In Critical Perspectives on Ancient DNA, we dive deep into these issues, interrogating the practices, communications, and broader consequences of archaeogenetics. The seven chapters in this book present a critical perspective on this research field, exploring how, rather than simply revealing all-encompassing objective truths, it not only reifies old categories of identity and belonging but also creates new ones. The chapters assess to what extent archaeogenetics has contributed to a new and better version of historical knowledge, and they scrutinize the validity of bold claims about finding the real answers to questions of prehistoric events and ancient people’s identities. Do these claims have any foundation, or are they, rather, reflections of an ambitious—but ultimately impossible—positivist effort to uncover historical truths by employing the methods of natural science?
The Study of DNA
DNA is a molecule, of which long strands—chromosomes—exist in the nucleus of human cells. Parts of the chromosomes (usually considered to be less than 2 percent in humans) contain coded instructions for the production of various proteins and thus influence the physical functions and appearance of the human body. These units are called genes. A human genome contains the chromosomes for an individual in their cell nuclei, as well as a separate, smaller body of maternally inherited DNA found in the mitochondria, the cell’s “powerhouses.” By extracting and analyzing DNA from the cell nucleus and the mitochondria, and comparing the DNA of different individuals, it is possible to detect close biological family relationships and estimate distant ones. It is also possible to diagnose some diseases (such as Huntington’s disease and sickle-cell anemia) and trace some physical characteristics (such as waxy ears).
The iconic helix shape of the DNA molecule was officially presented by Francis Crick and James Watson in the early 1950s, a time of postwar optimism, when science and technological innovation were seen as leading the way to a prosperous future.2 Crick and Watson became media celebrities, and DNA became publicly known as an objectively detectable code of life. It inspired widespread phantasms of DNA as a complete “blueprint” of an organism with the potential to bring the long-dead past back to real life, spicing up adventure fiction and archaeohorror films such as The Mummy.3 In the 1980s, when DNA profiling was developed for forensic science, DNA became widely known as hard evidence of individual identity, valid in a judicial sense. Altogether, this created a solid, popular confidence in DNA as a source of indisputable truth providing a complete map of an individual’s characteristics.
While it is easy to be seduced by the metaphor of DNA as a blueprint, this is not quite how genes works. As molecular anthropologist K. Ann Horsburgh puts it, “Blueprints share a one-to-one correspondence with the object they specify; they always produce the same results. This is certainly not the case with DNA.”4 In reality, the relation between DNA (the so-called genotype) and the actual outcome (the so-called phenotype) is much more complicated than suggested by the blueprint metaphor. Human identity and family relations are, moreover, defined by so many factors other than biology. Hence, there is little congruence between the great popular trust in DNA and what DNA can actually say in a scientific analysis—especially when it comes to aDNA. While this divergence between DNA as popular image and genetics as science is well known, it has rarely been brought into serious conversation by researchers working in the field. When it has, the focus has tended to be on the risks of false claims, which are said to diminish the public’s trust in science.5
In this volume, we offer a slightly different perspective on this problem. Rather than dismissing the inflated public trust in DNA as unimportant just because it may be false or trivial, we point to its great importance for archaeogenetics.6 In this vein, we recognize that knowledge about aDNA is not only created in science laboratories and at universities, but through complex meaning-making interactions between research and society at large. Throughout the volume, we maintain that the scientific discourse and practice of archaeogenetics have been formed in close, and continuous, interaction with popular imagination. Indeed, as Amade M’charek points out in her chapter in this book, archaeogenetics “invites a wide audience to project different kinds of aspirations, feelings, and vested ideas” on its subject. Popular phantasms and public expectations have played, and continue to play, prominent roles in the development of the field.
Ancient DNA, Archaeogenetics, and Archaeogenomics
Ancient DNA refers to the DNA of organic remains from the past. Since DNA molecules start to degrade as soon as the organism is dead—unless soft tissues are preserved as, for example, in the case of bog bodies or permafrost mummies—ancient DNA is in nearly every case more fragmentary than that of a living organism. Most attempts to extract and analyze aDNA are therefore ridden with problems of degradation. In analyses of ancient human DNA, there is also the risk of contamination from the abundance of DNA from living humans swirling around at archaeological excavations, in museums, and in the laboratory. For a long time, these problems seemed insurmountable, and it was not until the 1980s that the first studies of aDNA were published. In terms of knowledge structure and research questions, these studies built on earlier work in molecular anthropology, population genetics, and forensic science, but added the specific methodological challenges of working with degraded and potentially contaminated DNA, as well as questions and problems relating to archaeological and historical discourses.
