Periodic Reporting for period 1 - X-KIN (Exploring patterns of prehistoric kinship from socio-cultural anthropological perspectives)
Reporting period: 2023-10-01 to 2025-09-30
Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project
Over the past decade, the rapid expansion of ancient DNA (aDNA) research has transformed the study of prehistoric communities by making biological relatedness newly visible in the archaeological record. This “ancient DNA revolution” has triggered a renewed focus on prehistoric kinship, yet within archaeogenetics kinship is typically reduced to genetic proximity. This narrow conception overlooks a large body of socio-cultural anthropological research demonstrating that kinship is always more than shared biology: it is created, negotiated, and lived through everyday practices, forms of co-residence, ritual obligations, and the symbolic significance of dwelling places. In many small-scale societies, houses—not genes—are the primary anchors of belonging, inheritance, memory, and group identity.
This tension between biological and social understandings of relatedness forms the core motivation for X-KIN: Exploring Patterns of Prehistoric Kinship from Socio-Cultural Anthropological Perspectives. The project addresses a critical need: without integrating social sciences and humanities (SSH) perspectives, current interpretations of prehistoric kinship risk reifying genetic data as social fact, thereby limiting our ability to recognize diverse ways of being related in the past. X-KIN responds to the political and strategic context in which ancient DNA findings increasingly shape public and academic narratives about identity, ancestry, and migration. By promoting interdisciplinary integration, X-KIN advances more nuanced, responsible, and socially informed interpretations of prehistoric social organization.
X-KIN focuses on four major archaeological sites in southeastern Europe and Anatolia—Çatalhöyük, Lepenski Vir, Arslantepe, and Vučedol—regions central to debates about social complexity, Neolithic transformations, and Bronze Age innovations. These sites provide unique opportunities to integrate biological signatures, architectural patterns, settlement organization, and mortuary practices. Through triangulation of archaeological data, bioarchaeological markers, and ethnographic insights, the project reads these materials as “material codes” of prehistoric kinship. Rather than using ethnography to verify prehistoric practices, X-KIN treats cross-cultural materials as heuristic tools to illuminate the variability and fluidity of kinship relations.
The overall objectives of X-KIN are threefold:
1. To develop an interdisciplinary analytical framework that integrates socio-cultural anthropology, prehistoric archaeology, and bioarchaeology for interpreting kinship in prehistory.
2. To provide comparative analyses across regions and case studies that reveal how houses, built environments, and social practices shaped kin relations beyond biogenetic connections.
3. To demonstrate the added value of SSH integration for improving interpretations of ancient DNA findings and for refining public narratives of ancestry and identity.
The expected impacts of X-KIN are significant. Scientifically, the project will strengthen interdisciplinary collaboration and offer a corrective to overly geneticized interpretations of the past. Strategically, it will contribute to broader European agendas emphasizing responsible research practices, cultural heritage engagement, and dialogue between STEM fields and SSH disciplines. At societal level, X-KIN’s findings help counter essentialist understandings of identity by demonstrating the multiplicity of kinship forms that shaped prehistoric communities. By revealing how social ties were constituted through houses, spaces, and shared practices rather than genes alone, the project contributes to a more inclusive and complex understanding of human belonging.
In sum, X-KIN sets the scene for rethinking prehistoric kinship as a dynamic intersection of biological, social, and material relations. It charts a project pathway toward impactful, nuanced interpretations that resonate across scientific, cultural, and public domains.
This tension between biological and social understandings of relatedness forms the core motivation for X-KIN: Exploring Patterns of Prehistoric Kinship from Socio-Cultural Anthropological Perspectives. The project addresses a critical need: without integrating social sciences and humanities (SSH) perspectives, current interpretations of prehistoric kinship risk reifying genetic data as social fact, thereby limiting our ability to recognize diverse ways of being related in the past. X-KIN responds to the political and strategic context in which ancient DNA findings increasingly shape public and academic narratives about identity, ancestry, and migration. By promoting interdisciplinary integration, X-KIN advances more nuanced, responsible, and socially informed interpretations of prehistoric social organization.
