From ias.edu:
The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) and its international partners have received a €10 million Synergy Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to fund a multidisciplinary study of more than 100 medieval cemeteries located across central and eastern Europe. The project, HistoGenes, will seek to understand the impact of migrations and mobility on the population of the Carpathian Basin from 400–900 CE, based on a comprehensive analysis of samples from 6,000 ancient burial sites. HistoGenes will, for the first time, unite historians, archaeologists, geneticists, anthropologists, and specialists in bioinformatics, isotope analysis, and other scientific methods in understanding this key period of European history.
The team’s four principal investigators, representing these various disciplines, are Patrick Geary (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA), Johannes Krause (Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany), Walter Pohl (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria), and Tivadar Vida (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary). In the U.S., the research team includes Professor Krishna Veeramah, a population geneticist from Stony Brook University. Geary and Veeramah had previously led a pilot study, published in Nature Communications in 2018, which sequenced the genomes of entire ancient cemeteries to examine the relationship between the genetic background of these communities and the archaeological material left behind.
For additional information, please contact Patrick Geary at geary@ias.edu
