Overview
The study of kinship from archaeology has been fluctuating. At the end of the 20th century archaeologists were reluctant or skeptical about its relevance and viability. However, in recent decades it has gained prominence and today it is experiencing a sweet moment, although not without problems. Its recent impulse has been due to the methodological development of bioscience techniques (aDNA and isotope studies) and to the profound revision and updating of other inference strategies from household archaeology. All this has resulted in the public interest in kinship in the past, as well as an increasing funding of research programs and a rapidly growing scholarly literature. However, as a line of work in its infancy, the academic landscape is fraught with confusion and interpretive uncertainty. There are various ways of understanding kinship and assorted ways of approaching it from archaeology. The common identification of kinship as biological relatedness is only a restrictive and context-dependent way of understanding it, which may serve to comprehend our Western society, but is not directly applicable to any other. Archaeology must critically construct its own methods of inference and narratives about kinship as a social matter. It is therefore urgent to reclaim a social archaeology of kinship that collaborates yet is not subordinated to other sciences. This volume aims to contribute to this challenge. To this end, it compiles case-based essays elaborated by renowned international scholars (archaeologists and geneticists) in which inference methods and interpretative possibilities about kinship in the past are discussed. The volume’s scope is mainly focused on Iberia, although case-studies are drawn worldwide. Spain is a dynamic research hub belonging to a minority archaeological tradition, where varied theoretically informed and promising approaches to the subject are being undertaken and is therefore paradigmatic of current trends and prospects in the international scene.
Full Product Details
Author: Antonio Blanco-González ,
Eva Alarcón-García
Publisher: Sidestone Press
Imprint: Sidestone Press
ISBN: 9789464264043
ISBN 10: 9464264047
Pages: 242
Publication Date: 31 December 2025
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
College/higher education
,
Professional & Vocational
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming
Availability: In Print
Limited stock is available. It will be ordered for you and shipped pending supplier's limited stock.
Author Information
Antonio Blanco-González is a tenured senior lecturer in Prehistory working at the University of Salamanca (Spain). He has previously developed his research as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at Durham University (United Kingdom) and as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Valladolid (Spain). He has published numerous contributions in the most prestigious journals (Antiquity, Journal of World Prehistory, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, Oxford Journal of Archaeology, Journal of Social Archaeology, Quaternary Science Reviews, etc.) on later prehistoric Iberia and social archaeology applying multi-proxy strategies. He is the co-editor (with Prof. Tobias L. Kienlin) of Current Approaches to Tells in the Prehistoric Old World (Oxbow, 2020) and has been Principal Investigator (PI) of the MSCA4Ukraine project TRANSPONTIC and co-PI of the Spanish Ministry of Science-funded research project ARQPARENT on the archaeology of kinship in Central Iberia. Eva Alarcón-García is a tenured senior lecturer in Prehistory working at the University of Granada. She completed her postdoctoral studies at Durham University (United Kingdom). Her research is conducted within the framework of feminist archaeology; her interests revolve around the development of the archaeology of maintenance activities (recovery of spaces and women’s work in the past) and the visibility of girls and boys as protagonists in stories, paying special attention to learning and socialising processes within the framework of childhood archaeology. All her research focuses on the late prehistory of the Iberian Peninsula under four fundamental variables: time (daily life), space (domesticity), objects (artefacts and ecofacts) and subjects (people). Her ultimate goal is to contribute knowledge as well as reverse social and historical assessments with the intention of building a more human-centred scientific knowledge. She has been co-PI of the research project ARQPARENT.
