Colonial New Zealand was built on the ideal of creating better lives for settlers. Emigrants came looking to escape the shackles of the class system and poor conditions in Industrial Revolution–period Britain. Colonial propaganda claimed that most emigrants achieved their aims, but the lives the colonists actually experienced upon reaching New Zealand remain relatively unexplored from a biosocial perspective. In this article we present a pilot study of stable-isotope test results of bone collagen from seven adults interred in St. John’s Cemetery, Milton, New Zealand (ca. 1860–1900). We interpret the diet at Milton and broadly compare our isotopic results with contemporaneous samples from Britain. We show that, as in contemporary Britain, the diet of our studied individuals was focused on C₃ crops and terrestrial meat sources. Despite higher δ¹⁵N values in contemporary UK populations (which can be simplistically interpreted as indicative of higher meat intake), consideration of different local baselines makes it likely that this New Zealand population had relatively similar levels of meat intake. Interestingly, marine resources did not form an important part of the Milton diet, despite the site’s proximity to the ocean, hinting at the possible stigmatization of local resources and the development of a European New Zealand (pākehā) food identity.

新西兰殖民地建立在为定居者创造更好生活的理想之上。在工业革命时期的英国，移民开始寻求摆脱阶级制度的束缚和恶劣的条件。殖民宣传声称大多数移民实现了他们的目标，但是从生物社会的角度来看，殖民者到达新西兰后实际经历的生活仍然相对未开发。在本文中，我们对来自新西兰米尔顿圣约翰公墓（约1860–1900年）的7名成年人的骨胶原的稳定同位素测试结果进行了初步研究。我们对米尔顿（Milton）的饮食进行解释，并将我们的同位素结果与来自英国的同期样本进行广泛比较。我们证明，与当代英国一样，我们研究的个人饮食都集中在C _3上。农作物和陆生肉类来源。尽管高δ ¹⁵在当代英国人口的N值（可以简单地解释为指示较高的肉类摄入量），考虑到不同的本地基准的很可能使这个新西兰人口有肉的摄入量相对类似的水平。有趣的是，尽管该地点靠近海洋，但海洋资源并未构成Milton饮食的重要组成部分，这暗示了当地资源可能受到污名化，并发展了欧洲新西兰（pākehā）的食品特性。