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Globalization, social mobility or inequality are modern terms that describe very old realities. More than 4,000 years ago the families of the big owners accumulated and transmitted the wealth from generation to generation. This upper class lived with people who owned very little, sometimes within the same house. This is reflected in a study published Thursday in the journal Science, a collaboration between German archaeologists and geneticists that offers the most accurate reconstruction of the social structure in the Bronze Age , thanks to the analysis of bone remains found in the Lech Valley , near Augsburg.
Genetics, combined with the study of the objects with which they were buried, has served to identify the place that these people occupied in society during their lifetime. Specifically, scientists have discovered cemeteries in which families of a high social status rest, in which they have found biologically related men and upper class women who were not of local origin. Most likely, they will spoil the landowners. "These women grew very far from the region, possibly hundreds of kilometers away," explains Alissa Mittnik, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute and co-author of the study.
The geographic mobility of these women could have played a decisive role in the transfer of knowledge and culture throughout this period. "The trade of objects and raw materials, as well as knowledge of metal working techniques, required the maintenance of large commercial networks, so we assume that these women played a role in this regard, although we can only speculate on what this it implied exactly, "notes Mittnik. "Maybe they could have taken the education they received in their youth to the valley of Lech."
This custom of marital unions with other regions - called patrilocal by anthropologists - was not a temporary phenomenon, but persisted over a period of 800 years during the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age . However, their burials are the same as those of the native population, indicating that they were integrated into the local community. "They were buried with many bronze objects, a sign of high social status, but some of those objects also show stylistic links with contemporary groups from nearby regions, the Czech Republic and central Germany."
Servants or slaves
But, in addition, in the same deposits, there was also an important number of other individuals of local origin, clearly poorer, who rest in small graves found in individual rooms . The remains do not allow researchers to establish whether they were servants or slaves, but the analysis of the few objects with which they were buried reflects a significant inequality with respect to upper-class families. The authors stress that this class structure was maintained, at least, for seven centuries. "Wealth was related to biological kinship or foreign origin; the family nucleus transmitted its property and status over generations," summarizes Philipp Stockhammer, a professor of prehistoric archeology at the University of Munich. "And in all the farms we also find people of local origin poorly equipped."
This circumstance proves that there was a clear division within the homes, similar to what we know in classical Greece and Rome, with an upper class attended by slaves or servants. "Although these people in the Lech Valley lived more than 1,500 years before the Roman era" Stockhammer qualifies. "I think we are beginning to understand how inequalities within a home are a much broader phenomenon and go back much more in time than we had thought."
Origins of inequality
In Central Europe, the Bronze Age frames the period between 2200 and 800 BC . A time in which the combination of technological advances drives large-scale changes: in particular the wheel, the domestication of the horse and the appearance of bronze. The raw materials needed to manufacture this alloy - copper and tin - became valuable goods that were transported over hundreds or thousands of kilometers creating a first globalization based on these commercial networks.
Previous studies had already pointed out that the first hierarchical structures evolve in this period , expanding differences in property and wealth that will be maintained in a lasting manner. Previous work by archaeologists at the universities of Bristol, Cardiff and Oxford claimed that hereditary inequality seems to have begun more than 7,000 years ago, at the beginning of the Neolithic, largely with the custom of bequeathing land and livestock inheritance.
One of the great innovations that the work of German researchers now brings is the ability to reconstruct prehistoric family trees from four to five generations thanks to bone remains. Archaeologists were able to compare the degree of kinship, funerary goods and the location of the graves thanks to the generation of data of the entire genome from more than 100 skeletons. However, the authors point out that this reconstruction only includes the male lineage: the daughters left the farms when they reached adulthood, just as the mothers were always women who had come from far away lands.
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