History is always analyzed with the bias of the present. Hence, the practices of certain ancient cultures may seem more or less appropriate to us today. But the data is what it is, and the interpretations come later. Here is a good example.
The Avars were a nomadic people from the steppes of Central Asia who ruled much of central and eastern Europe for a quarter of a millennium, between the 6th and 9th centuries AD. Although they are perhaps less known than their predecessors, the Huns, the truth is that the Avars were much more successful than Attila himself, the last and most powerful of the Hun leaders, who was barely able to dominate European territory for a period of 20 years. (from 434 to 453 AD).
A team led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute has analyzed a total of 424 individuals from four cemeteries of the Avar era and has been able to reconstruct important social dynamics of these populations descended from the steppes and who settled in the Carpathian basin.
As the archaeologists explain in an article published in the journal Nature, up to 300 of the individuals studied had a close relative (first or second degree) buried in the same cemetery, which allowed extensive genealogies to be reconstructed and revealed that the Avars practiced strict patrilineal descent system.
This is a practice of social organization that revolves around the paternal line and requires both patrilocality (that men remain in the community after marriage) and female exogamy (that women move to the tribe of their couple after marriage).
This is not, however, the most surprising thing that the specialists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have discovered. “In a way, this pattern shows the important role of women in promoting the cohesion of this society. It was they who connected individual communities, probably causing political changes,” says Zuzana Hofmanová, lead author of the study.
Getting a wife was essential for Avar culture, although the treatment of women was, at least from the current perspective, totally sexist. “It was common to have multiple reproductive partners. And there are several cases that show that these communities practiced so-called levirate unions, a system that implies that related male individuals (brothers or father and son) have offspring with the same woman,” say the researchers.
“These practices, together with the absence of genetic consanguinity, indicate that Avar society maintained a detailed memory of its ancestry and knew exactly who its biological relatives were over generations,” says Guido Alberto Gnecchi-Ruscone, first author of the study. .
The largest family tree that specialists have been able to reconstruct through DNA analysis of the remains has been an extensive pedigree of up to nine generations and spanning about 250 years. The Avar cemeteries left one of the richest archaeological heritages in European history, including around 100,000 tombs that have already been excavated.
Despite their importance in the social organization of this culture, women are especially underrepresented in historical sources. This is due, according to experts, to the fact that most of the information has come to us from the texts written by their enemies, mainly the Byzantines and the Franks, who did not give much importance to the internal organization of the Avar clans. .
Combining genetic data with archaeological, anthropological and historical information has served to discover more about the kinship patterns and demographic development of this ancient nomadic culture that maintained steppe traditions, although it also underwent changes over the centuries.
The researchers have identified a clear temporal transition within one of the sites analyzed, where there was a change from one paternal line to another. “This replacement reflects both an archaeological and dietary change and a large-scale transition that occurred throughout the Carpathian Basin,” says Zsófia Rácz, co-author of the paper. This movement is likely related to political changes in the region that would have been impossible to see without studying entire communities.
