Projects
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action, Global Postdoctoral Fellowship (2023–2026)
X-KIN: Exploring Patterns of Prehistoric Kinship from Socio-Cultural Anthropological Perspectives
Host Institutions: Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago and Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna
Research Problem
During the past decade, the “ancient DNA revolution” has reopened key questions about prehistoric kinship that within archaeogenetics is narrowly viewed as genetic proximity. From a socio-cultural anthropological perspective, however, kinship is not only a biological but also a performative and imaginary principle for structuring and maintaining social relations. Frequently, it is not blood but houses that play a crucial role in forming kinship relations. Therefore, a unified study of dwelling spaces and biological markers of kinship is crucial to understanding kinship in prehistory.
Research questions
• How can the material structures such as settlements, buildings, artifacts, and biological markers be read as ‘material codes’ of prehistoric kinship?
• How can ethnographic reports exemplify rather than verify variability in kinship during prehistory?
Research sites
Four research sites in southeastern Europe and Anatolia: Çatalhöyük, Lepenski Vir, Arslantepe, and Vučedol.
Methods
X-KIN will align ethnographic reports with archaeological data to further contextualize houses and settlements as well as biological signatures of individuals to illuminate prehistoric kinship practices. This will be achieved through triangulation of analytical methods; by employing archaeology of kinship approaches based on cross-cultural anthropological insights, controlled comparison between ethnographic and archaeological material, and regional comparison between archaeological sites.
Innovation
Several archaeologists have voiced the need for archaeologists to move beyond understanding kinship through biogenetic links but as a social practice instead – joining well-known insight from earlier socio-cultural anthropology. For the first time, kinship in prehistory will be addressed from an interdisciplinary perspective, including socio-cultural anthropology, bioarchaeology, and prehistoric archaeology, within a common analytical framework.
Location of the four research sites (OeAW/OeAI, M. Börner and S. Cveček)
Gerda Henkel Foundation 2023
So close, yet so far: Contextualizing non-biological relations in Anatolian and Balkan Neolithic from socio-cultural anthropological perspectives
Research Problem
In our, Eurocentric world, we are used to bury the dead in family groups that are often composed of biologically closed individuals. But what happens when we consider other socio-cultural contexts, where this is not the case? By using state-of-the-art aDNA analyses, it is nowadays possible to confirm and specify genetic links between persons recovered from archaeological records. Simultaneously, the analyses can reveal that individuals are not genetically closely related. For individuals that are interred close by, be that within the same building or burial context, archaeologists would normally consider close social ties. However, when archaeogeneticists cannot attest close biological links between individuals buried close by, relations between those individuals lose importance. These unrelated individuals (beyond the 3rd degree, the so-called “cousins” from a Eurocentric perspective) cannot be neatly plotted onto the genetic kinship tree but remain “outliers”. They not only fall outside kinship diagrams but also outside archaeogeneticists’ current abilities to fully understand the relations between those and other individuals that are genetically related. Rather than focusing on attested biological relations, which already is the case, this research project prioritizes non-biological relations between individuals interred close by to fully understand kinship and relatedness in prehistory.
When prioritizing the lack of biological proximity between closely buried individuals, important questions arise: What can the evidence of co-buried, unrelated individuals evidence tell us about kinship and parenting in Anatolian and Balkan prehistory? Which relations, if not biological ones, connected those individuals? Did they belong to the same age group? Did they live together? Were commensality and co-residence equally or even more important than blood relations for creating kinship ties? These questions will be in this project addressed through an indigenous critique (Graeber and Wengrow 2021). The latter approach incorporates a comparison between archaeological and ethnographic cases, which I have previously conducted for the early Bronze Age households in the Aegean (Cveček 2022).
Post-DocTrack 2021–22
Households at the dawn of the Bronze Age: Anthropological contextualizations of local social organization within the Aegean basin
This interdisciplinary project examined the role of households during Early Bronze Age (EBA, beginning of the 3rd millennium BCE) in the Aegean basin from socio-cultural anthropological perspectives. The project dealt with households and social organization at two prehistoric sites: Platia Magoula Zarkou (Thessaly, Greece) and Çukuriçi Höyük (western Anatolia, Turkey).
The study relied on the household archaeology approach to analyze prehistoric material finds, which were contextualized through methods of historical and comparative anthropology.
The first objective of this project addresses the role of households: Were households at Çukuriçi Höyük and Platia Magula Zarkou “domestic mode of production” households or were they more specialized units primarily geared to production for exchange and/or tribute? The second objective questions which of the ideal types of non-state social organization (e. g. segmentary (lineage) systems, big man society, great man society, and chiefdom with and without conical clan) is appropriate to describe social organizations in these settlements, if any?
Based on this research, Sabina published her monograph titled Çukuriçi Höyük 4: Household Economics in the Early Bronze Age Aegean” (2022), which appeared with the Austrian Academy of Sciences Press.
ATHENS Fellowship 2021
Re-exploring matrilineal societies in Aegean prehistory
This was a three-month postdoctoral project carried out at the Austrian Archaeological Institute in Athens, Greece. Based on the literature research, the concept of matrilineal kinship in the Aegean prehistory was revisited through socio-cultural anthropological theories and concepts.
Research questions guiding this research were the following: How have the authors supported or argued against the existence of matrilineal societies in the Aegean Neolithic and Early Bronze Age and what data have scholars used to support such claims? Which archaeological sites in Aegean Neolithic and Early Bronze Age periods provide the best data (e.g. houses and settlements; symbolism (e.g. female figurines); subsistence; burial osteology; aDNA; and stable isotope results) to explore and discuss the evidence in line with socio-cultural anthropological theories and concepts?
Based on this study, a journal article titled “Enthrone, dethrone, rethrone: The multiple lives of matrilineal kinship in Aegean Prehistory” has been submitted to the Archaeological Dialogues and is currently in review.
DOC-team Project 2016–2021
The Role of Households at the Dawn of the Bronze Age: Contextualizing Social Organization
This DOC-team project was a jointly planned set of interdisciplinary dissertation projects with a common over-arching research interest. This research focused on studying households, household activities and settlement organization as a primary source for discussing the emergence of social structures in the Early Bronze Age, at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC, in the Aegean and Western Anatolia. The main aim was to shed more light on the social organization of this period through the transdisciplinary approach of combining archaeological data and methods with anthropological methodology and concepts.
In contrast to the usually rather ›elite focused‹ Bronze Age research, this project is an innovative bottom-up approach with its main focus on social structures. These sets of topics were addressed by research cooperation between two archaeologists, one archaeozoologist, and Sabina Cveček, a social anthropologist, linking knowledge of both humanities and natural science. Spatial analyses of two archaeological excavations, Platia Magula Zarkou in Thessaly/Greece and Çukuriçi Höyük in western Anatolia, provided data for detailed analysis on intra as well as inter-site spatial analyses.
Sabina’s analytical, conceptual, and comparative role in this project led to a sound level of interdisciplinary sophistication and theorization that enriched the overall outcome of the entire project.
Within this project, Sabina defended her PhD thesis titled “Households at the dawn of the Bronze Age: Anthropological contextualizations of local social organization within the Aegean basin” at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna (adviser: Prof. Dr. Andre Gingrich). For her thesis, Sabina received a Sowi:doc 2021 Award from the University of Vienna Doctoral School of Social Sciences.
