What is kinship trouble? When and where did it emerge? Why does it matter and how can we overcome it? These questions guide our discussion of kinship trouble, a term meant to capture the difficulties in reconstructing ancient kin relations, but also an attempt to resolve them through interdisciplinary collaboration and ethically adequate approaches. Motivated by the importance of crossing disciplinary boundaries and the urgency of working together to understand human diversity in the past and present, we reconsider kinship not only as a biological or genetic but also as a social phenomenon for the study of societies through archaeogenetic, archaeological, and socio-cultural anthropological approaches. As to the question of how kinship trouble could be overcome, we propose making more ‘oddkin’ (sensu Haraway) to bring disciplines into the conversation and foster unexpected collaborations around three themes: ethical collaboration, the integration of biological and social approaches, and kinship studies as acts of care and (non)mutuality of being.

In recent years, palaeogenomics has significantly advanced our understanding of human population history and evolution. Emerging studies now employ ancient genomic data to explore biological relatedness in archaeological contexts, with a growing number of studies on the topic. These investigations probe, for instance, the role of biological kinship in burial organization and mortuary practices, shedding new light on the complexities of ancient and historical human societies. Our review surveys a few examples of these studies, scrutinizing the methods and interpretations of DNA-based kinship research. We discuss the overlap between biological relatedness and other forms of kinship, acknowledging the complexity of human relationships across time and cultures. Emphasizing interdisciplinary collaboration, we advocate for integrating theoretical frameworks from sociocultural anthropology, archaeology, and Indigenous studies into palaeogenomics for a more thorough understanding of kinship in past societies. Additionally, we offer guidance throughout for newcomers venturing into using ancient DNA to study relatedness, reviewing key methodological aspects involved in biological relatedness inference and addressing common misconceptions, potential pitfalls, and methodological limitations.

There has been much discussion of various lines of evidence—genetic, bioarchaeological, and cultural–phylogenetic—that indicate patrilineal and patrilocal kinship systems predominated in Neolithic to Bronze Age Europe. These patterns were unique to this time and place, however, and evidence from prior periods and from other regions outside of Europe suggest a broader diversity in kinship systems that was replaced over time. Moreover, practices such as cousin marriage might have emerged in distinct regions, influenced by subsistence strategies and particular lifeways. In considering this diversity, we propose that the patrilineal/patrilocal developments observed in Europe during the Neolithic and Bronze Age were a distinctive prehistoric process among livestock herders and agriculturalists who dispersed into this region. Patrilineal kinship spread with these dispersals, as it now appears that matriliny was practised at Neolithic Çatalhöyük and in Iron Age Britain, for example. In this context, we can argue for different kinship systems in continental Europe before, during and after the Neolithic.

Biological determinism continues to shape how kinship is defined, from research to repatriation proceedings. This privileging of biological relatedness reflects and reinforces dominant ‘Western’ frameworks of kinship, often sidelining culturally-specific, Indigenous, and community-centered understandings of family and social belonging. Advances in archaeogenomic technologies today offer unprecedented insight into past human societies, and these advances have the potential to forge new, multivocal, and inclusive approaches to kinship. However, the application of ancient DNA risks reproducing power imbalances and epistemic hierarchies when genetic connections are assumed to be the primary or sole measure of social ties. This paper examines the conceptual and ethical implications of privileging DNA as a measure of kinship, emphasizing how such practices can obscure complex social realities, undermine self-determination, and reify narrow and essentialist understandings of identity. We call for critical reflection about the agents and motivations of archaeogenomics research, on the role of genetics in defining relationships and urge that multiple knowledge systems be considered in studies of kinship, both past and present.

This study investigates trends in the conceptualization, methods and analysis of kinship throughout the corpus of bioarchaeological research from the pre-Hispanic Andes in recent years (since 2000). Building on a summary of key shifts in archaeogenetics and definitions of foundational concepts like ayllu social organization and relationship kinship in the Indigenous Americas, the study carries out bibliometric analysis of four methods-based search strings. The resulting corpus (N=25 publications) is analysed for word frequency and correlation to understand how kinship analysis has changed through time, across cultures and contexts and according to methods used within bioarchaeology. Results show that explicit testing of kinship-related hypotheses has remained somewhat steady across aDNA, biodistance, cranial vault modification (CVM) and isotopic studies—especially for foundational bioarchaeology journals—and may be experiencing a resurgence. However, household and community levels of kinship were often excluded from study conceptualization and research questions. Results suggest isotopic analysis can augment archaeogenetic and morphometric approaches to understanding how common geography and substance consumption constitute kin groups. Collaborative, multi-correlate databases of archaeological individuals are proposed to advance kinship studies in Andean bioarchaeology.

