CO-MOVE - Cultures on the move? New approaches to the archaeology and genetics of the Yamnaya to Corded Ware burial transition

• Applicant: Dr. Maxime Brami
• Subject Area: Prehistory and World Archaeology
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 466680522

How did people and innovations spread at the turn of the 3rd millennium BC? What was the impact of so-called ‘Yamnaya’ steppe migrations on the cultural and genetic makeup of central and eastern Europe? Today ideas long thought unfashionable, such as ‘massive migration’ and ‘wholesale cultural change’, are back on the agenda, fuelled by an extraordinary genetic revolution that is overturning accepted theories about our past. Yet the link between ‘Yamnaya’ migration and cultural innovation, such as new burial practices, has not been explicitly tested or validated. Closer integration of archaeology and genetics is currently hampered by the lack of a statistically robust framework to define cultural units and compare them with archaeogenomic clusters. This project uses multivariate approaches from data mining and machine learning to systematically revisit cultural taxonomies in central and eastern Europe and explicitly test the presumed co-dispersal of steppe-derived pastoralists with new burial practices and artefacts.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Finland
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Volker Heyd