Response to Beavan Athfield's “Comment on ‘Diet-Derived Variations in Radiocarbon and Stable Isotopes: A Case Study from Shag River Mouth, New Zealand’”

Abstract

Beavan Athfield (2006) has commented on our recent paper in this journal (Higham et al. 2005). In our opinion, both in her response and in Beavan Athfield (2004) she misrepresents the evidence and conclusions presented by Anderson (2000). She claims (Beavan Athfield 2006:117) that Andersons (2000) Figure 6, which is reproduced as Beavan Athfields (2004) Figure 1, shows that ages of ancient rat bone gelatin in 1995-1996 (NZA numbers 4000-6000) were exclusively earlier than about 1000 BP, while those from 1997 onward (NZA numbers 7000+) were exclusively later than about 1000 BP. Beavan Athfield asserts that this is the result of Anderson (2000) ignoring 9 published accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) results from 1995-1996 that were younger than about 900 BP. These would be serious claims of poor scholarship, were they substantiated, but in fact, Anderson (2000, 2004) never asserted that the AMS results were distributed so exclusively, nor did he fail to take account of all published results.