Princeton | New York Team
Joint RESEARCH
IAS | SUNY
The IAS–Stony Brook team is responsible for the analysis of data from three areas within the wider HistoGenes project: The Western Balaton Region in the fifth-sixth century; The Little Hungarian Plain; and the region that includes today Slovenia. In addition, we are developing new tools for analysis of the project’s data.
I
Western Balaton Area
In the Western Balaton Region, we have analyzed 38 burials from the fifth-century cemeteries of Fonyód, Hács, and Balatonszemes and compared these with the sixth-century burials at nearby Szólád.
A summary of our preliminary results is available as a preprint at https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.09.26.509582v1.
II
Little Hungarian Plain
In the Little Hungarian Plain, we are analyzing data from the fourth to the eighth centuries from Győr-Széchenyi tér, Hegykő-Mező utca, Szeleste, Gyirmót-Homokdomb, Ménfőcsanak, Börcs-Nagydomb, and Ménfőcsanak-Bevásárlóközpont
III
Slovenia
The area of modern Slovenia provides an ideal area in which to follow the long-term transformation of a region from a Roman province to a Medieval polity.
We are analyzing data from fourteen sites in and around Celje, Ljubljana,and Vipavska dolina that date from the third to the tenth centuries and are observing dramatic changes in the genetic makeup of the region across this period.
IV
Identity by Descent
Much of our analysis uses tools developed in previous studies, including principal component analysis and supervised cluster analysis to recognized levels of genetic diversity and population structure within these communities as well as biological relatedness in order to establish pedigrees within sites. However, we are also pioneering a new approach to identify more deep biological relationships through the recognition of identical by decent (IBD) tracts of genetic material that can indicate how closely different communities were connected across space and time. We will be demonstrating the efficacy of this method in our planned publications.