Projektbeschreibung
Forschung zu berittenen Viehhirten aus Russland
Was wissen wir über die massiven Veränderungen, die vor rund 5 000 Jahren in Europa stattfanden? Ihr Widerhall in Bezug auf die genetische Abkunft, die soziale Struktur und die Sprachen Europas bleibt weiterhin sichtbar. In diesem Zusammenhang nimmt nun das EU-finanzierte Projekt YMPACT die Yamnaya, berittene Viehhirten aus Russland, in den Blick und untersucht deren Verbreitung in den Steppenlandschaften des heutigen Bulgarien, Ungarn, Rumänien und Serbien. Das Team von Forschenden wird außerdem Feldstudien und Probenentnahmen durchführen. Das Projekt wird insbesondere die Interaktionsmuster, das physische Erscheinungsbild und die Populationsdynamik sowie die Mobilität, Ernährungsweise, Beschäftigung und Lebensweise der Yamnaya beleuchten. Daten von 320 ausgegrabenen Grabhügeln und mehr als 1 000 Gräbern werden analysiert, um diese Veränderungen zu quantifizieren.
Ziel
Dramatic migrations in the third millennium BC re-shaped Europe, modifying its economy, society, ethnicity and ideological structure for ever. The best incentive proxy are populations that moved from the steppes of Russia, spreading as far west as Hungary, implanting a pastoral economy with widespread innovations. These dynamic people covered thousands of kilometres within a few centuries, and organised direct physical relations over the steppes for the first time. This synchronism is promoted by a society organised to fit to this lifestyle, with new herding techniques, likely use of wagons and domesticated horses, and a protein-rich diet, whose adaptive advantages are evident from the physical record in human skeletons and territorial extensions. This is the Yamnaya complex, whose impact remains visible today in the European gene pool and apparently the propagation of Indo-European languages. This international and interdisciplinary project examines the data from 320 excavated burial mounds and c.1350 burials to calibrate these changes, also against a control sample of supposedly local and neighbouring populations. The archaeological, biological and environmental information allows large, new datasets to be built, whose systematic interrogation and modelling should reveal the formative processes behind these changes. Assessing funeral archaeology, material culture, and exchange pattern defines their culture and impact. Scientific analyses of skeletons expose relations of origin, degrees of consanguinity, diet, and histories of individual mobility over single lifetimes with new precision and replicability. They should also act as proxy datasets for environmental changes using further analytical techniques in a context of landscape evolution. Diachronic patterns within these sets should link with aspects of the internal social dynamics, such as the creation of new status positions, visible later in the Pan-European Corded Ware and Bell Beaker groups.
Wissenschaftliches Gebiet
Schlüsselbegriffe
Programm/Programme
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Finanzierungsplan
ERC-ADG - Advanced GrantGastgebende Einrichtung
00014 Helsingin Yliopisto
Finnland