X-KIN focuses on four major archaeological sites in southeastern Europe and Anatolia—Çatalhöyük, Lepenski Vir, Arslantepe, and Vučedol—regions central to debates about social complexity, Neolithic transformations, and Bronze Age innovations. These sites provide unique opportunities to integrate biological signatures, architectural patterns, settlement organization, and mortuary practices. Through triangulation of archaeological data, bioarchaeological markers, and ethnographic insights, the project reads these materials as “material codes” of prehistoric kinship. Rather than using ethnography to verify prehistoric practices, X-KIN treats cross-cultural materials as heuristic tools to illuminate the variability and fluidity of kinship relations.
The overall objectives of X-KIN are threefold:
1. To develop an interdisciplinary analytical framework that integrates socio-cultural anthropology, prehistoric archaeology, and bioarchaeology for interpreting kinship in prehistory.
2. To provide comparative analyses across regions and case studies that reveal how houses, built environments, and social practices shaped kin relations beyond biogenetic connections.
3. To demonstrate the added value of SSH integration for improving interpretations of ancient DNA findings and for refining public narratives of ancestry and identity.
The expected impacts of X-KIN are significant. Scientifically, the project will strengthen interdisciplinary collaboration and offer a corrective to overly geneticized interpretations of the past. Strategically, it will contribute to broader European agendas emphasizing responsible research practices, cultural heritage engagement, and dialogue between STEM fields and SSH disciplines. At societal level, X-KIN’s findings help counter essentialist understandings of identity by demonstrating the multiplicity of kinship forms that shaped prehistoric communities. By revealing how social ties were constituted through houses, spaces, and shared practices rather than genes alone, the project contributes to a more inclusive and complex understanding of human belonging.
In sum, X-KIN sets the scene for rethinking prehistoric kinship as a dynamic intersection of biological, social, and material relations. It charts a project pathway toward impactful, nuanced interpretations that resonate across scientific, cultural, and public domains.
Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far
The X-KIN project has advanced substantially toward its scientific objectives through a coordinated set of analytical, field-based, laboratory, and collaborative research activities. Regular bi-monthly supervisory meetings with my mentor at the Field Museum, William A. Parkinson, have been essential for maintaining scientific direction, refining methodological approaches, and aligning project outputs with broader developments in archaeology and anthropology. These meetings also played a central role in shaping the next stages of my academic trajectory, ensuring that scientific decisions were made within a coherent long-term research plan.
A major achievement of the reporting period has been the systematic field engagement at all four project sites—Çatalhöyük, Lepenski Vir, Arslantepe, and Vučedol. Site visits enabled me to examine settlement layouts, dwelling structures, mortuary contexts, and museum collections first-hand. Importantly, these visits fostered direct relationships with excavators, project directors, and site specialists, facilitating access to unpublished archaeological and bioarchaeological materials as well as long-term research collaborations. This groundwork has been essential for triangulating architectural, artefactual, and biological evidence relevant to prehistoric kinship practices.
Laboratory work has also been central to the project. I spent two weeks in the ancient DNA laboratory at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, where I worked closely with archaeogeneticists to understand both published and emerging datasets from Çatalhöyük. This immersion in laboratory protocols and analytical pipelines provided valuable insight into the possibilities and constraints of ancient DNA research. Discussions of ongoing, unpublished genetic results significantly improved my ability to integrate genetic, archaeological, and ethnographic lines of evidence within a unified interpretive framework.
On the analytical side, I conducted an extensive literature review for all four sites, consolidating archaeological, architectural, mortuary, environmental, bioarchaeological, and ethnographic sources relevant to kinship analysis. A key technical milestone was gaining access to, and structuring, a comprehensive database of all finds from Çatalhöyük, which now forms the empirical backbone for the project's cross-site comparative work.
