Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ANCESTORS (Making Ancestors: The Politics of Death in Prehistoric Europe)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2020-10-01 do 2022-03-31
How did politics and inequality work in prehistoric Europe? Traditionally, politics has been seen in terms of discrete political ranks identified through differential treatment of individual burials. But this results in classifying much of prehistory, where the dead were treated in ways which effaced individual identity, as egalitarian. The result is an artificially dichotomous history: Neolithic people had landscapes, rituals and ancestors, Bronze and Iron Age people had politics and inequality. In the last two decades this approach has been strongly critiqued. Burial treatment rarely relates to status so directly; the dead serve many different political roles. Inequality in pre-state groups rarely consists of clear strata; inequality and equality exist in tension within groups. Inequality may have been present throughout European prehistory, but manifest situationally through differential life chances, kinship, ritual or ancestorhood, rather than overtly through political command, wealth or identity. But this new perspective has never been tested empirically.
This project tests alternative models of prehistoric inequality and deathways. To investigate social relations in life, it uses osteobiography, reconstructing life stories from skeletons through scientific data on identity, health, diet, mobility and kinship. To understand deathways, it employs a second new methodology, funerary taphonomy. Combining osteobiography and taphonomy allows us to connect ancient lives and deaths. Peninsular Italy provides a substantial test sequence typical of much of Europe. For each of three key periods (Neolithic, 6000-4000 BC; Final Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, 4000-1800 BC; Middle Bronze Age to Iron Age, 1800-600 BC), 200+ individuals will be analysed. The results will allow us to evaluate for the first time how inequality affected lives in prehistoric Europe and what role ancestors played in it.
This project tests alternative models of prehistoric inequality and deathways. To investigate social relations in life, it uses osteobiography, reconstructing life stories from skeletons through scientific data on identity, health, diet, mobility and kinship. To understand deathways, it employs a second new methodology, funerary taphonomy. Combining osteobiography and taphonomy allows us to connect ancient lives and deaths. Peninsular Italy provides a substantial test sequence typical of much of Europe. For each of three key periods (Neolithic, 6000-4000 BC; Final Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, 4000-1800 BC; Middle Bronze Age to Iron Age, 1800-600 BC), 200+ individuals will be analysed. The results will allow us to evaluate for the first time how inequality affected lives in prehistoric Europe and what role ancestors played in it.
“ANCESTORS” has carried out a wide range of work so far. The foundation is the basic groundwork for the project (including hiring staff, setting up a website, project database, equipment pool and accounting systems). We have had a series of intensive seminars to introduce staff to the issues and data of the project and to familiarise them with the multiple disciplines involved in the research. In laboratory work in multiple museums in Rome and elsewhere in Italy, we have collected skeletal and taphonomic data on eight prehistoric (Neolithic, Copper Age and Bronze Age) collections and done preparatory organisational investigations, background archaeological research, and preliminary inspections for about 10 more. Samples from these have started through the pipeline of specialist analyses, generating the first batches of new isotopic data, the first batch of new radiocarbon dates, and preliminary datapoints of ancient DNA data; genomic and proteomic analyses of prehistoric dental calculus are also in progress, as are histological analyses of funerary taphonomy. We also collaborated with two mathematician interns to develop new approaches to understanding how tomb assemblages form. We have also hosted the annual UK-based Central Mediterranean Prehistory research day, with talks by about 20 colleagues working in Italy, Malta, Croatia, and North Africa, and by the time this report is submitted we will be having our first plenary in-person seminar with all project participants gathering to exchange updated results and plan the next segment of research.
While this research is very much in progress and we are working to make up COVID-related delays to lab work, we have advanced the research question and the field in a number of ways. The PI has been working to refine explicit, testable models of how prehistoric politics can be related to bioarchaeological data, in the context of an overview of health inequality in prehistoric societies. In methodological developments, we are pioneering the first use of histology for taphonomic reconstruction of funerary rites outside the UK, and our work on compound-specific amino acid analysis for reconstructing prehistoric diet is innovative. We have developed novel approaches for using probabilistic modelling to address a traditional and intractable archaeological question, how many people were buried in a collective tomb. In empirical matters, even our preliminary results have revealed novelties, including isotopic evidence for gendered differences in diet in the Neolithic, and taphonomic evidence for the unexpected variety and complexity of ancestral rituals at Neolithic settlement sites.