EAA2021: Abstract
Abstract is part of session #468:
Title & Content
Title:
Making Kin: the archaeology and genetics of human relationships
Content:
Kin-making is a key part of how humans structure their relations with each other, with their wider community and with the non-human world. Kin relations are constituted by shared values, shared experience, as well as by shared cultural or biological lineage. In recent years, archaeogenetics has offered us a startling level of clarity into biological relationships between individuals and groups of past people. At this crucial moment for our discipline, when archaeogenetic studies are being heralded as offering extraordinary insights into the social and political organisation of past communities, it is imperative that archaeologists retain a critical stance on the assumptions that so often underpin interpretations of archaeogenetic data.
In this paper, we argue that blood and biology are key elements of kin-making only in so far as they are contextualised and made sense of through social relations. The naturalisation of biological relatedness as the basis of kinship has its origins in the legacies of colonialism, which employed a particularly restrictive definition of kinship as a means of legitimating access to land and controlling the bodies of women and indigenous groups. Instead, taking as our inspiration the work of Indigenous scholars, we argue that the kinship produced through social relations and the kinship produced by genetic studies are not identical but can be complimentary.
Archaeology, with its focus on the material remains of the past, provides particular opportunities to examine how other forms of material and technological intervention (including ritual, exchange, and the sharing of food) facilitated the creation of kinship links not solely rooted in the human body. Here, we consider the extent to which the social salience of biological relationships identified through aDNA analysis can be addressed without imposing contemporary forms of familial structure and gender ideology onto the past.
In this paper, we argue that blood and biology are key elements of kin-making only in so far as they are contextualised and made sense of through social relations. The naturalisation of biological relatedness as the basis of kinship has its origins in the legacies of colonialism, which employed a particularly restrictive definition of kinship as a means of legitimating access to land and controlling the bodies of women and indigenous groups. Instead, taking as our inspiration the work of Indigenous scholars, we argue that the kinship produced through social relations and the kinship produced by genetic studies are not identical but can be complimentary.
Archaeology, with its focus on the material remains of the past, provides particular opportunities to examine how other forms of material and technological intervention (including ritual, exchange, and the sharing of food) facilitated the creation of kinship links not solely rooted in the human body. Here, we consider the extent to which the social salience of biological relationships identified through aDNA analysis can be addressed without imposing contemporary forms of familial structure and gender ideology onto the past.
Keywords:
Kinship, archaeogenetics, lineage, relationality
Downloads:
authors
Main authors:
Catherine Frieman1
Co-author:
Joanna Bruck2
Affiliations:
1 Australian National University
2 University College Dublin
2 University College Dublin