Medieval Nubia was composed of three kingdoms located along the Middle Nile. Although biological distance (biodistance) research has demonstrated population continuity in this region, little is known about the population structure or social organization in any single era. The Medieval Period (550–1500 CE) was a particularly dynamic one in Nubia, since all three kingdoms converted to Christianity in the mid-sixth century CE, and neighboring polities converted to Islam a century later. The political ramifications of these conversions have been studied at a large scale, but little research has investigated the local processes that comprise social organization during this time. Minimal research has used contemporary populations to analyze regional, local, and family level social organization in Nubia. Biodistances were investigated through nonmetric traits of the skull in six cemeteries from three archaeologically defined sites in modern northern Sudan, using Mahalanobis D2 distance, among other statistical tests. The six cemeteries in this study are from Mis Island (three cemeteries), Kulubnarti (two cemeteries), and Gabati (one cemetery). Mis Island and Kulubnarti were part of the same kingdom (Makuria) from the seventh century on, while Gabati was part of the far Upper Nubian kingdom of Alwa.When cemeteries from the same sites are pooled, results show that the two more northerly sites were more closely related, while the third site, located in a different kingdom, was biologically distant. This suggests that political boundaries may have affected movement of individuals or families among rural villages. These results are highly, though insignificantly, correlated with a previously published three-site craniometric biodistance study of the same samples. When the relationships among all six cemeteries are considered, the two located at Kulubnarti are more distant from each other than expected. One Kulubnarti cemetery appears closely related to the three cemeteries at Mis Island, while the other is biologically distant to that cluster. These findings, along with recently acquired carbon dates, suggest that the two Kulubnarti cemeteries represent two contemporaneous neighboring groups that were relatively genetically isolated from one another and that experienced life, health, and disease quite differently. An attempt to contextualize these regional results with data from across the continent failed to provide meaningful results. The continental analysis integrated novel data with a publicly available global dataset. However, the biodistance analysis primarily demonstrates clustering of the samples by analyst, suggesting problems with inconsistent data collection methods.Biodistance was also studied in depth for Mis Island. This study is the first to include cemetery 3-J-18, which surrounded the Late Medieval (1100–1500 CE) church, in a bioarchaeological analysis of Mis Island. This sample is the most biologically heterogeneous of the Mis Island cemeteries, and preliminary spatial analysis suggests that all ages and sexes are represented in it. Compared to the closer-than-average relationship observed between the other two Mis Island cemeteries, cemetery 3-J-18 is a biological outlier. Still, all three Mis Island cemeteries are more closely related than the Kulubnarti cemeteries are to each other.Results of sex-specific analyses of individual cemeteries, as well as pooled samples for each site, show similar levels of variability among same sex pairs. This suggests the practice of multilocal postmarital residence, where a husband and wife are equally likely to live near the husband’s kin as the wife’s kin, a pattern newly recognized to be common among human groups. In addition, all three cemeteries were spatially analyzed assuming uniform distribution of burials, and one was retested using previously identified spatial groupings. These analyses of the three Mis Island cemeteries are unable to detect the presence of kin groups, despite differing spatial demographic patterns among the cemeteries. This diverges from the patterns observed in pre-medieval cemeteries, where biological affinity is an important factor in burial location.
Read
