Making kin: The archaeology and genetics of human relationships

Joanna Brück; Catherine J. Frieman

doi:10.14512/tatup.30.2.47

Authors

Joanna Brück School of Archaeology, University College Dublin (IE) https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8942-5504 joanna.bruck@ucd.ie
Catherine J. Frieman School of Archaeology and Anthropology, The Australian National University (AU) https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9030-4483 catherine.frieman@anu.edu.au

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14512/tatup.30.2.47

Keywords:

archaeogenetics, kinship, biogenetic determinism, relations, identity

Abstract

Thanks to next generation sequencing (NGS), we can now access ancient biological relationships, including ancestry and parentage, with a startling level of clarity. This has led to recentering of kinship within archaeological discourse. In this paper, we argue that blood and biology are key elements of kin-making only in so far as they are contextualized and made sense of through social relations. We argue that the conceptions of kinship that underpin archaeogenetic studies are the product of a particular historical and political context. Archaeology, with its focus on the material remains of the past, provides 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 ancient DNA analysis can be addressed without imposing contemporary forms of familial structure and gender ideology onto the past.

References

Abel, Sarah; Schroeder, Hannes (2020): From country marks to DNA markers. The genomic turn in the reconstruction of African identities. In: Current Anthropology 61 (S22), pp. 198–209.

Andrade, Carlos (2014): A Hawaiian geography or a geography of Hawai’i? In: Jon Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio (ed.) I ulu i ka ‘āina. land. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 4–22.

Booth, Tom; Brück, Joanna; Brace, Selina; Barnes, Ian (2021): Tales from the supplementary information. Ancestry change in Chalcolithic-Early Bronze Age Britain was gradual with varied kinship organisation. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 31 (2), pp. 1–22.

Brück, Joanna (2021): Ancient DNA, kinship and relational identities in Bronze Age Britain. In: Antiquity 95 (397), pp. 228–237.

Brück, Joanna; Davies, Alex (2018): The social context of Late Bronze Age valuables. In: Cambridge Archaeological Journal 28 (4), pp. 665–688.

Carsten, Janet (2004): After kinship. Cambridge, U. K.: Cambridge University Press.

Ensor, Bradley (2017): Testing ethnological theories on prehistoric kinship. In: Cross-Cultural Research 51 (3), pp. 199–227.

Franklin, Sarah (2001): Biologization revisited. Kinship theory in the context of the new biologies. In: Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon (eds.): Relative values. reconfiguring kinship studies. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 302–325.

Frieman, Catherine J.; Hofmann, Daniela (2019): Present pasts in the archaeology of genetics, identity, and migration in Europe. A critical essay. In: World Archaeology 51 (4), pp. 528–545.

Frieman, Catherine J.; Teather, Anne; Morgan, Chelsea (2019): Bodies in motion. Narratives and counter narratives of gendered mobility in European later prehistory. In: Norwegian Archaeological Review 52 (2), pp. 148–169.

Furholt, Martin (2019): Re-integrating archaeology. A contribution to aDNA studies and the migration discourse on the 3rd Millennium BC in Europe. In: Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 85, pp. 115–129.

Goldfarb, Kathryn; Schuster, Caroline (2016): Introduction. (De)materializing kinship – holding together mutuality and difference. In: Social Analysis 60 (2), pp. 1–12.

Haak, Wolfgang et al. (2008): Ancient DNA, strontium isotopes, and osteological analyses shed light on social and kinship organization of the Later Stone Age. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105 (47), pp. 18226–18231.

Hakenbeck, Susanne (2019): Genetics, archaeology and the far right. An unholy trinity. In: World Archaeology 51 (4), pp. 517–527.

Haraway, Donna (1997): Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse. Feminism and technoscience. New York, NY: Routledge.

Haraway, Donna (2016): Staying with the trouble. Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Hofreiter, Michael; Serre, David; Poinar, Hendrik; Kuch, Melanie; Pääbo, Svante (2001): Ancient DNA. In: Nature Reviews Genetics 2 (5), pp. 353–359.

Johnston, Robert (2020): Bronze Age worlds. A social prehistory of Britain and Ireland. London: Routledge.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall (2013): Braiding sweetgrass. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions.

Knipper, Corina et al. (2017): Female exogamy and gene pool diversification at the transition from the Final Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age in central Europe. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114 (38), p. 201706355.

Leclerc, Jean; Masset, Claude (2006): L’évolution de la pratique funéraire dans la sépulture collective néolithique de La Chaussée-Tirancourt. In: Bulletin de la Société Préhistorique Francaise 103 (1), pp. 87–116.

MacCormack, Carol; Strathern, Marilyn (eds.) (1980): Nature, culture and gender. Cambridge, U. K.: Cambridge University Press.

Marks, Jonathan (2001): “We’re going to tell these people who they really are”. Science and relatedness. In: Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon (eds.): Relative values. Reconfiguring kinship studies. Durham, NY: Duke University Press, pp. 355–383.

Mittnik, Alissa et al. (2019): Kinship-based social inequality in Bronze Age Europe. In: Science 366 (6466), p. 6219.

Parker Pearson, Michael (1999): The earlier Bronze Age. In: John Hunter and Ian Ralston (eds.): The archaeology of Britain. An introduction from the Upper Palaeolithic to the Industrial Revolution. London: Routledge, pp. 77–94.

Reardon, Jenny (2017): The postgenomic condition. Ethics, justice, and knowledge after the genome. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Reich, David (2019): Who we are and how we got here. Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sahlins, Marshall (2013): What kinship is-and is not. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Schiffels, Stephan et al. (2016): Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon genomes from East England reveal British migration history. In: Nature Communications 7, p. 10408.

Schneider, David (1984): A critique of the study of kinship. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Skoglund, Pontus; Mathieson, Iain (2018): Ancient genomics and modern humans. The first decade. In: Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics 19 (1), pp. 381–404.

Sjögren, Karl-Göran et al. (2020): Kinship and social organization in Copper Age Europe. A cross-disciplinary analysis of archaeology, DNA, isotopes, and anthropology from two Bell Beaker cemeteries. In: PLoS ONE 15 (11), p. e0241278.

Stallard, Matthew; de Groot, Jerome (2020): “Things are coming out that are questionable, we never knew about”. DNA and the new family history. In: Journal of Family History 45 (3), pp. 274–294.

Strand, Daniel; Källén, Anna (2021): I am a Viking! DNA, popular culture and the construction of geneticized identity. In: New Genetics and Society, pp. 1–21.

TallBear, Kimberly (2013): Native American DNA. Tribal belonging and the false promise of genetic science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

TallBear, Kimberly (2018): Making love and relations beyond settler sex and family. In: Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway (eds.): Making kin not population. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press, pp. 145–164.

Todd, Zoe (2017): Fish, kin and hope. Tending to water violations in amiskwaciwâskahikan and Treaty Six Territory. In: Afterall – A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 43, pp. 102–107.

Watts, Vanessa (2013): Indigenous place-thought and agency amongst humans and non humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European World tour!). In: Decolonization: Indigineity, Education and Society 2 (1), pp. 20–34.

Weston, Kath (2013): Families we choose. Lesbians, gays, kinship. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Willerslev, Eske; Cooper, Alan (2005): Review paper. Ancient DNA. In: Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 272 (1558), pp. 3–16.

Wolf-Meyer, Matthew (2020): Recomposing kinship. In: Feminist Anthropology 1 (2), pp. 231–247.