Anastasis. Research in Medieval Culture and Art is an international peer-reviewed journal edited by The Research Center of Medieval Art, ”Vasile Drăguț” at the “George Enescu” National University of Arts  of Iași, România.

Anastasis. Research in Medieval Culture and Art is an open access journal, which publish original articles in the areas of medieval art and medieval culture. The aim is to stir people’s interest for scientific research regarding the Middle Ages in order to qualify the modern preoccupation with medieval art.

In order to offer a more complex and nuanced set of ideas, the journal has an interdisciplinary character and publishes research about visual arts, restoration, architecture, music, theatre, theology, philosophy, literature, sciences etc.

Each issue contains research articles on varied topics, as well as sections on Medieval Art and Civilisation and Medieval Culture in Contemporary Research. Finally, there is a section with book reviews. Judging from the table of contents, the journal offers a fine and varied glimpse into a lively research center somewhat on the periphery of the mainstream (Anglo-American) milieu of medieval art research.

The first issue for 2018 has just been published. Call for papers for issue two ends 15.09.2018

Table of contents

Constantin Ciobanu
Les inscriptions simulées de la peinture médiévale roumaine dans le contexte de l’art et de la pensée orthodoxes / Simulated Inscriptions of Romanian Medieval Painting in the Context of Orthodox Art and Thinking
Article PDF

Florin Crîșmăreanu
Théologie de la beauté dans les écrits de Maxime le Confesseur / The Theology of Beauty in the Writings of Maximus the Confessor
Article PDF

Brînduşa Grigoriu
Yseut et Tristan comme parents : le Roman d’Ysaÿe le Triste / Yseut and Tristan as Parents : the Romance of Ysaÿe le Triste
Article PDF

Irina-Andreea Stoleriu
Adrian  Stoleriu
Representations of the Pope in Western Art
Article PDF

Bogdan Ungurean
Notes on the St. Theodore’s church iconostasis from Iași. Technique of execution, stylistically description and state of conservation
Article PDF

Oana Maria Nicuţă
Visual Litteracy and the Crux of the Visible: Is Stained Glass a Manifestation of the Diaphanous?
Article PDF

Cristina Gelan
Ideology, Symbolism and Representation through Byzantine Art
Article PDF

Angela Simalcsik
New Cases of Symbolic Trepanation from the Medieval Period Discovered in the Space between Prut and Dniester
Article PDF

MEDIEVAL CULTURE IN CONTEMPORARY RESEARCH

Ioana Palamar 
Self-Portrait: Between Normality and Psychosis
Article PDF

Codrina-Laura Ioniţă
“Le Buisson Ardent de la Vierge”. Une lettre et une icône / The Burning Bush of Virgin Mary. A letter and an icon
Article PDF

Luana Stan 
Teodora-Sânziana Stan
Revalorisation des rituels ancestraux des amérindiens du Canada dans la musique de Murray Schaffer / Revalorization of Canadian Amerindian Rituals in Murray Schafer’s Music
Article PDF

Paula Onofrei
Medieval Symbols in “The Name of the Rose”, by Umberto Eco
Article PDF

Rosângela Aparecida da Conceição
Thomaz Scheuchl, the Trajectory of a Disciple of Beuron: from the Restoration of the Cathedral of the Ascension in Satu Mare to the Paintings of Churches in Brazil
Article PDF

The post Anastasis – Journal About Research in Medieval Culture and Art appeared first on Medieval Histories.

by Philip Jett

Robert Todd Lincoln did not resemble his famous father. At seven inches shorter and quite a few pounds heavier, many who met him were disappointed. He lacked the ability to spin a tale like his father, often referred to as an “unsympathetic bore.” Yet, after his brothers died at ages three, eleven, and eighteen, Robert became the only living legacy of the most popular U.S. president.

Robert attended the finest schools, such as Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard College, and Harvard Law School. By age twenty-one, he’d already attended both of his father’s presidential inaugurations. A year later, he left Harvard Law School to become the assistant adjutant to General Grant, a mere two months before the Civil War ended. He was present during General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House. After the war, Robert moved to Chicago and finished school at what is today Northwestern School of Law. He married Mary Eunice Harlan, whose father was a U.S. Senator and Secretary of the Interior. They had two daughters and a son.

