A Social Archaeology of Kinship in Iberia and Beyond

The study of kinship from archaeology has been fluctuating. At the end of the 20th century archaeologists were reluctant or skeptical about its relevance and viability. However, in recent decades it has gained prominence and today it is experiencing a sweet moment, although not without problems. Its recent impulse has been due to the methodological development of bioscience techniques (aDNA and isotope studies) and to the profound revision and updating of other inference strategies from household archaeology. All this has resulted in the public interest in kinship in the past, as well as an increasing funding of research programs and a rapidly growing scholarly literature. However, as a line of work in its infancy, the academic landscape is fraught with confusion and interpretive uncertainty. There are various ways of understanding kinship and assorted ways of approaching it from archaeology. The common identification of kinship as biological relatedness is only a restrictive and context-dependent way of understanding it, which may serve to comprehend our Western society, but is not directly applicable to any other. Archaeology must critically construct its own methods of inference and narratives about kinship as a social matter. It is therefore urgent to reclaim a social archaeology of kinship that collaborates yet is not subordinated to other sciences. This volume aims to contribute to this challenge. To this end, it compiles case-based essays elaborated by renowned international scholars (archaeologists and geneticists) in which inference methods and interpretative possibilities about kinship in the past are discussed. The volume's scope is mainly focused on Iberia, although case-studies are drawn worldwide. Spain is a dynamic research hub belonging to a minority archaeological tradition, where varied theoretically informed and promising approaches to the subject are being undertaken and is therefore paradigmatic of current trends and prospects in the international scene.