This paper explores the dynamics of power and legitimacy between the late Roman Empire and the societies beyond its northern and eastern frontiers, arguing that shared understandings of political authority, developed through centuries of interaction, facilitated the establishment of post-Roman kingdoms. Unlike the more formalized relationships with client kingdoms along the empire’s eastern and north African frontiers, interactions along the northern and eastern European borders were more fluid. The paper posits that gift-giving, particularly of imperial brooches and gold medallions, was central to establishing political relationships between the Roman emperor and rulers beyond the frontier. These gifts created networks of obligation, with recipients potentially owing peace, tribute, or military service. A newly identified imperial brooch from Ureki in Georgia suggests a wider geographical reach of these networks. However, by the fifth century, rulers beyond the frontier began to imitate Roman symbols of power, commissioning their own versions from local craftworkers. By doing so, they cut themselves loose from earlier ties of obligation. The paper concludes that this long history of interaction and mimesis of Roman power structures enabled populations beyond the Roman frontier to understand and ultimately emulate Roman imperial power.

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.

English is the lingua franca not only for academia but also for almost all international infrastructures and global communications. It comes as no surprise, then, that the dominant and assumed normative voice in archaeology is standard British English (SBE) for narratives of various times and places. This language is ‘majoritarian’—by this we do not mean that it is spoken by most of humanity, but that it is the imposed ‘ideal’ others are measured against, and that is an issue. Categories, terms and ways of interpretation are all done from a privileged majoritarian position. These do not translate and are certainly not applicable in all the different places where archaeology takes place. This paper is the culmination of conversations that occurred during a Theoretical Archaeology Group conference session in 2023, with contributing authors having adapted their talks into a discussion format to keep the conversation on challenging language representation active within the discipline.

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.