Robert was asked to run for president or vice-president several times but refused, although he did accept positions as the U.S. Secretary of War in 1881 and the Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of St. James in 1889. He became a successful corporate lawyer and later became president of the enormous Pullman Palace Car Company, which produced streetcars and luxury railway cars. He and his family traveled the world and owned beautiful homes, including the twenty-four room mansion, Hildene, with eight bathrooms, eight fireplaces, and a basement, on 400-acres in Manchester, Vermont. Quite an improvement over his father’s childhood log cabin.

Yet sadness also followed Robert. He’d lost his father to an assassin’s bullet when he was twenty-one years old. His only son, Abraham “Jack” Lincoln II, died at the age of sixteen of a blood infection. His mother’s notoriously odd behavior grew more bizarre so Robert committed her to a private sanitarium for women. She eventually lived out the remainder of her life quietly with a sister in Illinois. Her relationship with Robert never recovered.

Uncannily, Robert was associated with each of the first three presidential assassinations. He’d eaten breakfast with his father, but refused his mother’s invitation to join them at Ford’s Theatre that evening, preferring to stay at the White House instead. When Robert received word of the shooting, he rushed to his father’s bedside at the Petersen House and wept there until his father succumbed.

While serving as Secretary of War in 1881, he accompanied President James Garfield to the Sixth Street Train Station in Washington, D.C. where he witnessed the shooting of the president. “How many sorrows have I passed in this town?” he said. Twenty years later, he accepted the invitation of President William McKinley to attend the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, where McKinley was shot as Robert made his way through the Exposition to join him. Feeling cursed, Robert refused subsequent presidential invitations, once writing: “No, I’m not going . . . because there is a certain fatality about presidential functions when I am present.”

No event exemplifies Robert’s blessed and cursed life more than one that took place in 1864 on a New Jersey railway station platform. Years later, Robert recalled the incident: “The train began to move, and by the motion, I was twisted off my feet . . . and was personally helpless, when my coat collar was vigorously seized and I was quickly pulled up and out to a secure footing on the platform.  Upon turning to thank my rescuer, I saw [the gentleman], whose face was of course well known to me, and I expressed my gratitude to him.” A member of General Grant’s staff wrote a letter to that gentleman expressing President Lincoln’s gratitude, something the man kept and displayed often. The gentleman was the famous actor, Edwin Booth, brother of John Wilkes Booth, who would assassinate Robert’s father months later.

Robert made his last public appearance at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. in May 1922. He died at Hildene four years later, one week shy of his eighty-third birthday. Though he desired to be buried in the Lincoln Tomb in Springfield, Illinois, his wife interred him in a grand sarcophagus at Arlington Cemetery.

Many might say Robert Lincoln became a millionaire off of his father’s presidency and assassination and achieved little in the way of public service. He was anti-labor and did not stand up against discrimination. Instead, he felt comfortable steering the high-paying helm of the largest manufacturing company in America at the turn of the century. Yet, it is hard to criticize the son of Abraham Lincoln. He had some mighty big shoes to fill—size 14 as a matter of fact.

PHILIP JETT is a former corporate attorney who has represented multinational corporations, CEOs, and celebrities from the music, television, and sports industries. He is the author of The Death of an Heir: Adolph Coors III and the Murder That Rocked an American Brewing Dynasty. Jett now lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

The post Robert Todd Lincoln—Blessed and Cursed appeared first on The History Reader.

How did Henry the Fowler and his son, Otto the Great, turn Germany into the political centre of 10th century Europe? By besting the Magyars? Or by more traditional mythmaking? New book explores the various sources and their role in the later historiography.