The development of aDNA studies, or archaeogenetics, can be roughly divided into two phases. The first began in earnest in 1984, when scientists at a laboratory in Berkeley, California managed to sequence mitochondrial DNA from a stuffed quagga in a museum in Germany.7 Around the same time, biologists in Silicon Valley developed a new technology for replicating fragments of DNA from different types of samples in order to visualize genetic diversity. Geneticists had previously been forced to sequence particular strands of interest by hand, involving a heavy investment of time and money, but polymerase chain reaction (PCR) made it possible to amplify small fragments of genetic material and visualize them far more easily. By the beginning of the 1990s, scientists had successfully applied PCR to amplify aDNA fragments not only from preserved soft tissue, but also from dry bones and fossilized remains of ancient plants and insects.8
The field of human archaeogenetics—with which this book is primarily concerned—grew rapidly in the following years. As geneticists and molecular anthropologists turned from skin and mummies to more common ancient human remains in the form of bone and teeth, they could start addressing questions about genetic relations between tentative ancient population groups, such as the Pacific Islanders and Native Americans, as well as investigating prehistoric “celebrities” such as Ötzi, the 5,000-year-old man found in a melting glacier in the Tyrolean Alps in 1991.9 One particularly noted study during this period was a 1997 article in which geneticists in Germany presented the sequencing of mitochondrial DNA from the remains of an approximately 30,000-year-old Neanderthal individual. By demonstrating that the resulting sequence fell outside the variation of modern humans, the study indicated that Neanderthals went extinct without interbreeding with modern humans.10
In this first phase of archaeogenetics, the introduction of DNA to the toolkit of archaeological science also inspired discussions among archaeologists and molecular anthropologists regarding the methodological and epistemological challenges, and potential ethical issues, pertaining to this new line of research.11
The second phase of archaeogenetics came with the introduction of the technology known as next-generation sequencing.12 Developed in the first decade of the new millennium, this technology made it possible for scientists to sequence multiple small fragments of DNA in parallel, with bioinformatic technology piecing together the fragments by mapping “reads” to a reference genome. In practical terms, this meant that the whole breadth of a human genome could be sequenced in a single day, in contrast to the technology used in the 1990s, with which it could take over a year.13
The possibility of sequencing larger parts of ancient human genomes allowed archaeogenetics to develop into archaeogenomics.14 Published in 2010, the first genome-wide DNA studies of ancient humans included sequences from a 4,000-year-old individual from present-day Greenland and an archaic hominin individual from a Russian cave.15 The same year, a paper presenting the first sequencing of a Neanderthal genome showed that modern humans indeed have traces of DNA shared with Neanderthals in their genomes.16 This finding suggested that the two human subspecies, contrary to previous claims, not only lived at the same time but also interbred.
With next-generation sequencing, the number of sequenced samples from ancient human remains grew exponentially. While a handful of ancient genomes were sequenced in 2010, more than a hundred samples were sequenced every year between 2015 and 2018. By 2018, over 1,300 genome sequences had been produced from ancient human remains.17 Meanwhile, the publications on ancient human DNA—from scientific papers in Science and Nature to popular science books and journalistic reports—skyrocketed. As noted by scholars covering the development of archaeogenetics, the field has become a “hype” buttressed by a steady stream of interviews, television documentaries, TED talks, and newspaper profiles featuring the leading scientists in the discipline.18 According to philosopher of science Joyce Havstad, the unwavering media interest has turned archaeogenetics into a “sensational science” whose practitioners “can foreseeably expect to capture and sustain public interest … in a way that is likely to foster its development, and to amplify the publication and prestige of its results.”19 As Andreas Nyblom puts it in his contribution to this volume, archaeogenetics thrives in the media limelight.