Scientific collaboration has been at the core of X-KIN’s interdisciplinary aims. I worked closely with archaeologists, biological anthropologists, and archaeogeneticists from southeastern Europe and Anatolia to co-author a forthcoming article for World Archaeology, which synthesizes archaeological and genetic evidence across the region. Equally important has been my collaboration with Maanasa Raghavan (University of Chicago) and Penny Bickle (University of York) on research examining the conceptual and methodological challenges of integrating ancient DNA into archaeological interpretations. Together, we organized a high-level professional workshop at the American Institute of Archaeology Annual Meeting in Chicago and co-edited a special section for the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, which establishes a novel interdisciplinary space for discussing kinship, descent, and social organization. Penny Bickle’s expertise in stable isotope analysis was particularly crucial in refining my interpretation of isotope datasets and their implications for understanding mobility, diet, and kin relations.
Building on these collaborations, I developed a School of Advanced Research (SAR) Advanced Seminar proposal, successfully assembling a team of ten leading scholars from socio-cultural anthropology, archaeology, and ancient DNA research. The accepted five-day seminar, scheduled for May 2025, will address theoretical and methodological approaches to descent, providing a major platform for deepening interdisciplinary dialogue at the highest level.
Finally, I co-organized a two-day interdisciplinary workshop in Vienna with Ana Herrero-Coral and Katharina Rebay-Salisbury, bringing together geneticists, archaeologists, and socio-cultural anthropologists to critically evaluate kinship, household organization, and lines of descent across diverse datasets. The workshop generated new collaborative networks and opened pathways for comparative research that directly contribute to X-KIN’s scientific goals.
Collectively, these activities have significantly advanced the technical and analytical foundations of the project, strengthened interdisciplinary integration, and created new comparative frameworks for rethinking prehistoric kinship through archaeological, biological, and socio-cultural perspectives.
A major achievement of the reporting period has been the systematic field engagement at all four project sites—Çatalhöyük, Lepenski Vir, Arslantepe, and Vučedol. Site visits enabled me to examine settlement layouts, dwelling structures, mortuary contexts, and museum collections first-hand. Importantly, these visits fostered direct relationships with excavators, project directors, and site specialists, facilitating access to unpublished archaeological and bioarchaeological materials as well as long-term research collaborations. This groundwork has been essential for triangulating architectural, artefactual, and biological evidence relevant to prehistoric kinship practices.
Laboratory work has also been central to the project. I spent two weeks in the ancient DNA laboratory at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, where I worked closely with archaeogeneticists to understand both published and emerging datasets from Çatalhöyük. This immersion in laboratory protocols and analytical pipelines provided valuable insight into the possibilities and constraints of ancient DNA research. Discussions of ongoing, unpublished genetic results significantly improved my ability to integrate genetic, archaeological, and ethnographic lines of evidence within a unified interpretive framework.
On the analytical side, I conducted an extensive literature review for all four sites, consolidating archaeological, architectural, mortuary, environmental, bioarchaeological, and ethnographic sources relevant to kinship analysis. A key technical milestone was gaining access to, and structuring, a comprehensive database of all finds from Çatalhöyük, which now forms the empirical backbone for the project's cross-site comparative work.
Scientific collaboration has been at the core of X-KIN’s interdisciplinary aims. I worked closely with archaeologists, biological anthropologists, and archaeogeneticists from southeastern Europe and Anatolia to co-author a forthcoming article for World Archaeology, which synthesizes archaeological and genetic evidence across the region. Equally important has been my collaboration with Maanasa Raghavan (University of Chicago) and Penny Bickle (University of York) on research examining the conceptual and methodological challenges of integrating ancient DNA into archaeological interpretations. Together, we organized a high-level professional workshop at the American Institute of Archaeology Annual Meeting in Chicago and co-edited a special section for the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, which establishes a novel interdisciplinary space for discussing kinship, descent, and social organization. Penny Bickle’s expertise in stable isotope analysis was particularly crucial in refining my interpretation of isotope datasets and their implications for understanding mobility, diet, and kin relations.
