Abstract
Establishing the age at which prehistoric individuals move away from their childhood residential location holds crucial information about the socio dynamics and mobility patterns in ancient societies. We present a novel combination of strontium isotope analyses performed on the over 3000 year old “Skrydstrup Woman” from Denmark, for whom we compiled a highly detailed month-scale model of her migration timeline. When combined with physical anthropological analyses this timeline can be related to the chronological age at which the residential location changed. We conducted a series of high-resolution strontium isotope analyses of hard and soft human tissues and combined these with anthropological investigations including CT-scanning and 3D visualizations. The Skrydstrup Woman lived during a pan-European period characterized by technical innovation and great social transformations stimulated by long-distance connections; consequently she represents an important part of both Danish and European prehistory. Our multidisciplinary study involves complementary biochemical, biomolecular and microscopy analyses of her scalp hair. Our results reveal that the Skrydstrup Woman was between 17–18 years old when she died, and that she moved from her place of origin -outside present day Denmark- to the Skrydstrup area in Denmark 47 to 42 months before she died. Hence, she was between 13 to 14 years old when she migrated to and resided in the area around Skrydstrup for the rest of her life. From an archaeological standpoint, this one-time and one-way movement of an elite female during the possible “age of marriageability” might suggest that she migrated with the aim of establishing an alliance between chiefdoms. Consequently, this detailed multidisciplinary investigation provides a novel tool to reconstruct high resolution chronology of individual mobility with the perspective of studying complex patterns of social and economic interaction in prehistory.
Highlights
Ancient human migration studies are currently witnessing a knowledge-revolution brought about mainly by contributions from ancient DNA and strontium isotope analyses [1]
When examined from an archaeological standpoint, this one-time movement of the Skrydstrup Woman, an elite female in her “age of marriageability”, might suggest that she migrated with the aim of establishing an alliance between chiefdoms rather than for trade purposes
We present a novel set of investigations, in which high-resolution strontium isotope analyses of different human tissues of a single individual are combined with physical anthropological analyses
Summary
Ancient human migration studies are currently witnessing a knowledge-revolution brought about mainly by contributions from ancient DNA (aDNA) and strontium isotope analyses [1]. While DNA analyses have provided this new evidence for migrations on a larger chronological and geographical scale, strontium isotope analyses have yielded information on the migration of single individuals allowing for the identification of migrants at specific sites [4,5,6,7,8]. New methodological developments in strontium isotope analyses based on soft human tissues such as scalp hair and fingernails have allowed scientists to trace the mobility of single individuals in unprecedented detail, providing the possibility of identifying travel and movement on a month-to-month scale [5,9]. The Skrydstrup Woman was unearthed in 1935 from a burial mound in southern Denmark (Figs 1 and 2, and S1 Text) [10] In addition to those anthropological and strontium isotope analyses, we conducted a series of scientific analyses on her scalp hair, including biomolecular, light stable isotope and microscopic analyses
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