The Construction of Ottonian Kingship: Narratives and Myth in Tenth-Century Germany
Series: Intellectual and Political History
by Antoni Grabowski
Amsterdam University Press 2018
ISBN: 9789462987234

ABSTRACT:

German historians long assumed that the German Kingdom was created with Henry the Fowler’s coronation in 919. The reigns of both Henry the Fowler, and his son Otto the Great, were studied and researched mainly through Widukind of Corvey’s chronicle Res Gestae Saxonicae. There was one source on Ottonian times that was curiously absent from most of the serious research: Liudprand of Cremona’s Antapodosis. The study of this chronicle leads to a reappraisal of the tenth century in Western Europe showing how mythology of the dynasty was constructed. By looking at the later reception (through later Middle Ages and then on 19th and 20th century historiography) the author showcases the longevity of Ottonian myths and the ideological expressions of the tenth century storytellers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr Antoni Grabowski works at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History at the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is interested in the historiography of the tenth century and its later reinterpretations.

The post The Construction of Ottonian Kingship appeared first on Medieval Histories.

by Anne de Courcy

Towards the end of the nineteenth century and for the first few years of the twentieth, a strange invasion took place in Britain. The citadel of power, privilege, and breeding in which the titled, land-owning governing class had barricaded itself for so long was breached. The incomers were a group of young women who, fifty years earlier, would have been looked on as the alien denizens of another world—the New World, to be precise. From 1874—the year that Jennie Jerome, the first known ‘Dollar Princess’, married Randolph Churchill—to 1905, dozens of young American heiresses married into the British peerage, bringing with them all the fabulous wealth, glamour and sophistication of the Gilded Age.

In her new book, The Husband Hunters: American Heiresses Who Married into the British Aristocracy, Anne de Courcy sets the stories of these young women and their families in the context of their times. Based on extensive first-hand research, drawing on diaries, memoirs and letters, this richly entertaining group biography reveals what they thought of their new lives in England – and what England thought of them. Keep reading for an excerpt of The Husband Hunters.

* * * * *

Alva’s costume for the 1883 ball. Image is in the public domain via Wikipedia.

At the news of the ball, the society papers were agog. Who would come to it and who would stay away? What would happen when the different branches of the Vanderbilts met? Would the boycott of Alva still continue?

The Duke, as Alva had guessed, proved too much of a draw for anyone to resist, and her invitations were all eagerly accepted. Consuelo, seeing the inexorable approach of a fate she dreaded, was in despair. As Alva was determined that nothing would interfere with her plan—let alone the fact that her daughter was in love with someone else and did not wish to marry the man her mother had selected—Consuelo was kept a prisoner in the Marble House.

The porter was under orders not to let her out alone, her mother and her governess were always with her and when friends called they were told she was not home. She was unable to write a letter because she had no means of buying a stamp or posting it and all the letters that arrived for her were taken straight to Alva, who destroyed them. Equally powerful as a prison wall was the psychological factor that she had been brought up from babyhood with the habit of total subordination to someone whose will was the law.

It was not long before the Newport society, aware of Alva’s treatment of her daughter, echoed with the phrase: ‘A marble palace is the right place for a woman with a marble heart.’

Consuelo held out against the prospect before her as long as she could but, after five months without word from her lover, and unable to reach him, with her mother raging, screaming and shouting that either she would have a fatal heart attack or that she would ‘shoot Winthrop Rutherfurd’ and threatening that therefore she would be arrested, imprisoned and hanged, she cracked, and agreed to accept the Marlborough when he proposed. She was barely eighteen, completely isolated, utterly miserable and brought up to be subservient to her mother in all things.

When the Duke arrived in Newport as part of an American tour her was entertained by several of its notables, with others crowding to watch where possible. But the highlight was Alva’s ball, planned so that she would outdo any previous entertainment in both taste and lavishness.

Image via Library of Congress.

She succeeded. The grounds were lit by thousands of tiny lights, a host of servants wore livery in style of Louis XIV, there were nine French chefs, three orchestras and the tables were decorated with pink hollyhocks among which swarmed tiny hummingbirds. In the yellow marble hall, a bronze drinking fountain held pink lotus plants, above which hovered artificial butterflies.

