Adults and children buried together in medieval Scandinavia were often not close relatives, according to a new ancient DNA study. The findings challenge a longstanding assumption about shared graves while offering new insights into how medieval communities understood family, gender and belonging.
Researchers from Stockholm University analysed DNA from 142 individuals dating from the late Viking Age and Middle Ages, including 68 children and adolescents. The remains came from three sites in Sweden: Sigtuna, near Stockholm; Västerhus in Jämtland; and Fjälkinge in Skåne.
The study, published in Science Advances, focused particularly on multiple burials, graves containing two or more people. Of the 142 individuals subjected to genomic screening, 116 came from 50 multiple burials, with individuals from single graves providing comparative material.
Archaeologists have often interpreted adults and children sharing such graves as members of the same biological family. Ancient DNA allowed the researchers to test that assumption directly.
”We often assume that adults and children sharing a grave were parents and children or other close family members. In most cases, that was not what we found,” says Maja Krzewińska, Centre for Palaeogenetics, Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies, Stockholm University, lead author of the study.
Who was buried together?
Most of the multiple burials examined contained both adults and children. Of 51 multiple burials included in the study’s analysis of age and sex, 28, or 54.9%, contained adults and children. Another 12 contained only children and 11 only adults.
Yet genetic testing revealed that sharing a grave did not usually mean sharing close biological ancestry. At Västerhus, only three of the 25 multiple burials with sufficient genomic information contained first-degree relatives, representing 12% of the graves tested. These consisted of two sisters, a father and son, and two probable siblings. No second-degree relatives were found buried together there, although such relationships could be identified between people in different graves.
At Sigtuna, close or relatively close kinship was detected in two of 16 multiple burials with sufficient genetic information. One involved an unspecified second-degree relationship and the other was probably a parent and child.
The researchers also compared genetic diversity among people sharing graves with that of individuals buried separately. Genetic diversity among those in multiple burials was similar to or greater than that among people from single graves at the same sites, providing further evidence that multiple graves did not primarily contain close relatives.
”Archaeologists have debated the relationships between people buried together in this type of grave for a long time. Ancient DNA has finally given us the tool we have been waiting for to test these interpretations directly,” says Anna Kjellström, researcher at the Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies, Stockholm University.
Most of the multiple burials appear to have been simultaneous interments, meaning the people were probably buried at or around the same time, although some may have been added to graves sequentially. The lack of close biological relationships therefore raises the question of why these particular people were buried together.
The researchers suggest that more distant biological relationships, common origins, membership in the same household, or other community connections may have influenced the decision. Their analysis found numerous more distant genetic relationships across the cemeteries, but only about 6.38% of these relationships involved people buried together.
This does not mean that family relationships were unimportant in medieval Scandinavian burial practices. Instead, the evidence suggests that kinship could structure a cemetery on a broader level without determining precisely who shared an individual grave.
Boys and girls in medieval cemeteries
Anders Götherström, Centre for Palaeogenetics, Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies, Stockholm University. Photo: Rickard Kilström/Stockholm University
The DNA evidence also allowed researchers to investigate another difficult question: how children were treated in death. Determining the biological sex of children’s skeletons from their physical remains is notoriously difficult. Genetic analysis allowed researchers to identify the biological sex of individuals who could not reliably be identified as male or female through traditional osteological methods.
The results suggest that children often followed the same gender-based burial conventions as adults. This was particularly clear at Västerhus, where the cemetery was divided spatially by sex. Boys and girls broadly followed the same pattern as adult men and women. Mixed-sex graves, meanwhile, were concentrated mainly on the eastern and western sides of the church rather than following the usual north-south division.
Same-sex adult-child graves were particularly common. Of the 28 graves containing adults and children, 17 contained adults and children of the same biological sex, compared with eight mixed-sex graves and three where the sex of at least one individual could not be determined.
”The children were not treated as a separate category. In death, they appear to have been treated according to the same social and religious principles as adult men and women,” says Anders Götherström, Professor of Molecular Archaeology, Centre for Palaeogenetics, Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies, Stockholm University.
There were exceptions. Four infant girls at Västerhus were buried in the southern part of the churchyard, an area normally associated with males, and were buried with males. Another infant girl was buried with males beneath the southern wall of the church atrium.
The researchers found no comparable examples of young boys buried with adult women in the northern part of the cemetery. Mixed-sex graves also appeared more frequently in particular areas, including along the chancel and beneath the church porch, suggesting that social status or other circumstances could sometimes take precedence over gender conventions.
The researchers caution that the pattern was not identical everywhere. The Sigtuna churchyards have not been completely excavated, making their spatial organisation harder to determine, while no spatial segregation by sex could be identified at Viking Age Fjälkinge.
Lady 56 and a medieval pilgrimage
Forensic facial reconstruction based on morphology and genetics of one of the key Västerhus individuals analysed in the study. The reconstruction and the photograph are by Oscar Nilsson. Photo: Oscar Nilsson/Stockholm University, 2026
Among the individuals studied at Västerhus, one woman offers a particularly striking glimpse into medieval family networks and mobility.
Known to researchers as Lady 56, or wes056, she died before the age of 30. DNA connected her with several people buried elsewhere in the cemetery, including her parents, her brother and two daughters. Rather than being buried together in a family grave, members of this extended family were distributed across different parts of the churchyard.