This article draws on queer and feminist social anthropological epistemologies in order to sketch out a methodological framework for the interpretation of archaeological data from funerary contexts. Funerary assemblages have ongoing significance in archaeological models of identity and social structure, including one’s status, gender, cosmological beliefs, etc. Biomolecular analyses of human remains are a major source of data about the past and are increasingly used to reconstruct past social structures, especially where there is evidence of biological connection between individuals at a single funerary site. However, archaeological interpretation of these sites is complicated by their origin in social interactions, belief structures, and sometimes extended funerary rites, which themselves may have been adapted for a range of ritual, political and interpersonal needs. Here, we consider the funerary sphere as a site of ‘kin-work’, a concept from feminist anthropology that centres the everyday, habitual, and often overlooked material efforts of sustaining inter- and intra-generational familial relations. We argue that kinning practices form a key part of burial rites as the dead person or persons’ relationships are reconsidered, renegotiated, transformed, or manipulated. The goal is to develop a model of kin relations within funerary contexts in order to contribute to a more nuanced archaeology of social practice that complements emerging discussions of family structure, kinship and relatedness.

Kinship in archaeology has often been understood through a narrow biological lens, privileging genetic relatedness and the nuclear family as the primary unit of social organization. Yet anthropological and ethnographic studies demonstrate that care and child-rearing are widely shared practices that extend beyond parents, involving kin and non-kin alike. This article explores how such forms of cooperative childcare, particularly alloparenting, can be recognized in prehistoric burial contexts. By integrating archaeological, genetic, isotopic and osteological evidence, it argues for a broader interpretation of adult–child co-burials, moving beyond the assumption of direct biological parenthood. A series of Iberian case studies illustrates both the potential and the challenges of detecting fostering, non-parental care and the social significance of children in mortuary practices. Finally, the article introduces the SKIN: Social Kinship and Cooperative Care project, which applies a multi-disciplinary framework to investigate how women and children buried together in Iberia’s later prehistory reveal the diversity of social bonds that shaped communities.

Houses and unilineal descent groups have been treated as different types of social phenomena in socio-cultural anthropology, and as borrowed for analysis of households and settlements in archaeology. This paper contends that houses and lineages, especially those configured by Crow–Omaha kinship terminologies, are better considered as perspectival variants, reflecting differences that are fundamentally synchronic versus diachronic. Crow–Omaha systems and house societies exhibit signal similarities, occupying an intermediate status between kin-based and class-based formations, and evidently derive in an evolutionary sense from prior ‘Iroquois’ or ‘Dravidian’ forms. Setting out the terms in which kinship systems should be considered if they are to serve as useful explanatory analogues for archaeological analysis, the paper then proceeds to examine Lévi-Strauss’s original inspiration for the ‘house’, i.e. societies of the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America. It is no coincidence, the present paper contends, that Kwakwa̲ka̲’wakw, the archetypal house society is situated adjacent to a Crow-matrilineal series of communities that share a great deal in common with it culturally, as a result of centuries of exchange. In short, the house needs to re-attend to kinship structures, as descent groups need to be reconnected with exchange structures and alliance processes earlier elaborated by Lévi-Strauss.

This paper examines the phenomenon of posthumous kinship. In 1951, E.E. Evans-Pritchard introduced us to the possibility that a ghost could be defined as the legal father or mother of a child. Since the time of his writing, this once seemingly ‘exotic’ cultural practice has been brought ‘home’ to Western audiences through the clinical practice of harvesting gametes of recently (or soon to be) deceased individuals for reproductive purposes. Through an examination of several cases in which the dead have been made to ‘father’ or ‘mother’ a child, this paper explores the social and political ramifications of posthumous kinship including what it reveals about shifting Euro-American understandings concerning biological properties (and property), subjectivity, embodiment and the contested boundary between life and death.

