Opening Up the Family Tree: Promoting More Diverse and Inclusive Studies of Family, Kinship, and Relatedness in Bioarchaeology

Abstract

Family is a fundamental organizing aspect of human society, but family organization is understudied within bioarchaeology. Historically, bioarchaeological research has focused on kinship analysis, the reconstruction of biological relationships within archaeological contexts. Kinship analysis has generated important insights into past community organization and cultural practices, but it is rooted in biologistic and heteronormative values. As a result, traditional kinship research inadvertently emphasizes biological relatedness and nuclear family organization and limits our ability to recognize different ways of forming families. In this chapter, I propose an alternative framework that facilitates a more inclusive approach to family organization in the past. By approaching family as a multiscalar form of social identity, integrating multiple lines of bioarchaeological data, and using analytical methods that do not prioritize biological data, bioarchaeological family research can potentially identify diverse forms of family organization in archaeological contexts. Bioarchaeologists can leverage the knowledge produced using this framework to contribute to public discussions of “the family,” destabilize contemporary common sense conceptions of kinship rooted in the perceived naturalness of the nuclear family, and promote more inclusive conceptions of relatedness and ways of forming families.