A new study has shed light on the family and social life of the Avars, a mysterious empire that ruled much of Central and Eastern Europe for 250 years from the mid-sixth century. With opulent graves but no written records, details about this enigmatic nomadic group have remained largely unknown until now.
The study analyzed DNA taken from the remains of 424 people buried in four cemeteries unearthed in Hungary and revealed that men stayed within their community after marriage while women married outside it – a pattern known as patrilocality. The researchers were able to build detailed family trees or pedigrees, with one spanning nine generations across 2½ centuries.
The analysis showed that around 300 of the individuals had close relatives buried in the same cemetery and discovered that women who married into the Avar groups came from different places but still shared a “steppe” genetic ancestry – probably not conquered local people. It was relatively common for both men and women to have children with multiple partners, according to Guido Alberto Gnecchi-Ruscone of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
The study also found multiple cases of closely related male individuals having offspring with the same female partner – three pairs of fathers and sons, two pairs of full brothers, and one sibling of paternal half-brothers and an uncle and nephew. These “levirate unions” that took place after a woman’s death existed in other Eurasian steppe societies too, indicating the Avars clung to some aspects of their former nomadic way of life when they abandoned it shortly after arriving in Europe.
The researchers found no signs of interbreeding between close blood relatives – a phenomenon known as consanguinity – suggesting that people knew who their biological relatives were and traced them over the generations, according to Gnecchi-Ruscone. While men’s graves had higher status items such as horses, saddles, and harnesses, women likely played an important role in promoting social cohesion linking individual communities by ensuring daughters did not take husbands from among their mothers’ or grandmothers’ kin.
The study was a “fruitful interweaving of genetics, history, and archaeology,” according to Bryan Miller of the University of Michigan who wasn’t involved in it. He added that only data sets with far greater resolution – fuller investigations of whole communities – could provide definitive or nuanced narratives about societies like this one as previous studies had attempted to do using fewer individuals per community or a handful representing entire cultures and societies across Eurasia.
Leave a Reply