Even the cotillion favors, previously chosen by Alva in Paris – Louis XIV fans, etchings, gold watch-cases—were so splendid that guests actually stole them from one another. Alva wore white satin with a court train and a dazzle of diamonds; beside her stood Consuelo in white satin and tulle. It was a triumph—except that there was no offer of marriage from the Duke. The parties and dinners went on…and on…and on—and still nothing. Finally, the evening before he was due to leave, the Duke proposed. Alva, determined to waste no time in clinching the matter, announced the engagement the following day, even ordering her servants to spread the good news with the words ‘Go out and tell everyone you know.’

Interested in more from The Husband Hunters? Listen to an excerpt of the audiobook:

Anne de Courcy is the author of thirteen widely acclaimed works of social history and biography, including MARGOT AT WAR, THE FISHING FLEET, THE VICEROY’S DAUGHTERS and DEBS AT WAR. She lives in London and Gloucestershire.

The post The Real Women Who Inspired Downton Abbey appeared first on The History Reader.

Is Early Medieval Europe in the process of merging with The Journal of Late Antiquity? Four out of five articles touch upon people and events in the 4th, 6th, and 6th centuries.

Table of Contents

The post Early Medieval Europe August 2018 appeared first on Medieval Histories.

Recent issues of Speculum shows that literature departments currently have the upper hand regarding the content of this journal. Out of 18 articles published this year, only two falls into the categery, history proper.

The Medieval Academy of America was founded as an interdisciplinary association including members from language, literature, history and philosophy. In practice it works a seesaw where literature-based medievalists compete with medieval historians.

Currently, it is obvious the medievalists working inside medieval literature studies have the upper hand. Of 18 articles published in vol. 93 of Speculum this year (2018), only two may be classified as representing medieval history, two have an art historical focus, and the rest concerns literature and texts.

Speculum. The journal of the Medieval Academy of America
Editor: Sarah Spence
Volume 93, Number 3,  July 2018

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Rethinking the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215
Jeffrey M. Wayno
pp. 611–637

“All the Way to the British Isles”: Ayyūbid-English Diplomatic Networks in an Early Thirteenth-Century Exchange
Ilan Shoval
pp. 638–668

Lydgate’s Virtual Coteries: Chaucer’s Family and Gower’s Pacifism in the Fifteenth Century
R. D. Perry
pp. 669–698

Augustine on Lying
Erika T. Hermanowicz
pp. 699–727

Hildesheim Avant-Garde: Bronze, Columns, and Colonialism
Ittai Weinryb
pp. 728–782

The post New Issue of Speculum 2018 appeared first on Medieval Histories.

Last year the Society for Medieval Archaeology decided to publish two issues per year of the journal Medieval Archaeology. The issue from June 2018 cover a wide variety of themes and subjects offering a handful of new and inspiring articles as well as a series of book reviews

List of contents:

Dressed for Ritual, Dressed for Life. A Migration-Period Grave from Sande in Norway
Marianne Vedeler, Elna Siv Kristoffersen & Ingunn Marit Røstad
Pages: 1-27

The Eslington Sword and the Kingdom of Northumbria
Rob Collins & Sam Turner
Pages: 28-52

An Insular Reliquary from Melhus: The Significance of Insular Ecclesiastical Material in Early Viking-Age Norway
Aina Heen-Pettersen & Griffin Murray
Pages: 53-82

Pebbles and Peregrinatio: The Taskscape of Medieval Devotion on Inishark Island, Ireland
Ryan Lash
Pages: 83-104

The Archaeology of the Military Orders: The Material Culture of Holy War
Aleks Pluskowski
Pages: 105-134

Medieval Timber Motte Towers
William Wyeth
Pages: 135-156

Archaeological Excavations of the Medieval Royal Kincardine Landscape, Aberdeenshire, Scotland 
Kevin Malloy & Derek Hall
Pages: 157-176

The post New Issue of Medieval Archaeology August 2018 appeared first on Medieval Histories.

Scone is best known for the Stone of Scone, also known as the Stone of Destiny or the Stone of Coronation. Less well known is that Scone was the primary ceremonial and legislative gathering place in Scotland. Recently, the results from extensive archaeological excavations were published.

