Description du projet
Un examen plus attentif des éleveurs de bovins à cheval en Russie
Que savons-nous des changements massifs apparus en Europe il y a environ 5 000 ans? Ses réverbérations sur l’ascendance génétique, l’organisation sociale et les langues européennes restent visibles. En se concentrant sur les Yamnaya, des éleveurs de bovins à cheval issus de la Russie, le projet YMPACT, financé par l’UE, étudiera leur répartition actuelle dans les paysages steppiques de la Bulgarie, de la Hongrie, de la Roumanie et de la Serbie. L’équipe de recherche mènera également des études de terrain et prélèvera des échantillons. Plus précisément, le projet mettra en lumière leur modèle d’interaction, leur apparence physique et la dynamique de sa population ainsi que leur mobilité, leur régime alimentaire, leurs professions et leur mode de vie. Il étudiera les données de 320 tumulus excavés et de plus de 1 000 sépultures pour calibrer ces changements.
Objectif
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.
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ERC-ADG - Advanced GrantInstitution d’accueil
00014 Helsingin Yliopisto
Finlande