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. 2022 Dec 27;12(1):22415.
doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-25975-9.

Kinship practices in the early state El Argar society from Bronze Age Iberia

Vanessa Villalba-Mouco  1   2 , Camila Oliart  3 , Cristina Rihuete-Herrada  3 , Adam B Rohrlach  4   5 , María Inés Fregeiro  6 , Ainash Childebayeva  4 , Harald Ringbauer  4 , Iñigo Olalde  7   8   9 , Eva Celdrán Beltrán  3 , Catherine Puello-Mora  3 , Miguel Valério  3 , Johannes Krause  4 , Vicente Lull  3 , Rafael Micó #  10 , Roberto Risch #  11 , Wolfgang Haak #  12
Affiliations

Kinship practices in the early state El Argar society from Bronze Age Iberia

Vanessa Villalba-Mouco et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

The Early Bronze Age in Europe is characterized by social and genetic transformations, starting in the early 3rd millennium BCE. New settlement and funerary structures, artifacts and techniques indicate times of change with increasing economic asymmetries and political hierarchization. Technological advances in metallurgy also played an important role, facilitating trade and exchange networks, which became tangible in higher levels of mobility and connectedness. Archeogenetic studies have revealed a substantial transformation of the genetic ancestry around this time, ultimately linked to the expansion of steppe- and forest steppe pastoralists from Eastern Europe. Evidence for emerging infectious diseases such as Yersinia pestis adds further complexity to these tumultuous and transformative times. The El Argar complex in southern Iberia marks the genetic turnover in southwestern Europe ~ 2200 BCE that accompanies profound changes in the socio-economic structure of the region. To answer the question of who was buried in the emblematic double burials of the El Argar site La Almoloya, we integrated results from biological relatedness analyses and archaeological funerary contexts and refined radiocarbon-based chronologies from 68 individuals. We find that the El Argar society was virilocally and patrilineally organized and practiced reciprocal female exogamy, supported by pedigrees that extend up to five generations along the paternal line. Synchronously dated adult males and females from double tombs were found to be unrelated mating partners, whereby the incoming females reflect socio-political alliances among El Argar groups. In three cases these unions had common offspring, while paternal half-siblings also indicate serial monogamy or polygyny.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Early bronze age El Argar in southern Iberia. (A) Map of Iberia and location of the Argaric and other Bronze Age nearby sites. The map was created using QGIS 3.12 (https://qgis.org/en/site/) and uses Natural Earth vector map data from (https://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/). (B) A view of the La Almoloya hilltop site from the East.
Figure 2
Figure 2
(A) Plan of La Almoloya phase 3 highlighting the position of burials that have yielded sufficient aDNA and close genetic relatedness between individuals up to the 2nd degree. For full pedigrees see SI Appendix, Sect. 3. (B) Exemplary pithos double burial and grave goods (C) from La Almoloya burial AY38.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Summary of the genetic results from the double burials at Almoloya. (A) Results of the Pairwise-mismatch rate (PMR) analysis including all pairs of individuals from the Iberian Bronze Age available to date. The x-axis shows the number of overlapping SNPs between each pair and the y-axis the coefficient of relatedness. All adult double burials fall within the range of randomly drawn pairs of individuals from the Iberian Bronze Age. (B) Reconstructed pedigrees of three cases involving adult double burials and their common offspring. Below the colored squares and circles is the contextual information of all adult double tombs, including sex, age at death, mitochondrial and Y-chromosomal haplogroups, direct 14C dates, as well as stratigraphy. Pink outlines reflect interchangeable genetic sexes and gray dashed lines indicate pedigrees reconstructed from low coverage data.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Overview of genetic sex and age at death determinations and total numbers of observed relationships per category and long-distance relatives outside La Almoloya. (A) Simplified age classes of the individuals analyzed from La Almoloya: subadult (including infant (0–3 years) and child (3–12 years)) and adult (including young adult (20–35 years), middle adult (35–50 years), and old adult (50+ years)) females and males. Of note, adolescent individuals (12–20 years) were not found at the site; (B) total number of 1st- (pink) and 2nd-degree (purple) relatives between age and sex classes as summarized in (A). Numbers reflect the number of links in the pedigrees between age/sex classes and numbers inside symbols reflect the number of links within each class. The graph illustrates the absence of either 1st- or 2nd-degree relationships among adult females; (C) Long-distance relatives (6–7th degree) as indicated by shared IBD-blocks between individuals from La Almoloya and other BA archaeological sites. The map was created using QGIS 3.12 (https://qgis.org/en/site/) and uses Natural Earth vector map data from (https://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/).
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