The Stone of Scone is an oblong, red sandstone used as the Scottish coronation stone. Famously taken by Edward I of as part of the spoils of war and taken to Westminster. Although, the English promised to return the stone in 1328, it remained in England until 1950, when it was “stolen” from The Abbey and brought back to Scotland. Retrieved by the British Authorities, it was not until 1996 that the stone was formally returned to Scotland as a gesture of conciliation. It now resides at the castle in Edinburgh until the next British coronation. Whether or not this Stone of Scone is the original has been disputed for centuries. More interesting though, it seems, is to investigate the original setting of the stone at the centre of the ancient ceremonial assembly ground at Scone and compare the site with other similar assembly grounds.

The Royal Complex at Scone

Scone’s role as the premier site for royal investiture and legislative assemblies is well known. The earliest trusted record dates to AD 906, while the last state occasion took place in 1651.

At the centre of the complex is the Moothill Mound, the site of an Augustinian Abbey founded by Alexander I in c. 1120. The mound measures 90 x 64 metres and rises two metres above ground. It is located inside the Abbey grounds with the ruined church to the south. This measured c. 77 metres and was impressive enough to be used for the actual medieval unction and coronation ceremonies of kings and queens.

Moothill, itself, was ditched. Radiocarbon dates from charcoal fragments found in the ditch dates the site to the 10^thto 12^thcenturies, thus generally confirming the written evidence, from the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba’ (dated to the 10^thcentury.) As excavations in the mound itself has not been carried out the exact date cannot be fixed, but the possibility exists that the written record and the construction of the mound and the ditch surrounding it can be dated to c. AD 1000. “Whether in the tenth or eleventh century, the creation and augmentation of a monumental platform for high ceremonial and legislative assemblies was implicated in elite political strategies to elevate Scone as a royal centre”, writes O’Grady, who continues to describe how the place was used for legislative assemblies until the 15^thcentury, when they were moved to more secure locations in the royal strongholds of Perth, Stirling, and Edinburgh.

The European Context

After the foundation of the Abbey in the 12^thcentury, the meeting ground at Scone came to look much like the traditional idea of an “Aula Regia”, a space consisting of a royal chapel, a space dedicated to processions, and a proper meeting ground – whether inside a hall or outside on a mound. The O’Grady mentions similar places at Cordoba, Aachen, Westminster, Prague, Gamla Uppsala, Nidaros in Norway and Lund in Sweden. Others worthwhile exploring in detail would be Paderborn, the Saxon twin of Aachen, the somewhat later Goslar, and Jelling, with the last two dated to approximately to the same timeframe as the complex at Scone (the 10^thand early 11^thcentury).

Whether or not a church was erected at Scone at the beginning of the 10^thcentury cannot be known without further excavations. It seems likely, though, that familiarity with the model as it derived from Trier via Aachen, was widespread in the 10^thcentury and onwards, and that it likely inspired the construction of the assembly site at Scone.

SOURCE:

Accumulating Kingship: the archaeology of elite assembly in medieval Scotland
By Oliver J. T. O’Grady
In: World Archaeology
Published online: 12 Jul 2018

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Oliver J. T. O’Grady is a landscape archaeologist with expertise in the archaeology and history of medieval north-west Europe. His research focuses are the interdisciplinary study of medieval landscapes and elite central places, the material remains of medieval gathering practices and the political role of the medieval Church. His PhD was entitled ‘The Setting and Practice of Open-air Judicial Assemblies in Medieval Scotland’, which led to his role as Principal Investigator of field investigation projects at the royal centre and medieval inauguration site at Scone in Perthshire, Scotland (2005–2011). He currently works as a freelance independent researcher and archaeologist.

READ MORE:

He has worked in connection with the project: Debating the Thing in the North: the Assembly Project.

The post The Royal Complex of Scone from the 10th century appeared first on Medieval Histories.

Scone is best known for the Stone of Scone, also known as the Stone of Destiny or the Stone of Coronation. Less well known is that Scone was the primary ceremonial and legislative gathering place in Scotland. Recently, the results from extensive archaeological excavations were published.