Building on these collaborations, I developed a School of Advanced Research (SAR) Advanced Seminar proposal, successfully assembling a team of ten leading scholars from socio-cultural anthropology, archaeology, and ancient DNA research. The accepted five-day seminar, scheduled for May 2025, will address theoretical and methodological approaches to descent, providing a major platform for deepening interdisciplinary dialogue at the highest level.
Finally, I co-organized a two-day interdisciplinary workshop in Vienna with Ana Herrero-Coral and Katharina Rebay-Salisbury, bringing together geneticists, archaeologists, and socio-cultural anthropologists to critically evaluate kinship, household organization, and lines of descent across diverse datasets. The workshop generated new collaborative networks and opened pathways for comparative research that directly contribute to X-KIN’s scientific goals.
Collectively, these activities have significantly advanced the technical and analytical foundations of the project, strengthened interdisciplinary integration, and created new comparative frameworks for rethinking prehistoric kinship through archaeological, biological, and socio-cultural perspectives.
Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)
The X-KIN project has produced several scientific results that move significantly beyond the current state of the art in archaeogenetics, prehistoric archaeology, and the anthropology of kinship. These advances demonstrate how integrating socio-cultural anthropological perspectives can fundamentally reshape interpretations of prehistoric relatedness and social organization.
A major result is the publication of my 2024 article, “Why kinship still needs anthropologists,” which has already received nearly twenty citations within a year. This exceptionally rapid uptake indicates the article’s impact in reframing interdisciplinary debates around ancient DNA, particularly by foregrounding the continued relevance of socio-cultural theory for interpreting prehistoric kinship. The response demonstrates a clear disciplinary need: archaeologists and geneticists increasingly recognize that genetic proximity alone does not explain social belonging, lineage, or household organization, and that anthropological expertise remains essential for interpreting kinship in the deep past.
Another significant scientific contribution is the co-authored piece, “Beyond Genetics: Exploring Aspects of Non-Biological Kinship in Prehistoric Times.” This work extends ancient DNA research into new conceptual territory. It demonstrates that the value of genetic data lies not only in identifying related individuals, but also—and crucially—in detecting non-related individuals who were nonetheless buried together, lived together, or shared household practices. By introducing a systematic analytical framework for interpreting adoption, the circulation of children, milk kinship, ritual co-residence, and other non-biological forms of relatedness, this publication provides the first integrated approach for identifying social kinship through negative genetic evidence. This represents a substantial methodological innovation and a major shift in how ancient DNA datasets can be mobilized to understand past societies.
A third advance is the forthcoming article “Cradled by Architecture: Infancy and Delayed Personhood in Neolithic Anatolia and the Balkans.” This study reveals that, at the onset of the Neolithic period, only infants were buried within houses, despite not necessarily being genetically related to other household members. This pattern challenges long-standing assumptions about nuclear families as universal units of prehistoric social organization. The findings suggest the presence of broader social or age-based categories—such as delayed personhood, infant liminality, or distinct age grades—through which communities understood infancy and humanity. This insight moves beyond existing interpretations of Neolithic mortuary practices and demonstrates how kinship was structured through architectural and social principles rather than strictly biological descent.
Together, these results reshape fundamental assumptions about kinship in prehistory and establish new interdisciplinary standards for the interpretation of ancient DNA. They demonstrate that kinship must be understood as an interplay of biology, social practice, architectural space, and community-defined criteria for belonging.
Key Needs for Further Uptake and Success
To maximize impact and ensure broader adoption of these results, several needs have been identified:
• Continued interdisciplinary research: Further comparative work integrating archaeology, bioarchaeology, ancient DNA, and socio-cultural anthropology is necessary to refine methods for identifying non-biological kinship.
