AMI is a multidisciplinary project that combines scientific and archaeological analyses to understand the human-animal relations, mortuary practices and human social identities based on Mesolithic (c 9000-7000 years ago) hunter-gatherer burial sites in Northeastern Europe. The aim is to gain precise and diverse information about the animal finds and the human individuals, and to use these data to reconstruct the life histories and social structures of the individuals. The area in focus is the North-eastern European forest area, rich in faunal and floral resources. Hunted, trapped and caught animals were the most powerful partners and richest resource for these populations, in both material and cosmological sense. The inclusion of animal bones, bone and stone artefacts, and red ochre in graves was an important burial custom designed by the living for the deceased. AMI conducts systematical bioarchaeological analyses of grave finds to make inferences about what the burial goods are, or why certain animal species were more common than other. In order to receive a more precise picture of the uses of animals, we also search for traces from animal hairs and feathers from soil samples. By studying human remains with bioarchaeological methods like stable isotopes, dental calculus and physical anthropology we will collect information of the diet, health and mobility.
AMI will broaden our understanding of the roles of animals in ideologies and burial practices among non-agricultural peoples in the North, and how animals or artefacts made of them were used for expressing identities. This will help us to understand not only our own past, but also what it means to be a part of a web of actors in nature where humans are only one species among many.
AMI studies materials from more than 300 burials from eight cemeteries in North-eastern Europe, focusing on Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov (YOO) in Karelia, Skateholm I and II in Scania, Zvejnieki in Latvia and Donkalnis and Spiginas in Lithuania.