The “aDNA Revolution”
The hype around archaeogenetics has not gone unnoticed by the scientists themselves. In the wake of next-generation sequencing and the steep publication curve of aDNA data and papers, researchers in the field have begun claiming that archaeogenetics constitutes a “revolution,” and that the application of new molecular technologies marks a “paradigm shift” in the history of archaeology and anthropology.20 The revolution trope has been reproduced not merely in academic settings but also in popular science, news media, and interviews with scientists involved in the field.21
While many have been eager to announce this “aDNA revolution,” however, it is worth noting that few have sought to clarify why this is a revolution and against what or whom it is directed. In his classic 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, historian of science Thomas Kuhn argues that a “scientific revolution” takes place when a discipline is confronted by a fundamental problem which threatens to devastate the entire scientific pursuit. With the establishment of a new “paradigm” designed to resolve the problem, Kuhn suggests, the discipline is saved, but at the expense of vast amounts of previously accepted knowledge, methodology, and terminology. As with a political revolution, Kuhn notes that the scientific revolution means that “the world itself changes.”22
A critical question, however, is how all of this applies to aDNA research. What is the problem that threatens to undermine archaeology and anthropology, and to which genetic analysis promises a solution? What is the new paradigm established by archaeogenetics, and in what way(s) has it fundamentally transformed archaeological or anthropological research? What previously established archaeological knowledge has been ground by the mills of next-generation sequencing? And against whom or what is the revolution staged?
Since none of the proponents of the “aDNA revolution” have addressed any of these questions, it seems reasonable to suggest that the term does not purport to represent a scientific revolution in the traditional Kuhnian sense of the word. Rather, the “aDNA revolution” seems to be a somewhat hyperbolic euphemism for the past years’ increasing number of sequenced ancient genomes and published scientific papers. Seen from this perspective, it is revealing that Harvard-based geneticist David Reich, who is perhaps the person most closely associated with the term “aDNA revolution,” has described his main contribution to archaeogenetics as “to make ancient DNA industrial—to build an American-style genomics factory.”23 As Reich boasts, his laboratory is “producing data so fast that the time lag between data production and publication is longer than the time it takes to double the data in the field.”24
The most striking feature of this kind of rhetoric is the focus on numbers: more samples, more data, more papers. For Reich and his fellow aDNA revolutionaries, the revolution does not primarily seem to concern the quality of scientific results, but the quantitative leap in numbers of resources (ancient human genomes, next-generation sequencing technology, big data) and products (databases, scientific papers, books, conferences). While it is of course true that archaeogenetics has experienced a boom in the number of samples and publications, however, it is not apparent that this boom itself constitutes a “revolution” of archaeological or anthropological knowledge. Indeed, one could go as far as K. Ann Horsburgh in her concluding commentary to this volume and say that “despite grandiose claims to the contrary, aDNA data have not, and will not, revolutionize reconstructions of the past.”
The Social Effects of Archaeogenetics
If empirical aDNA studies now abound, less attention has been paid to the cultural, social, and political aspects of archaeogenetics. The enthusiasm over technological advancements and the possibilities for cost-effective and hitherto unfeasible large-scale analyses has left little room for thorough critical inquiries into the wider effects of archaeogenetic research.25 For sure, in the past years we have seen a number of publications presenting recommendations and best practices for archaeogenetics, often calling for a more genuine engagement with descendant communities and improved “collaboration” between geneticists, archaeologists, and custodians of human remains.26 Moreover, several scientists in the field have published opinion pieces requesting a more cautious handling of ancient human remains and a greater sensitivity toward groups affected by archaeogenetic research.27 The basic intention of such texts—to facilitate a more ethically attuned and politically informed approach among scientists in the field—is certainly important. One hopes a better understanding of the interests of different stakeholders would engender more socially responsible practices.28
Since most of these publications have been written by researchers with stakes in the current standing and future development of the field, however, they rarely address more profound epistemological, cultural, and political issues related to archaeogenetics. What happens to our understanding when archaeology and historical inquiries into the past are married to genetic science? How does the research field relate to earlier traditions of categorizing human subjects according to biological differences, and in what ways can it not only challenge but activate and reify ideas of identity, race, and nationality? What kinds of cultural or historical narratives are generated by archaeogenetics, and what sorts of politics might such narratives give rise to? How does the entanglement of research laboratories, popular media and funding agencies shape the production of archaeogenetic knowledge? And how does the genetic concept of “ancestry” promoted by archaeogenetics relate to nonbiological, much older, ideas of what it means to be related?
