July 17, 2023

Kin and Connection - an introductory post

In this post I want briefly to introduce myself and the Kin and Connection project - thanks so much, by the way, for taking an interest!

So... who am I? I am Catherine Frieman, an archaeologist at the Australian National University. I started out as a lithic specialist (stone tools are still my first love) with an interest in technological change in European prehistory.¹ This led me to work more thoughtfully on topics like innovation and resistance, practices which have been explored in depth in contemporary contexts but much less frequently in archaeology. Thanks to an Australian Research Council DECRA, I could really get my teeth into this material and the outcome was the first monograph exploring the process of innovation in the context of archaeological material.²

At the same time, I was working on another collaborative project exploring the affordances of scientific data (stable isotopes, ancient DNA, etc.) to tell us about mobility. How people and objects moved in the past and the traces of these we can identify in the archaeological record have been a topic of interest for generations, and these new scientific tools are giving us exciting new insights. BUT (yes, there's always a but) I became concerned at how the scientific data seemed to be limiting our interpretations rather than expanding them. So, with some brilliant colleagues, I tried to develop a more comprehensive framework to integrate these data into social interpretations.³ That work laid the foundation for the Kin and Connection project (hereafter, KINnect).

So what is KINnect anyways? Well... the idea is to build on the wealth of ancient DNA and other scientific data now available and to try to build a more robust methodological framework to integrate these into social archaeological models. Over the last few years, the quantity and quality of scientific data have increased to such an extent, that some insights about social practice are becoming more easily accessible. However, the constraints of scientific publishing and disciplinary norms of our scientist colleagues mean that these insights may not always speak as directly to the archaeological record as we social archaeologists would like.

Rather than just shout across the disciplinary divides, I've put this project together to be a meeting place between our various fields where we can hopefully hash out something better for all of us. The focus is kinship because it seems like a natural junction between the scientific story of relatedness among bodies and the social story of relations among people.

A rough model of kinship as visible to archaeology

I'll be digging into this from a few different angles: archaeological data to give us insight into lineage, diet, and shared technological gestures; a meta-analysis of various scientific datasets that give insight into mobility and connectivity alongside various archaeological datasets; and (most nerve-wracking for me) discussions and interviews with colleagues working in aDNA to better understand the disciplinary overlaps and separations that have shaped aDNA research so far in order to open up areas for collaboration that we have not yet fully explored.

Wish me luck!

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Future entries might be longer or shorter - some will probably be more academic, others brief reports on conferences or other relevant events. Hopefully, in future I'll also have some guest posts from other project members and research collaborators. Please subscribe and feel free to get in touch with any questions you might have!