Krishna Veeramah of Stony Brook University and Patrick Geary of the Institute for Advanced Study will use advanced ancient DNA analysis to clarify the nature of the medieval "barbarian" societies from which many modern-day Europeans still trace their national identities. The degree to which biological relationships shape the social organization of human groups has been a major area of research across many fields. Understanding these dynamics in past non-state societies matters because many modern nations claim these earlier polities as their own historical identities. However, written texts and cultural artifacts such as weapons, jewelry, and clothing are at best ambiguous sources for understanding this past. DNA from burials potentially offers new biological information that, when combined with more traditional archeological and written data, can substantially increase our understanding of the social structures of past peoples. In particular, 2nd generation sequencing is revolutionizing the ability to interrogate DNA from ancient samples, though until now its application has been limited to questions regarding hominin prehistory.
Between the fifth and seventh centuries Western Europe experienced the disappearance of the Roman Empire and along with it a fundamental transformation of economic, social, and cultural patterns. Migrating barbarian groups are thought to have played an important role in this transformation and scholars have long debated their social structures. It is uncertain whether these were communities that had long maintained social and cultural cohesion or if they were heterogeneous ad hoc military groups. The migration of the Lombards from Pannonia (what is now Western Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Eastern Austria) into Italy in 568 C.E. represents one of the most historically documented migrations and one for which there is a relative abundance of putative archaeological material. Veeramah, Geary and colleagues will generate genomic level data from a key Lombard era cemetery in Szólád, Hungary. Forty-six burials at this fully excavated site will undergo DNA extraction followed by whole mitochondrial (mtDNA) sequencing. Those burials for which mtDNA sequencing is successful will then undergo sequencing at approximately 390,000 sites from across the genome. This will allow inference of genetic relatedness between burials down to at least third degree relatives. Standard statistical methods will test whether relatedness is associated with the spatial arrangement of burials, and genomic ancestry will be correlated with other archaeological data to develop a high-resolution conceptual model of social organization, hierarchies, and gender relationships. Besides illuminating the structure of this specific community, the results will contribute to the development of new approaches to the application of genomic analysis of historical populations.
