Beyond Genetics: Exploring Non-Biological Kinship in Prehistoric Times
»Beyond Genetics: Exploring Non-Biological Kinship in Prehistoric Times«
Over the past decade, there has been a growing interest in understanding families and kinship structures of the groups that inhabited prehistoric Europe. This has led to a significant number of archaeogenetic publications that aim to reconstruct the genetic relatedness among individuals buried in the same grave, cemetery or site. Recurring patterns of extended genetically-related families haven entrenched visions of a predominantly patrilineal and patrilocal past.
While the focus has been on the reconstruction of genealogies, the unrelated members of the community have been largely overlooked. The presence of children who are not genetically related to the adults with whom they share a grave, together with the evidence from isotopic analyses that there was great mobility of boys and girls during childhood, also points to a broader concept of family in which care for children is not a given at birth but is socially constructed. Concepts such as fostering, adoption and the integration of step-children are increasingly evident in later European prehistory and need to be considered and integrated into our reconstruction of past social structures.
Alternative forms of non-genetic or social kinship, apparent through individuals lacking genetic ties but occupying the same funerary spaces as the members of a specific family, are central to this workshop. It will provide an opportunity to discuss different methods of detecting non-biological relationships in the prehistoric archaeological record and how to interpret them within these fluid kinship systems. The exchange of different viewpoints between archaeologists, geneticists and socio-cultural anthropologists is essential in order to approach a phenomenon as complex and diverse as prehistoric kinship, while avoiding clichés and the imposition of modern, Western notions of kinship and family on prehistoric settings. The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers from different disciplines to forge a new social archaeology of kinship, which is currently in its early stages of development.
This workshop is funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and the European Commission under Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global and Postdoctoral Fellowships.