Reconstruction of Residence Patterns Through Genetic Typing of Skeletal Remains of an Early Medieval Population

The study is carried out on a randomly drawn sample of 200 individuals from the early medieval graveyard at Weingarten, Germany, dating from the 5th-8th century A.D. This skeletal population comprises 800 individuals, who show variation of their social standing through characteristic sets of grave goods that display wealth and rank differentials. Several DNA typing approaches are applied to reconstruct residence patterns in this socially stratified population. For one, the simultaneous amplification of nine autosomal short tandem repeats (STRs) generates the genetic fingerprint that is unique to an individual. Furthermore, through the analysis of Y-chromosomal STRs individuals of the same paternal lineage can be identified, whereas sequencing analysis of the hypervariable region of the mitochondrial DNA can determine which members of a population belong to the same matrilineage. Comparisons between the social groups will show if differing variabilities can be detected for the analysed DNA sequences. In th...