These are the kind of questions addressed in Critical Perspectives on Ancient DNA. A collection of essays written by renowned scholars in Europe and the United States, this book offers the first comprehensive and in-depth inquiry into the practices and effects of archaeogenetics. As a multidisciplinary venture, it features anthropologists, archaeologists, geneticists, media historians, cultural studies scholars, and researchers in science and technology studies. Although their objects of study and methodological approaches differ, all contributions come together in an effort to critically investigate how archaeogenetics appears in relation to, and in interaction with, society at large.
The Chapters
In the first chapter in this book, “Gained in Translation: Interdisciplinary Challenges in Ancient DNA,” geneticists Charlotte Mulcare and Mélanie Pruvost delve into one of the most discussed problems of archaeogenetics, namely the interdisciplinary collaboration between geneticists and archaeologists. The challenges stemming from interdisciplinarity have been discussed many times before, and improved collaboration between geneticists and archaeologists has often been proposed as the silver bullet to solve most problems identified in the field. Arising from profound personal experiences of working in research teams with scholars from the humanities, Mulcare and Pruvost take a slightly different approach to the problem of interdisciplinarity. Rather than glossing over the differences between geneticists and archaeologists, they emphasize the importance of acknowledging the fundamental epistemological distinctions between genomic science and disciplines in the humanities. While disparities in technical knowledge and language may lead to misunderstanding and tension, Mulcare and Pruvost argue that there is good reason to avoid rushing to immediate consensus. Instead, they encourage researchers in the field of archaeogenetics to sit with conflicts, acknowledge differences, and engage in acts of translation.
In “Diagrams of Human Genetic Kinship and Diversity: From the Tree to the Mosaic and the Network?,” cultural studies scholars Marianne Sommer and Ruth Amstutz home in on technologies of knowledge production and visualization in archaeogenetic research. By describing and comparing software programs employed for the statistical analyses of populations, as well as visual representations used to illustrate the resultant data, Sommer and Amstutz show that what may seem to be neutral or data-derived technologies are in fact creative, generating fundamentally different research results depending on choices made by programmers and researchers. Following the use of common visual metaphors such as the tree and the mosaic from early thinking on human evolution to current research on aDNA, they demonstrate how “tree thinking” lingers in software programs and how this legacy potentially reproduces notions about discrete and “pure” populations. Despite the persistent emphasis on “admixture” and “gene flow” between populations, Sommer and Amstutz argue that archaeogenetic research which rests on such technologies risks reproducing a tradition of scientific racism, to which it is often said to be antithetical.
In the third chapter, “Past Pathogens and Precarious Futures,” science and technology studies scholar Venla Oikkonen explores cultural representations of ancient pathogens in permafrost. In the face of thawing due to climate change, there has been an increasing anxiety surrounding the capacity of pathogens to come alive and cause life-threatening infections. Focusing on two cases—the anthrax outbreak in Siberia 2016, and the reconstruction of the 1918 pandemic influenza virus—Oikkonen teases out the cultural imaginations and political narratives that take shape around these ancient pathogens. It is not only the past that matters when we deal with aDNA, she argues, but also the future. As Oikkonen’s two cases demonstrate, the relations between past, present, and future engendered by aDNA are ambivalent, as it both threatens and promises future life.
