Kinship structures in the Avar Period 2. Family trees in the Kunpeszér cemetery

In 1982–84, Elvira H. Tóth unearthed at Kunpeszér–Felsőpeszéri út a burial place with twelve graves, arranged in loose clusters, dated to the first decades of the Avar Khaganate. Archaeogenetic analyses of the anthropological material resulted in reconstructing two family trees, one including three persons and the other comprising four. The gold and silver earrings, swords and belts with gold and silver fittings, and bows in the graves attest to a wealthy community of Inner Asian origin who participated in the military campaigns of the Early Avar Period. Similar burial places with a few small grave clusters are characteristic of the archaeological record of this period in the Great Hungarian Plain. Based on the small number of graves and the two family trees, the site was the burial place of a small community that used it for only a short period.
The same site also included a Late Avar cemetery, a part of which was also excavated. The individuals buried there have a European genetic background; they were not related to those interred in the Early Avar burial place.
Archaeogenetic methods today allow for mapping, besides close (first-, second-, or third-degree) kinship relationships, distant blood ties between people, making the kinship-based connection network visible within and between communities. The hundreds of genetic samples from Avar individuals outline a network that sheds new light on several important questions about society. First, it corroborates former hypotheses (formulated based on the structures of family trees), namely that while communities were structured along paternal descent, they were connected primarily through women. Second, it has revealed that regionality, i.e. geographic proximity, played a decisive role in the formation of communities: the kinship-based networks within the Danube–Tisza Interfluve and the Trans-Tisza Region are denser than between these regions. It can also be investigated how many people a single person had distant family relations with throughout their life – for example, the ‘khagan’ buried in the lonely grave has the most such connections of all the analysed Avar individuals, indicating that he was a member of an elite family with which others had a propensity to ally or marry.

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Distance connections in the central zone of the Carpathian Basin of the ‘khagan’ unearthed at Kunbábony. He was related to the communities of both Kunpeszér and Kunszállás