Examining Bronze Age Kinship and Community Patterning in the Southern Urals, Russian Federation, through aDNA Study

Summary

This is an abstract from the "From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ancient DNA studies have increased exponentially in recent years and have had tremendous impact on our understanding of early genomic patterning in many regions of the world. The vast Eurasian steppe zone has not been overlooked in these important breakthroughs. Several recent studies from this broad region have stimulated new models for interpreting population migration and gene flow among pastoralist and agropastoralist populations. However, such studies frequently encompass large spatial territories and widely dispersed sampling. This paper, in contrast, focuses more intently on small-scale regional and subregional demographic processes relating to kinship patterning and community organization during the Bronze Age within the Southern Urals region. A detailed discussion of aDNA results from a sample of 50 individuals from the Kamennyi Ambar 5 cemetery (2100–1700 cal BCE), which is associated with the Sintashta archaeological culture, will be presented. These results offer a unique opportunity to examine more effectively ancestral heterogeneity, familial relatedness, and the biological sex of children and subadults among Bronze Age people living in the central steppes. The case study offers substantial comparative potential for examining variability in social organization and kinship patterning among early pastoralist societies in the Eurasian steppe region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36742.0