In the fourth chapter, “Twisting Strings: Hopi Ancestors and Ancient DNA,” Hopi tribe member Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa and anthropologist Chip Colwell discuss the problems inherent in uses of the concept of ancestry in archaeogenetics. Juxtaposing the strictly biological definition of ancestry in genetic science with Hopi notions of ancestry—conceived as a complex tapestry including humans and nonhumans, material objects, sites, and historical events—Koyiyumptewa and Colwell highlight the limitations of genetics in analyses of social identity. For archaeogeneticists to make valid contributions about cultures that do not share their specific concept of ancestry, they will have to adapt to other, extragenetical, definitions of what it means to be related. Reviewing the encounter between Indigenous tribes and archaeogenetics, the chapter points to an urgent need for a profound form of collaboration that does not merely aim to persuade Indigenous people to provide DNA samples for archaeogeneticists’ databases but is also open to negotiation of key concepts in archaeogenetics.
In “Whitewashing the Neanderthal: Doing Time with Ancient DNA,” anthropologist Amade M’charek scrutinizes cultural meaning making around concepts of race and identity by examining the influence of archaeogenetics on popular imaginations of the Neanderthal. If Neanderthals used to be depicted as brutal, dumb, dark-skinned, and apelike creatures, recent archaeogenomic research showing that Neanderthals interbred with Homo sapiens sapiens has engendered new representations of the Neanderthal as akin to the modern white European man, sporting business suits and talking on cell phones. This genre of representation, M’charek notes, inserts the Neanderthal as an object into a single story of origin where the European subject poses at the end as the crown of evolution. Weaving together personal memories and fieldnotes from her anthropological work in a leading lab working with Neanderthal DNA, along with close readings of museum displays and popular images of Neanderthals, she calls attention to the dangers of using aDNA to create a single story of evolution—in this case featuring a whitewashed version of the Neanderthal—with significance for racial politics in Europe and other parts of the world.
The relations between aDNA and popular culture are further explored in media historian Andreas Nyblom’s chapter “The Lagertha Complex: Archaeogenomics and the Viking Stage.” Presenting a close reading of the story about the “female Viking warrior”—a global media celebrity born out of a 2017 analysis of ancient human remains excavated from a Viking Age site in Sweden—Nyblom carefully unpacks the construction of individual identity based on aDNA. Contrary to the idea, promoted by the researchers and communicators, that the complex social identity of this individual from a thousand years ago was determined or “confirmed” by genomics, Nyblom demonstrates how the persona of the “female Viking warrior” was in fact constructed in convoluted interactions between archaeologists, academic journals, popular culture, news outlets, and social media. The main contribution of DNA to the story about the “female Viking warrior” was not analytical, Nyblom argues, but metaphorical. More than anything else, DNA was used as a sign of indisputable proof, stamped on creative interpretations inspired by archaeological findings, ancient mythology, and contemporary fiction.
In the final chapter, “Ancient DNA and the Politics of Ethnicity in Neo-Nationalist China,” anthropologist Magnus Fiskesjö offers a unique insight into the political potentials of aDNA. With historical overviews and current descriptions of the concept of ethnicity in national politics in China, Fiskesjö demonstrates how “the power of naming” in genetic mappings of past and present populations becomes complicit in political violations of human rights in contemporary China. He unfolds a deliberate political effort to establish the ethnic Han group as the deep-rooted origin of the Chinese nation, with subsequent programs of forced assimilation and erasure of targeted ethnic minorities. Official actors—from high-profile Chinese geneticists to president Xi Jinping himself—have emphasized the importance of DNA in this political pursuit. International researchers engaging in archaeogenetic research on Chinese material, Fiskesjö argues, often lack the cultural competence to understand the broader consequences of their research. As a warning example, the case of China points to the inherent potential of archaeogenetics to serve political ambitions with severe consequences.
In a concluding commentary arising from her own experiences of working with ancient DNA, molecular anthropologist K. Ann Horsburgh demonstrates how genetic data can become meaningful only by being articulated to other kinds of data, such as social and historical context. For the future of archaeogenetics, she makes a plea for broader interdisciplinary collaborations that can close the door to “molecular chauvinism,” in which genetic data are regarded as pure and privileged, and instead open up for a genuine appreciation of the epistemological complexity of aDNA studies. It will, Horsburgh implies, require a profound critical reflection that includes a halt in the hunt for flashy press releases, an engagement with Indigenous and descendant communities throughout the research processes, and a “recalibration of [the field’s] core mission and its core values.”
