Social Kinships and Cooperative Care: approaching relatedness in Later Prehistory through the analysis of women and children buried together

SKIN: Social Kinships and Cooperative Care explores relatedness beyond biological links in European Copper and Bronze Age societies.

SKIN will analyse the nature of different relationships between co-buried individuals in Iberia and Central Europe, c. 3000-1000 BC.

It will adopt ethnographic, archaeological and bioarchaeological approaches, including aDNA and Sr-isotope analysis, to investigate to what extent kinship relations were based on genetic links, or instead, included constructs complementing and extending the nuclear family.

Special attention will be paid to allomothering and cooperative care, two practices extensively documented cross-culturally, but rarely investigated in prehistory.

SKIN will (a) contribute to developing an effective theoretical and rigorous methodological framework to investigate social kinship by reviewing bioarchaeological approaches currently in use, (b) promote an alternative focus in archaeology, moving from supra-regional and long-term genetic issues to studying individuals, especially women and children traditionally left behind (c) give new insights of kinship in prehistory based on both social and biological ties.

The applicants new skills in human osteology, Sr- isotope and aDNA analyses acquired through high-quality training at the host institution AI and during her MSCA-PF secondment will contribute to achieving these goals.

Collaboration on the ECR-funded project The Value of Mothers to Society will create synergies exploring the gender dimension in Europes Later Prehistory.

SKIN contributes to understanding kinship relations and the crucial role of cooperative care in the past, which are current themes of worldwide order.