• Access to emerging genetic datasets: Sustained collaboration with laboratories and excavation directors is essential for incorporating newly sequenced individuals and unpublished data.
• Methodological development: There is a need for standardized protocols for interpreting negative genetic evidence (i.e. unrelated individuals buried together), which currently lacks formal guidance.
• Institutional and funding support: Workshops, seminars, and long-term interdisciplinary programs—such as the upcoming SAR Advanced Seminar—are crucial for embedding these approaches in international research practice.
• Training of early-career scholars: Ensuring future uptake requires training archaeologists and geneticists in socio-cultural theories of kinship, personhood, and household formation.
• Responsible communication frameworks: As kinship interpretations affect public understandings of ancestry and identity, clear standards for ethical communication are needed.
A major result is the publication of my 2024 article, “Why kinship still needs anthropologists,” which has already received nearly twenty citations within a year. This exceptionally rapid uptake indicates the article’s impact in reframing interdisciplinary debates around ancient DNA, particularly by foregrounding the continued relevance of socio-cultural theory for interpreting prehistoric kinship. The response demonstrates a clear disciplinary need: archaeologists and geneticists increasingly recognize that genetic proximity alone does not explain social belonging, lineage, or household organization, and that anthropological expertise remains essential for interpreting kinship in the deep past.
Another significant scientific contribution is the co-authored piece, “Beyond Genetics: Exploring Aspects of Non-Biological Kinship in Prehistoric Times.” This work extends ancient DNA research into new conceptual territory. It demonstrates that the value of genetic data lies not only in identifying related individuals, but also—and crucially—in detecting non-related individuals who were nonetheless buried together, lived together, or shared household practices. By introducing a systematic analytical framework for interpreting adoption, the circulation of children, milk kinship, ritual co-residence, and other non-biological forms of relatedness, this publication provides the first integrated approach for identifying social kinship through negative genetic evidence. This represents a substantial methodological innovation and a major shift in how ancient DNA datasets can be mobilized to understand past societies.
A third advance is the forthcoming article “Cradled by Architecture: Infancy and Delayed Personhood in Neolithic Anatolia and the Balkans.” This study reveals that, at the onset of the Neolithic period, only infants were buried within houses, despite not necessarily being genetically related to other household members. This pattern challenges long-standing assumptions about nuclear families as universal units of prehistoric social organization. The findings suggest the presence of broader social or age-based categories—such as delayed personhood, infant liminality, or distinct age grades—through which communities understood infancy and humanity. This insight moves beyond existing interpretations of Neolithic mortuary practices and demonstrates how kinship was structured through architectural and social principles rather than strictly biological descent.
Together, these results reshape fundamental assumptions about kinship in prehistory and establish new interdisciplinary standards for the interpretation of ancient DNA. They demonstrate that kinship must be understood as an interplay of biology, social practice, architectural space, and community-defined criteria for belonging.
Key Needs for Further Uptake and Success
To maximize impact and ensure broader adoption of these results, several needs have been identified:
• Continued interdisciplinary research: Further comparative work integrating archaeology, bioarchaeology, ancient DNA, and socio-cultural anthropology is necessary to refine methods for identifying non-biological kinship.
• Access to emerging genetic datasets: Sustained collaboration with laboratories and excavation directors is essential for incorporating newly sequenced individuals and unpublished data.
• Methodological development: There is a need for standardized protocols for interpreting negative genetic evidence (i.e. unrelated individuals buried together), which currently lacks formal guidance.
• Institutional and funding support: Workshops, seminars, and long-term interdisciplinary programs—such as the upcoming SAR Advanced Seminar—are crucial for embedding these approaches in international research practice.
• Training of early-career scholars: Ensuring future uptake requires training archaeologists and geneticists in socio-cultural theories of kinship, personhood, and household formation.
• Responsible communication frameworks: As kinship interpretations affect public understandings of ancestry and identity, clear standards for ethical communication are needed.