Dietary perspectives on social asymmetry in a full Iron Age community of northern Italy: stable isotope evidence from the Patavine CUS-Piovego necropolis
Giusy Capasso, Vito Giuseppe Prillo, Michael A. Beck de Lotto, Federico Lugli, Ciara O’Brien Butler, Alexandra J. Nederbragt, Alessia Nava, Luca Bondioli, Melania Gigante, Massimo Vidale, Giovanni Leonardi, Richard Madgwick · 2026
Read Dietary perspectives on social asymmetry in a full Iron Age community of northern Italy: stable isotope evidence from the Patavine CUS-Piovego necropolis by Giusy Capasso, Vito Giuseppe Prillo, Michael A. Beck de Lotto, Federico Lugli, Ciara O’Brien Butler, Alexandra J. Nederbragt, Alessia Nava, Luca Bondioli, Melania Gigante, Massimo Vidale, Giovanni Leonardi, Richard Madgwick (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13233962.txt.
Description
Giusy Capasso and colleagues published a 2026 archaeology study reading social inequality from the bones of an Iron Age community in northern Italy. The team measured carbon and nitrogen isotopes in nineteen human and sixteen animal remains from the CUS-Piovego burial ground in Padua. The buried individuals are thought to be low-status or socially marginal members of their community, making their diet a window on how the poor ate.
The isotope pattern showed a land-based diet with little variety and heavy reliance on C4 plants such as millet. Carbon values sat notably higher than in earlier regional burials, pointing to direct, substantial millet eating rather than getting it secondhand through millet-fed livestock. The authors read that plain, narrow diet as material evidence of social asymmetry in a city growing more complex and unequal.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Giusy Capasso, Vito Giuseppe Prillo, Michael A. Beck de Lotto, Federico Lugli, Ciara O’Brien Butler, Alexandra J. Nederbragt, Alessia Nava, Luca Bondioli, Melania Gigante, Massimo Vidale, Giovanni Leonardi, Richard Madgwick |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 51 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |