The Context of Relatedness: Historical Trends and Emerging Developments in Bioarchaeological Approaches to Kinship (original) (raw)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite Schneider’s claim that the study of kinship had little future, there has been a recent resurgence of anthropological kinship studies. In sociocultural anthropology, kinship research has progressed beyond documenting kin systems to investigating gender relations, interpersonal violence, socioeconomic behavior, and political organization, for example. As a synthetic subdiscipline bioarchaeology is well-positioned to embrace newer conceptions of kinship and use diverse datasets to reconstruct kin relations in the past. A literature review was completed to assess the current state of kinship research within bioarchaeology. First, core journals were identified and keyword searches of terms relevant to kinship studies were performed to obtain publication counts by decade beginning with the 1950s. Second, an exhaustive review of search results was performed to identify 1) whether publications addressed social kinship, biological kinship, or both, and 2) the data types used to investigate kinship. Across all searches, relative counts scaled by years in press indicate that American Anthropologist (423.43 articles) and American Journal of Physical Anthropology (200. 94 articles) have the greatest visibility of kinship-related terminology, while data types commonly employed highlight the disparate treatment of the topic between anthropological subdisciplines. Incidence of the terms “intracemetery”, “mate exchange”, and “lineage” experienced their highest levels over the past decade, possibly reflecting increased interest in biocultural approaches to kinship and continued interest in anthropological genetics. However, as few publications identified represent bioarchaeological research, it seems bioarchaeology has failed to incorporate recent developments in sociocultural anthropology. Notably, studies that apply a social identity perspective to bioarchaeological data emphasize age, gender, status, and ethnic identities, while kin-based identity remains underexplored. With few exceptions bioarchaeological kinship studies have failed to bridge the intellectual trajectories of archaeology, which favors the “house” concept, and biological anthropology, which largely remains focused on using biological data to identify kin groups among archaeological samples.

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