Kinship, gender, and Ancient DNA

Abstract

Despite their importance to social and cultural anthropology, kinship studies have rarely featured in archaeological research. This situation has rapidly changed, in large part as a response to the explosion of paleogenomic data, and a whole raft of new approaches to kinship, relationality, and biological relatedness are emerging. Here, we discuss this dynamic new field of archaeological kinship research with regard to both its genomic and social archaeological aspects. We build on feminist critiques of bio-essentialism to draw out the limitations of genetic data for telling us about social relations and take inspiration from First Nations scholarship to argue that an expansive, complex, and deeply social understanding of kinship is accessible to archaeologists.