Bioarchaeological analyses reveal long-lasting continuity at the periphery of the Late Antique Roman Empire.

The Basel-Waisenhaus burial community (Switzerland) has been traditionally interpreted as immigrated Alamans because of the location and dating of the burial ground - despite the typical late Roman funeral practices. To evaluate this hypothesis, multi-isotope and aDNA analyses were conducted on the eleven individuals buried there. The results show that the burial ground was occupied around AD 400 by people belonging largely to one family, whereas isotope and genetic records most probably point toward a regionally organized and indigenous, instead of an immigrated, community. This strengthens the recently advanced assumption that the withdrawal of the Upper Germanic-Rhaetian limes after the "Crisis of the Third Century AD" was not necessarily related to a replacement of the local population by immigrated Alamannic peoples, suggesting a long-lasting continuity of occupation at the Roman periphery at the Upper and High Rhine region.

Scales of transformations-Modelling settlement and land-use dynamics in late antique and early medieval Basel, Switzerland.

Multicomponent environmental models have increasingly found their way into archaeological research. Mostly, these models aim to understand human patterns as a result of past climatic and environmental conditions over long-term periods. However, major limitations are the low spatial and temporal resolution of the environmental data, and hence the rather static model output. Particular challenges are thus the number of chosen variables, the comprehensiveness of the explanatory parameters, and the integration of socio-cultural decision-making into the model. Here, we present a novel approach to generate annually resolved landcover variability using a broad variety of climatic, geological, hydrological, topographical, and dendrochronological data composites (Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI)). We analyze land-use and settlement capacity and vulnerability to estimate the socio-cultural transformation processes at Basel (Switzerland) during the Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Our results highlight the potential of the PDSI to predict local river run-off behavior from catchment analyses. The model enables to trace landcover as well as socio-cultural response to climatic variability and subsequent adaptation to trends in environmental vulnerability. This approach further helps to understand population dynamics in the periphery of the Roman administrative boundaries and to revise traditional archaeological narratives of large-scale population replacements during the so-called Migration Period.

Tracing mobility patterns through the 6th-5th millennia BC in the Carpathian Basin with strontium and oxygen stable isotope analyses.

The complexity of Neolithic population movements and their interpretation through material culture have been the subject of archaeological research for decades. One of the dominant narratives proposes that groups from the Starcevo-Körös-Cris complex spread from the central towards the northern Balkans in the Early Neolithic and eventually brought the Neolithic lifestyle into present-day Hungary. Broad geographical migrations were considered to shape the continuous expansion of Neolithic groups and individuals. However, recent archaeological research, aDNA, and isotope analyses challenged the synchronous appearance of specific material culture distributions and human movement dynamics through emphasizing communication networks and socio-cultural transformation processes. This paper seeks to retrace the complexity of Neolithic mobility patterns across Hungary by means of strontium and oxygen stable isotope analyses, which were performed on a total of 718 human dental enamel samples from 55 Neolithic sites spanning the period from the Starcevo to the Balaton-Lasinja culture in Transdanubia and from the Körös to the Tiszapolgár cultural groups on the Great Hungarian Plain (Alföld). This study presents the largest strontium and oxygen isotope sample size for the Neolithic Carpathian Basin and discusses human mobility patterns on various geographical scales and throughout archaeological cultures, chronological periods, and sex and gender categories in a multiproxy analysis. Based on our results, we discuss the main stages of the Neolithisation processes and particularly trace individual movement behaviour such as exogamy patterns within extensive social networks. Furthermore, this paper presents an innovative differentiation between mobility patterns on small, micro-regional, and supra-regional scales, which provides new insights into the complex organisation of Neolithic communities.