Vernot, Benjamin
ERC Consolidator Grant for the UNEARTH research project
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Zum Projekt
Family units and community organization shape our social fabric. While written records such as property and tax registers or certificates of birth, death, and marriage have enabled aspects of social organization to be reconstructed for some historical communities, these insights into kinship patterns and social stratification are almost impossible to resolve for the vast majority of ancient societies. However, people constantly shed DNA in life, and this DNA accumulates in places where we live and work.
For ancient societies, such DNA can function as forensic “breadcrumbs” that trace the spaces where ancient individuals interacted with one another and the institutional domains of their community. In the ERC-funded project UNEARTH, Benjamin Vernot and his team retrieve and analyze human DNA from Holocene settlements, and plan to use this DNA to map out social organization and family networks throughout the settlement context. At their primary study site of Vráble, a 4.000 year old Early Bronze Age settlement in Slovakia, they aim to retrieve this DNA from nearly every house, spanning 500 years of a dynamic settlement history. The researchers will additionally develop novel laboratory and computational methodology to analyze ancient human DNA from sediments, and seek to understand the origins of such DNA.