An infant girl buried in a Swedish churchyard roughly a thousand years ago was laid to rest among grown men in the section of the cemetery set aside for males, despite having no close biological tie to those beside her.
Archaeologists would once have read that placement as a sign of kinship, a father, an uncle, someone she belonged to by blood, but her DNA showed no such connection.
The discovery, published in Science Advances, comes from a genomic study led by researchers at Stockholm University that examines multiple burials across three sites in Sweden spanning the late Viking Age through the early medieval Christian period. Researchers turned to DNA because it's extremely difficult to tell a child's biological sex just by examining their bones, and Christian graves of the era rarely held jewelry or other items that might hint at it.
Most children sharing a grave with an adult, it turns out, weren't related to them at all.
“These burials appear to have been shaped by households, extended kin groups, or local communities, operating within Christian normative frameworks that may have constrained or overridden purely familial considerations,” Maja Krzewińska, lead author, said in a press release.
Read More: 5,500-Year-Old Stone Age Graves Reveal How Hunter-Gatherers Valued Family
Ancient DNA Shows Medieval Children Were Buried by Sex, Not Family
Västerhus church ruin
(Image Credit: Riksantikvarieämbetets arkiv – The church ruin of Västerhus, Frösö parish, Jämtland, Sweden)
The team analyzed 142 ancient genomes, including 68 children and 74 adults, from 50 multiple burials and 27 single burials across three Swedish sites: Fjälkinge, Sigtuna, and Västerhus. Adults and children sharing a grave were overwhelmingly the same sex, girls with women, boys with men.
That pattern echoes actual medieval law. One 12th-century Scandinavian legal code called for women to be buried north of the church and men to the south. The DNA shows that children, even infants, followed those same lines almost as strictly as adults did.
To find out whether people sharing a grave were close relatives, the team compared their DNA directly. They also measured overall genetic similarity among co-buried individuals and compared it with that of people buried separately in the same cemeteries.
If most shared graves held close family members, the people buried together should have been more genetically alike, but they were not. Only around 12 percent of the adequately tested multiple burials contained close biological relatives, such as a parent and child or siblings.
Not Every Burial Followed Medieval Gender Rules
Four infant girls, including the one buried among men, were interred on the side of the churchyard normally reserved for males, alongside adult men or, in one case, young boys. A fifth infant girl was buried with males beneath the southern wall of the church atrium. Researchers tested kinship for one of them and found only a distant biological link to the men beside her.
Something other than family, and something other than gender, occasionally decided where a person was laid to rest.
Family Ties Extended Across the Churchyard
Pilgrim shells found at the Västerhus cemetery
(Image Credit: Åhlin, Christer. Historiska museet/SHM, 2012 (CC BY 4.0)
The researchers also looked for more distant relatives, such as cousins and grandparents, by scanning shared DNA segments across the entire cemetery population, not just within individual graves. Those distant ties turned out to be common, but only a small fraction, about 6 percent, connected people who were actually buried together.
One woman buried at the Västerhus site shows how much these graves can still reveal. Her grave held one of only two scallop shells found in the entire cemetery, a symbol tied to a completed pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. She belonged to an extended, well-placed family buried close to the church, evidence of both mobility and elevated status in a community that otherwise left almost no personal belongings behind.
The graves did not preserve the names of the people buried there or explain the decisions made at their deaths. But altogether, their placement, possessions, and DNA show that medieval churchyards reflected a wider social order, one shaped by status, travel, religious rules, and relationships that cannot be reduced to a family tree.
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
- This article references information from a study published in Science Advances: Equal in death: Ancient genomic analysis of children’s early Christian burials