Critical Perspectives on Ancient DNA
As the title of this volume makes clear, these chapters offer critical perspectives on ancient DNA. But what exactly is the critique? What is meant by a genuinely critical perspective on archaeogenetics?
As noted above, the public perception of DNA has long tended to be characterized by the idea that our genes offer a source of absolute truth about who we “really” are. With aDNA, this idea has been projected onto the past. Researchers involved in archaeogenetic research have famously portrayed their enterprise as a “door to the past,” or a means for attaining indisputable evidence of what actually happened in prehistoric times.29 In a classic quote, Oxford geneticist and popular science personality Bryan Sykes has claimed that “our DNA does not fade like an ancient parchment; it does not rust in the ground like the sword of a warrior long dead.… It is the traveler from an antique land who lives within us all.”30
From this point of view, DNA is a passive artifact of the past, just waiting to be uncovered by cutting-edge scientists. It is not, however, an accurate description of archaeogenetics. The compositions of DNA molecules in our genomes are indeed inherited as more or less randomly recombined versions of the molecular compositions in the genomes of our ancestors. But the molecules are our own. And molecules do not speak. To make meaning out of what is fundamentally a meaningless substance, scientists and others who create and communicate stories about aDNA have to use words, names, labels, categories, statistical models, and images. These discursive components do not emerge naturally and neutrally out of the DNA molecules. Instead, they are the product of culturally informed techniques of meaning making. Not only do they hinge on specific historical contexts and existing discourses, they also have social and political effects that extend beyond the sphere of genetic science itself.31
The chapters in this volume can be seen as a critique of the notion of aDNA as a petrified historical source that can be neutrally and objectively unveiled by genetic analysis. Rather than approaching DNA in this way, the chapters investigate the meaning-making techniques of archaeogenetics and explore how these are anchored both in the history of the research field itself and in cultural discourses pertaining to other parts of society. Here, we find reason to recall some of the debates that surrounded the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) in the 1990s. Fronted by Stanford geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, and setting out to survey and map genetic relations between groups of people in order to reveal “who we are as a species and how we came to be,”32 the HGDP was caught between an outspoken antiracist ethos and allegations of biocolonialism, biopiracy, and racialist exploitation.33 After fierce debates that went on for years, the project was officially discontinued in 1997 when funding agents withdrew support. But the HGDP inspired new grand-scale endeavors with similar aims and ambitions, such as the Genographic and HapMap projects. Its legacy still lingers in current aDNA research—in terms of both methodology and ambition.34
In an influential study of the HGDP debate, sociologist Jenny Reardon argues that our understanding of the HGDP has been obscured by a flawed Enlightenment-based image of science as essentially pure and separate from politics.35 This figure of purity was at the heart of the idea that the HGDP would be an antidote to racism, just by providing scientific facts about complicated genetic relations. When critics pointed out that the principles of sampling and the structures of the analytical models used to sort out and “map” genetic diversity actually reinforced old and murky ideas of primitivity and essential identity, proponents of the HGDP struggled to take it in. Taking refuge in the idea of a pure science, they were adamant that their project could not be contributing to racism, because of its high-quality scientific foundation. Any dangerous or unethical effects of the project must, according to this mindset, be due to “misuse” or popular misunderstandings of science.
As Reardon and others have demonstrated with much clarity, however, this is not a sustainable understanding of scientific practice, which in reality is always entangled in the society that it is part of.36 In the words of science and technology studies scholar Kim TallBear, the molecular sequences that genetics draw on are not “simply uncovered in human genomes,” but “conceived in ways shaped by key historical events and influential narratives.”37 As a meaning-making practice, archaeogenetics does not only intersect with prevailing cultural discourses about history, identity, and belonging, as becomes clear in Amade M’charek’s chapter on the recent whitewashing of the Neanderthal. It also takes shape within prevailing power structures, such as those legacies of colonialism that inform the encounter between geneticists and Indigenous groups discussed in Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa and Chip Colwell’s chapter. Whatever social or political consequences archaeogenetics might have, these cannot be seen as the unfortunate result of a “misuse” of science, sloppy media accounts, or mistakes by bold and attention-seeking researchers. As the essays in this volume make clear, they ultimately stem from the science itself.
