Descripción del proyecto
Un acercamiento a los pastores rusos a caballo
¿Qué sabemos sobre los profundos cambios que se produjeron en Europa hace unos cinco mil años? Sus repercusiones sobre la herencia genética, la organización social y los idiomas europeos todavía son visibles a día de hoy. Centrándose en los «Yamnaya», pastores a caballo de Rusia, el proyecto financiado con fondos europeos YMPACT estudiará su distribución en la estepa de las actuales Bulgaria, Hungría, Rumanía y Serbia. El equipo de investigación también llevará a cabo estudios de campo y recogerá muestras. En particular, el proyecto arrojará luz sobre su patrón de interacción, aspecto físico y dinámica poblacional, así como sobre su movilidad, dieta, ocupación y estilo de vida. Estudiará los datos de 320 túmulos excavados y más de mil sepulturas para calibrar dichos cambios.
Objetivo
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.
Ámbito científico
Palabras clave
Programa(s)
Régimen de financiación
ERC-ADG - Advanced GrantInstitución de acogida
00014 Helsingin Yliopisto
Finlandia