text: As hyrax middens have been developed as palaeoenvironmental archives, there has been increasing emphasis on the application of stable isotope analyses to midden sequences. Initially this focussed on the use of bulk C data, with an emphasis on identifying changes in the relative abundance of C/C/CAM vegetation and associated palaeoecological/palaeoenvironmental inferences. This is useful in climatic transition zones, such as the Western Cape Province of South Africa, where modern rainfall seasonality has a strong impact on C/C grass distributions. δC records can also be used in some ecoregions, such as the dry savannah at Spitzkoppe in Namibia, as an indicator of the reliability of grass cover. As hyraxes will preferentially graze (grasses are C in the region), more depleted δC values from hyrax middens have been interpreted as evidence that the animals were forced to obtain a greater proportion of their diet from trees and shrubs, which are less susceptible to extended periods of drought. However, these data do not necessarily provide a direct and unambiguous indicator of past arid/humid shifts. As such, other studies have focussed on the use of δN data as a potential proxy for water availability in the environment