The Stone of Scone is an oblong, red sandstone used as the Scottish coronation stone. Famously taken by Edward I of as part of the spoils of war and taken to Westminster. Although, the English promised to return the stone in 1328, it remained in England until 1950, when it was “stolen” from The Abbey and brought back to Scotland. Retrieved by the British Authorities, it was not until 1996 that the stone was formally returned to Scotland as a gesture of conciliation. It now resides at the castle in Edinburgh until the next British coronation. Whether or not this Stone of Scone is the original has been disputed for centuries. More interesting though, it seems, is to investigate the original setting of the stone at the centre of the ancient ceremonial assembly ground at Scone and compare the site with other similar assembly grounds.

The Royal Complex at Scone

Scone’s role as the premier site for royal investiture and legislative assemblies is well known. The earliest trusted record dates to AD 906, while the last state occasion took place in 1651.

At the centre of the complex is the Moothill Mound, the site of an Augustinian Abbey founded by Alexander I in c. 1120. The mound measures 90 x 64 metres and rises two metres above ground. It is located inside the Abbey grounds with the ruined church to the south. This measured c. 77 metres and was impressive enough to be used for the actual medieval unction and coronation ceremonies of kings and queens.

Moothill, itself, was ditched. Radiocarbon dates from charcoal fragments found in the ditch dates the site to the 10^thto 12^thcenturies, thus generally confirming the written evidence, from the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba’ (dated to the 10^thcentury.) As excavations in the mound itself has not been carried out the exact date cannot be fixed, but the possibility exists that the written record and the construction of the mound and the ditch surrounding it can be dated to c. AD 1000. “Whether in the tenth or eleventh century, the creation and augmentation of a monumental platform for high ceremonial and legislative assemblies was implicated in elite political strategies to elevate Scone as a royal centre”, writes O’Grady, who continues to describe how the place was used for legislative assemblies until the 15^thcentury, when they were moved to more secure locations in the royal strongholds of Perth, Stirling, and Edinburgh.

The European Context

After the foundation of the Abbey in the 12^thcentury, the meeting ground at Scone came to look much like the traditional idea of an “Aula Regia”, a space consisting of a royal chapel, a space dedicated to processions, and a proper meeting ground – whether inside a hall or outside on a mound. The O’Grady mentions similar places at Cordoba, Aachen, Westminster, Prague, Gamla Uppsala, Nidaros in Norway and Lund in Sweden. Others worthwhile exploring in detail would be Paderborn, the Saxon twin of Aachen, the somewhat later Goslar, and Jelling, with the last two dated to approximately to the same timeframe as the complex at Scone (the 10^thand early 11^thcentury).

Whether or not a church was erected at Scone at the beginning of the 10^thcentury cannot be known without further excavations. It seems likely, though, that familiarity with the model as it derived from Trier via Aachen, was widespread in the 10^thcentury and onwards, and that it likely inspired the construction of the assembly site at Scone.

SOURCE:

Accumulating Kingship: the archaeology of elite assembly in medieval Scotland
By Oliver J. T. O’Grady
In: World Archaeology
Published online: 12 Jul 2018

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Oliver J. T. O’Grady is a landscape archaeologist with expertise in the archaeology and history of medieval north-west Europe. His research focuses are the interdisciplinary study of medieval landscapes and elite central places, the material remains of medieval gathering practices and the political role of the medieval Church. His PhD was entitled ‘The Setting and Practice of Open-air Judicial Assemblies in Medieval Scotland’, which led to his role as Principal Investigator of field investigation projects at the royal centre and medieval inauguration site at Scone in Perthshire, Scotland (2005–2011). He currently works as a freelance independent researcher and archaeologist.

READ MORE:

He has worked in connection with the project: Debating the Thing in the North: the Assembly Project.

The post appeared first on Medieval Histories.

Recently the human remains from 41 graves from six early medieval cemeteries in Southern Bavaria yielded genomic data showing that while men generally had ancestry resembling northern or central Europeans, the women exhibited a very high genetic heterogeneity.

