EAA2021: Abstract

Archaeology, bioarchaeology, and genomics are challenging the dominance of ethnological approaches to prehistoric kinship. Unlike today’s kin term evolutionism, they have data that actually date to prehistory and can avoid dubious normative cultural models interpreted through discredited 19th century phylogenetics or 1960s neoevolutionism. Though largely ignored or misunderstood in Europe, archaeological kinship analysis is the most developed and can detect intra- and inter-community variation and change. Bioarchaeological kinship analysis - using strontium isotope ratios or phenotypic traits - needs more informed interpretive models. From a social anthropological perspective, European genomic research has the most impoverished understanding of kinship, is ethnocentrically obsessed with uninformative nuclear family relations, and some is alarmingly mired in pre-WWII essentialism - particularly disturbing in an era of reemerging racist nationalism. At stake is whether genomics will become relevant to kinship research or serve as a precautionary tale as it is currently headed. Because kinship is always a social construction, aDNA researchers need models for interpreting how different kinds of corporate kin groups socially distribute biological relatedness within and across settlements and cemeteries. This paper illustrates how common kinship practices manipulate intra- and intergroup/cemetery biological compositions and re-analyzes published aDNA, strontium, and archaeological data from Central European Neolithic sites (patrilocality is not supported). Far from the sensationalist image of aDNA providing a definitive source, different kinship practices produce difficult to distinguish aDNA distribution patterns - a problem compounded by inappropriate cemetery sampling. However, aDNA results can be clarified when combined with strontium isotope ratios for individual life histories. In turn, archaeological kinship analyses can further clarify those results. Ancient DNA can potentially contribute productively to prehistoric kinship research but only if scholars familiarize themselves with the subject, adopt informed interpretive models and appropriate sampling, and combine their data with other sources.

ancient DNA, Kinship, Bioarchaeology, Archaeology, Europe, Neolithic

 Abstract (PDF)

Bradley E. Ensor¹