Abstract: Although human dietary evidence from the Jiangzhai site has already been investigated, there are some important issues that have not been discussed clearly, such as whether these human diets changed between periods, and whether there were any differences in human diets among the Banpo, Shijia and Jiangzhai sites. Considering these concerns, stable carbon and nitrogen isotopic analysis on ancient human bones from the Jiangzhai site was reanalyzed. The values of carbon isotopes of human bone collagen(-11.5‰～-8.5‰, with a mean value of-9.7±1.0‰, N=14) and the archaeological remains of millet(C4 plant) revealed that millet was the primary food resource for humans. The values of nitrogen isotope(7.8‰～9.7‰, with a mean value of 8.5±0.5‰, N=14) suggested that animal resources contributed a low proportion of the human diets. There was no correlation between human δ13C data and δ15N data, which suggested that the ancient human diet from this site was mainly based on highly developed millet agriculture at that time. In addition, there was no significant difference in the human diets between the two periods, which was a different result from the archaeozoological results. This result was probably because that the sample size of humans was small,the ratio of wild animal meat in human diets in the second period increased only a little, and meat was not a significant resource to human diets in both periods. Although the nearby Jiangzhai, Shijia and Banpo sites belonged to the same period, the mean δ13C value of human bones from the Jiangzhai site(-9.7±1.0‰, N=19) was similar to that of the Shijia site(-10.0±0.7‰, N=9), but much higher than that of the Banpo site(-14.8±1.9‰, N=5).These results suggested that millet agriculture at the Banpo site was inferior to that of the Jiangzhai and Shijia sites, which might be related to the small sample size of humans at the Banpo site and the differing paleoenvironments of these three sites.

Key words: Paleodiet; Stable isotopes; Millet agriculture; Paleoenvironment; Jiangzhai site