The early medieval burial grounds around Altenerding are justly famous for their plague victims, whose aDNA revealed the genetic imprint of the Justinian Plague as being of the same kind as the Black Death. The archaeological excavations have uncovered a multitude of detailed information about their daily life as well as burial customs. Now recent studies of their aDNA have added to this profile helping us to know about the ancestry of these people and the complex demographic processes, which made up the populace of some of the migratory movements of the 5^thand 6^thcentury.

The first mention of the Baiuvarii – present-day Bavarians – is credited to the historian Jordanes, who wrote about them in his book Getica in 551. Settled in the present-day upper and lower Bavaria, it has traditionally been argued that these Baiuvarii were composed of a mixture of the resident provincial Roman population plus immigrants from north-eastern Bavaria and Bohemia as well as their descendants (p. 151).

The new studies of the aDNA of some of these people show that the picture is much more complex.

First of all the study of the genomic data documents that people – apart from two females from Greek or Anatolian descent – predominantly exhibited a northern or central European ancestry, more precisely located in present-day northern France, the Netherlands, and Northern Germany. No traces were found of southwestern European DNA. Thus the authors conclude that the genetic profile of the population argue against any kind of significant admixture between the local migrants from the north and the Roman militia.

Further, one of the features of some of the skeletons in the five locations studied, is their elongated skulls, artificially created during early childhood. In the Bavarian sample these skulls belonged exclusively to females and could be detected in 14 individuals.

The genetics analysis showed that the individuals with these skulls presented an admixture of genetic ancestry found in southern to southeastern European countries. One woman even showed East-Asian ancestry

One of the most striking results of this study is the genetic difference between Early Medieval individuals with or without elongated skull, writes the group of scientists. While both females and males without this artificially induced deformity exhibited a common ancestry of northwestern and central European descent, the females with elongated skulls were genetically much more diverse. It thus looks as if local Bavarians did not artificially deform the heads of their children as has been suggested elsewhere. Such females likely migrated from southeastern Europe, witnessing to a system of exogamic exchanges of females between Baiuvarii and the steppe people (the Huns, Samatians and Avars). However the study suggests that this explanation does not cover the genetic findings.

These females, however, were obviously integrated into the local communities as their assemblies of grave goods showed a cultural mixture of both worlds. “This not only indicates a potentially significant level of integration of these women, but also cautions against inferring migration from material culture”, they write. (p. 3497)

The authors conclude that the genomic analysis of the type carried out on the 41 individuals in this sample, demonstrate the need for more micro-analyses of the same type. Such studies are essential to “better understand the complex patterns of migration, admixture, population structure, growth, and selection during more recent times”, they write.

FEATURED PHOTO:

Females buried at Altenerding with elongated skulls. © State collection for Anthropology and Paleoanatomy Munich, Germany

NOTES:

The Baiuvarii and Thuringi: An Ethnographic Perspective
Ed. by Janine Fries-Knoblach, Heiko Steuer and John Hines
Boydell & Brewer 2014, p. 151)

SOURCE:

Population genomic analysis of elongated skulls reveals extensive female-biased immigration in Early Medieval Bavaria
By Krishna R. Veeramah, Andreas Rott, Melanie Groß, Lucy van Dorp, Saioa López, Karola Kirsanow, Christian Sell, Jens Blöcher, Daniel Wegmann, Vivian Link, Zuzana Hofmanová, Joris Peters, Bernd Trautmann, Anja Gairhos, Jochen Haberstroh, Bernd Päffgen, Garrett Hellenthal, Brigitte Haas-Gebhard, Michaela Harbeck, and Joachim Burger. Edited by Eske Willerslev, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark, and approved January 30, 2018 (received for review November 21, 2017)
IN: PNAS March 27, 2018. 115 (13) 3494-3499; published ahead of print March 12, 2018.

READ MORE:

Altenerding in Oberbayern. Struktur des frühmittelalterlichen Gräberfeldes und Ethnogenese der Bajuwaren.
Ed. by Hans Losert and Andrej Pleterski
Berlin, Bamberg, Ljubljana 2003

The post Genetic Perspective on the Bavarians from the Migration period appeared first on Medieval Histories.