The HistoGenes ERC SyG project held its annual meeting in Budapest: the event summarized the results achieved so far and set tasks for the next period.
The project aims to investigate the transformation, formation, and biological background of early medieval populations in the Central Danube Basin after the fall of the Roman Empire and during the Great Migrations. This goal is realized through genetic and isotopic analysis of around 6,000 individuals who lived between the 4th and 9th centuries and whose bone remains are preserved in museums. This year's annual meeting was held in Budapest from October 18 to 21, attended by 70 researchers from 10 countries participating in the project: geneticists, historians, archaeologists, geochemists, physical anthropologists, and bioinformaticians.
The project, which started in May 2020, is slowly reaching its halfway point, providing an opportunity to assess the results so far. Around 80% of the planned samples have been taken, and more than half of these have already undergone complete genome sequencing. On the first day of the meeting, organized by the Institute of Archaeological Sciences, research group progress reports were held in the ELTE Faculty of Humanities Council Hall. The groups, organized on territorial and thematic bases, examine former burial communities providing samples by archaeological, bone, genetic, and isotopic methods, to better understand the social relations manifesting in burial practices and various aspects of everyday life of the period.
The groups analyzed the fate and mixing of the local population, their coexistence with northern and eastern immigrants, Germanic peoples, Slavs, and steppe peoples in the Central Tisza region, Kisalföld, around Keszthely, Southern Transdanubia, the Vienna Basin, and Slovenia. They examined the biological background of social hierarchy and status, the inheritance and transformation of cultural and ethnic traditions. Understanding kinship provides fundamental information on social organization and family functioning (nuclear family, extended family?). It is clearly visible how farming and lifestyle influence forms of coexistence. The project conducts full investigations at several sites per region. Thanks to this intensive sampling, it is already apparent that
even among sites from the same period and region, differences in social organization of communities can be identified.
In the former territory of Pannonia, the survival of the local population can be proven, while in the Great Hungarian Plain, communities of eastern origin with patrilinear descent that lived in one place for a long period can be observed during the Avar era.
On the second day of the meeting, organized by the ELKH BTK Institute for Archaeogenomics, researchers discussed new genetic and dating methods and shaped the research and publication strategy for the next period. After two days of intensive consultation, participants visited Zalavár and Keszthely, two sites studied in the project.
One of the leaders of the international project is Tivadar Vida, director of the ELTE Institute of Archaeological Sciences, who, together with his colleagues, recently traced the genetic origins of the Avar elite to an eastern region of Inner Asia by analyzing anthropological finds from Hungary .
Source and more images on the ELTE BTK page