This is a very complex interdisciplinary project involving 12 beneficiaries between Budapest and New York, and from several scientific and humanities disciplines. Some delays were caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the planned workflow has immediately begun, due to the great commitment for the project shown by all project members and partners. By the spring of 2024, over 6,000 samples had been taken and bone powder extracted in Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Serbia, Romania and Germany. Ancient DNA has been sequenced in the Leipzig laboratory from over 4,300 samples. The next step was bioinformatic processing, mainly for ancestry, for the modelling of mobility and migration and for the inference of large-scale pedigrees.
In 2022, we published an article in CELL about Avar elite graves of the 7th century. We found that the core group of the Avars mostly had Eastern Asian ancestry, which had always been a contested issue but corresponded to reports from the period. The eastern ancestry of the migrant Avars differs considerably from the ancestry of the regional population of rather mixed, mostly European origin whom they encountered in the Carpathian Basin in 567/68. This gives us the rare opportunity to trace processes of admixture between a migrant ruling group and other populations. Two further publications traced this process of admixture. One, published in Nature in spring 2024, deals with a group of 7th/8th century cemeteries along the Tisza river, close to the Avar core area in the Carpathian Basin. The other addresses two cemeteries in the margins of the Avar settlement area, south of Vienna. The most striking result of these studies is that even in peripheral places, East Asian ancestry was preserved until the 8th century, while other communities with very similar late-Avar culture could also be almost completely European.
Several further, mostly regional studies are in the pipeline in different stages. That includes transect studies of the Little Hungarian Plain, Slovenia and Sachsen-Anhalt, and articles focusing on the 5th/6th century, on the Huns, on the pre-Avar period in eastern Hungary, on the Moravian central places at Mikulčice and Pohansko, and on the region around Zalavár, both in the 9th century. Accompanying archaeological and historical studies address gender and reproduction practices (for instance levirate unions, apparent in the pedigrees and in Chinese texts about steppe peoples as well as in Western sources); the advances in the chronology of cemeteries; or compare Western and Chinese sources (in part still lacking a translation into Western languages) on the steppe peoples, which allows both confronting perceptions and assessing information on the ways of life in the steppe zone.
