Archaeology and the Genetic Revolution in European Prehistory

Abstract

Kristian Kristiansen is certainly one of the leading scholars in European archaeology. Anyone who studies the third and second millennium BCE will already have read some of his publications. His publication list is breath-taking, and if you look at the immense number of total views on Academia, actually every archaeologist in the world must have already looked at least one article by him. Kristiansen is important, influential and opinionforming. His work can only be admired. But that is precisely why it is important to look closely here. Kristiansen’s textual mass production has churned out a book that bundles many of his central themes of the last few years and puts them into an overall outline. As he explains in his acknowledgements, the text was written ‘to meet the theoretical and methodological challenge raised by the third science revolution and its implications for how to study and interpret European prehistory’ (p. 89). So, the objective is maximally large. Since Kristiansen’s book consists of a series of outtakes from earlier works or works in print, nothing is really new – in the end, no one can constantly reinvent himor herself, certainly not with such a publishing output. But the book provides a good overview of Kristiansen’s worldview and his approach to the past. It is hard to deny that archaeogenetics is a powerful game changer in the study of prehistoric societies. Migration and kinship studies have been taken to a new level. For Kristiansen, genetics – and with it other molecular biological approaches – is triggering a scientific revolution in archaeology. Since he calls this the third, after the classification inspired by geology, botany and zoology and the access to absolute time made possible by the 14C method, archaeology has thus far been poor in revolutions. And revolutions seem to be triggered only from outside the discipline. The many shifts in perspective and paradigms that archaeology has undergone in the same period do not seem to have had an equal influence. One could also reflect on why the discipline cannot seem to renew itself on its own. Archaeogenetics has already experienced its breakthrough, but according to Kristiansen it is still far from the phase of steady implementation. The differences between genetics and archaeology pose great challenges for interdisciplinary cooperation. Kristiansen complains about the criticism of earlier publications as unjustified. The criticised striking statements about extensive population changes, the spread of the Indo-Europeans and their language, which are not covered by the actual results of the study, he appeases with the fact that in the Supplementary Information these statements were formulated in a much more deliberate, cautious way. He also rejects accusations of implicit racist tendencies in genetic research. But here Kristiansen makes it too simple: discourse in science is primarily conducted via scientific publications. It is the duty of researchers to argue cleanly here. If the Supplementary Information does not convey the results of the study in the desirable clarity, then the results of the study should be formulated as such in the main text. If Jones and Bösl (2021) are right that genetics is driven by the quest for attention, celebrity and impact, then this should be taken very seriously. And Kristiansen’s discussion is also under-complex with regard to the accusations of racism. No one accuses geneticists of supremacist attitudes. The literature he cites is quite nuanced here. In xenophobic and racist discourses of right-wing groups, the concept of genetic ancestry has found fertile ground. It is genetics who are partly to blame for this since they open the door to problematic identity