Kinship studies recently have been going through a new wave of attraction in archaeogenetics and archaeology. Interdisciplinary cooperation remains an important challenge in these endeavours. Any research that requires interdisciplinary efforts will lead to reductive and potentially misleading conclusions if that cooperation is restricted to a range that is too narrow. The consequences usually are inadequate research results and insufficient ranges of interpretation. Moreover, such methodologically limited inquiries also may entail ethical concerns. Some of this is also valid for kinship analyses, in the study of the deep past as well as for contemporary communities. The present article examines the recently presented case of (‘Pannonian’) Avar excavations to demonstrate how archaeogenetic and archaeological interpretations may tend to ignore socio-cultural complexities. By arguing for the inclusion of socio-cultural anthropology in professional interdisciplinary kinship analyses of the deep past, concepts such as polygyny, levirate, ghost marriage and the notion of ‘female exogamy’ are examined for the case under scrutiny. The article illustrates how certain kinship practices—often misinterpreted in solely genetic terms or entirely ignored—can be understood as ethnographically grounded while also having a cross-cultural meaning suitable for comparison that is indispensable for the study of kinship in any historical period.

This commentary returns to the initial motivation for the 2000 volume Beyond Kinship, which was to create an intersection between ethnographic approaches to kinship and archaeological ones through the overlap constituted by materiality and practice. From the vantage point of that project, the current collection of papers adds important additional material bases for exploring kinship derived from archaeogenetic investigations. It is significant that the contributors express shared commitments to non-reductive use of new genetic data, seeking to avoid static and essentializing approaches that would privilege a biological domain. Equally important is the commitment of the participants to understanding kinship as work, making kin, not simply recognizing kin. In this sense, it exemplifies the rhetorical move ‘beyond kinship’ in the 2000 volume. By adopting a perspective from queer theory, the volume’s push to recognize a ‘kinship trouble’ parallel to Judith Butler’s ‘gender trouble’ invites consideration of making kin as a process of emergence of belonging. This begins to fulfil an ethical burden that anthropology has, as the discipline that claims kinship, to understand the intimacy of the kind of knowledges we produce, and to ensure they are so critically grounded that they can no longer be used against people’s interests.

In this commentary, I approach ‘kinship trouble’ as a cultural and medical anthropologist with two decades of ethnographic and collaborative engagement with genetics, and as someone deeply committed to and interested in interdisciplinary collaboration. From this perspective, the collection’s significance is its focus on the emergent encounter between two very different fields—new kinship studies and palaeogenetics—both of which intersect with archaeology. Combining the intellectual explosion of new kinship studies with the data explosion of palaeogenetics is an enticing premise. What can happen, kinship trouble asks us, if the creativity that characterizes the new kinship studies could be married with the rich new layers of genomic information that have sedimented archaeological scholarship? And what could be lost if this opportunity is squandered? The contributions to this collection read archaeological and palaeogenetic evidence against the grain to reveal active kin-making practices that often disrupt presentist, ethnocentric and heterosexist assumptions. These vibrant interpretations of relatedness provide many ‘carrots’ to entice anthropologists, archaeologists and palaeogeneticists to become ‘oddkin’ and to ‘lean in’ to kinship trouble.

This ‘afterword’ offers a critical reflection on the theme of ‘kinship trouble’ which runs through the papers in this special collection. Central to all of them are the questions of what it takes for individuals to be ‘biologically’ related, of what—if anything—this has to do with genetic connection, and of whether anything can be deduced about the kinship of individuals from the prehistoric past by way of the biomolecular analysis of their remains. It is shown that much of the trouble with kinship comes from the confusion between two understandings of the gene: as an information-bearing particle in a system of inheritance, and as a segment of the molecular genome. Starting from one or the other gives rise to markedly different accounts of kinship, founded respectively on inheritance and begetting. This also underpins the different ways we understand connections with other-than-human kin, whether in terms of evolutionary phylogenesis or ecologies of coexistence. The latter, better regarded as ‘kinning’ than ‘kinship’, lies not in a mix of genetic and cultural inheritance, but in the milieu of an intergenerational life process.