Kinship-based social inequality in Bronze Age Europe

Abstract

Revealing and understanding the mechanisms behind social inequality in prehistoric societies is a major challenge. By combining genome-wide data, isotopic evidence, and anthropological and archaeological data, we have gone beyond the dominating supraregional approaches in archaeogenetics to shed light on the complexity of social status, inheritance rules, and mobility during the Bronze Age. We applied a deep microregional approach and analyzed genome-wide data of 104 human individuals deriving from farmstead-related cemeteries from the Late Neolithic to the Middle Bronze Age in southern Germany. Our results reveal individual households, lasting several generations, that consisted of a high-status core family and unrelated low-status individuals; a social organization accompanied by patrilocality and female exogamy; and the stability of this system over 700 years.

Kinship, acquired and inherited status, and population structure at the Early Bronze Age Mokrin necropolis in northern Serbia

“…Multiple lines of evidence in our sample-high mtDNA variability, the presence of a certain number of unrelated women, and the absence of daughters-indicate that female exogamy was practiced between Mokrin and other settlements. Interestingly, the absence of adult daughters and presence of unrelated females has also been reported at a Bronze Age settlement in Bavaria (21). However, unlike the unrelated Bavarian females, who were mostly of higher status, the unrelated Mokrin females display a wide range of grave good richness, from poor to prestigious.…”

“…We found a rather high number of mitochondrial lineages (14 haplotypes in 24 individuals). High mtDNA diversity in combination with archaeological and isotope evidence can indicate female exogamy (21,40,41). Given the absence of genetic substructure and the fact that both Y-chromosomal and mitochondrial diversity is moderateto-high at Mokrin, the most parsimonious explanation is that this cemetery served a single, large, and contiguous population.…”

“…If social prestige was transmitted intergenerationally, we would expect to see this reflected in status markers. Based on previous palaeogenomic and isotopic research from a similar period of prehistory (21,41), we hypothesized that social status would be transmitted along patrilines, with women acquiring their status through marriage. Although the differences in status within the Mokrin necropolis were not extreme, there was great variability in grave goods displayed by biological relatives.…”

“…Ancient DNA directly illuminates only one facet of past societies: biological relatedness. However, when combined with multiple lines of bioarchaeological and archaeological evidence, palaeogenetic data enable a comprehensive exploration of the family concept and social organization (17)(18)(19)(20)(21).…”

A geostatistical approach to modelling human Holocene migrations in Europe using ancient DNA

“…We believe there is also a lot of potential for new geostatistical approaches that could be designed to combine other types of datasets in an integrative approach for the study of the past, even at more local scales than we looked at here. This could encompass, for example, the combination of strontium and oxygen isotope analyses together with radiocarbon data and contextual archaeological information (Sjögren, Price, and Kristiansen, 2016;Mittnik et al, 2019), the joint analysis of genetic and linguistic changes over time (Kristiansen, Allentoft, et al, 2017) or the study of the interactions between population density and vegetation (Müller, 2015;Kolář et al, 2018).…”