The wider family group appears to have enjoyed an important position within the community. Genetic analysis revealed an extended kindred whose members were frequently buried close to the church, something the researchers suggest may reflect long-standing social position or elevated status.
Lady 56’s grave contained another important clue about her life: a scallop shell. Only two such shells were discovered at the Västerhus cemetery. Scallop shells were closely associated with pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain, one of the most important pilgrimage destinations in medieval Europe. The researchers interpret the shell as evidence that Lady 56 had completed the pilgrimage.
If so, she had undertaken an extraordinary journey from Scandinavia to the Iberian Peninsula and back. Her burial offers evidence not only of the mobility possible for some medieval Scandinavians but also of the participation of women in long-distance Christian pilgrimage.
Family beyond the grave
One of the pilgrim shells found at the Västerhus cemetery – a site investigated in the study. Photo: Christer Åhlin/Historiska museet, 2012
The findings suggest that biological kinship remained important in medieval Scandinavian communities, but that the modern concept of the nuclear family may be a poor model for interpreting their graves.
Households in Viking Age and early medieval Scandinavia could encompass extended relatives as well as servants, employees and enslaved people. Social relationships could also include fostering, apprenticeship, concubinage and friendship alliances. These connections created communities in which biological relationship represented only one form of belonging.
At Västerhus in particular, DNA revealed numerous relationships between people buried in different graves. The researchers therefore suggest that family and fellowship extended well beyond the nuclear household, even though members of those wider networks were not necessarily buried together.
The study also leaves room for more practical explanations. Some people may have shared graves because they died at the same time through warfare, accidents or disease. However, the researchers did not find widespread evidence of trauma or the demographic patterns normally associated with epidemic mortality, making it impossible to identify a single explanation for the multiple burials.
Instead, burial arrangements probably resulted from a mixture of religious rules, social relationships and practical circumstances.
The authors also caution that the research was designed specifically to investigate relationships within multiple burials rather than reconstruct the populations of the three sites as a whole. Larger, site-wide studies will be needed to determine how widely the patterns apply.
Still, the DNA evidence demonstrates that being placed together in a medieval grave did not necessarily mean two people were close biological relatives. The people who buried them may have understood relationships and community in ways that cannot be reconstructed from bones and burial position alone.
The article, “Equal in death: Ancient genomic analysis of children’s early Christian burials,” by Maja Krzewińska, Anna Kjellström, Reyhan Yaka, Ricardo Rodríguez-Varela, Zoé Pochon, Vendela Kempe Lagerholm, Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, Torun Zachrisson, Natalija Kashuba, Verónica Sobrado, Thijessen Naidoo, Kıvılcım Başak Vural, Mattias Jakobsson, Gülşah Merve Kılınç, Jan Storå and Anders Götherström, is published in Science Advances. Click here to read it.
Children and adults interred together in medieval graves in Sweden were rarely closely related biologically, according to new genetic analyses of ancient collective burial sites.
Learn more in #ScienceAdvances: https://scim.ag/4vUiy7w
Adults and children buried together in medieval Scandinavia were often not close relatives, according to a new ancient DNA study. The findings challenge a longstanding assumption about shared graves while offering new insights into how medieval communities understood family, gender and belonging.
Researchers from Stockholm University analysed DNA from 142 individuals dating from the late Viking Age and Middle Ages, including 68 children and adolescents. The remains came from three sites in Sweden: Sigtuna, near Stockholm; Västerhus in Jämtland; and Fjälkinge in Skåne.
The study, published in Science Advances, focused particularly on multiple burials, graves containing two or more people. Of the 142 individuals subjected to genomic screening, 116 came from 50 multiple burials, with individuals from single graves providing comparative material.
Archaeologists have often interpreted adults and children sharing such graves as members of the same biological family. Ancient DNA allowed the researchers to test that assumption directly.
”We often assume that adults and children sharing a grave were parents and children or other close family members. In most cases, that was not what we found,” says Maja Krzewińska, Centre for Palaeogenetics, Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies, Stockholm University, lead author of the study.
Who was buried together?
Most of the multiple burials examined contained both adults and children. Of 51 multiple burials included in the study’s analysis of age and sex, 28, or 54.9%, contained adults and children. Another 12 contained only children and 11 only adults.
Yet genetic testing revealed that sharing a grave did not usually mean sharing close biological ancestry. At Västerhus, only three of the 25 multiple burials with sufficient genomic information contained first-degree relatives, representing 12% of the graves tested. These consisted of two sisters, a father and son, and two probable siblings. No second-degree relatives were found buried together there, although such relationships could be identified between people in different graves.
At Sigtuna, close or relatively close kinship was detected in two of 16 multiple burials with sufficient genetic information. One involved an unspecified second-degree relationship and the other was probably a parent and child.
The researchers also compared genetic diversity among people sharing graves with that of individuals buried separately. Genetic diversity among those in multiple burials was similar to or greater than that among people from single graves at the same sites, providing further evidence that multiple graves did not primarily contain close relatives.
”Archaeologists have debated the relationships between people buried together in this type of grave for a long time. Ancient DNA has finally given us the tool we have been waiting for to test these interpretations directly,” says Anna Kjellström, researcher at the Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies, Stockholm University.
Most of the multiple burials appear to have been simultaneous interments, meaning the people were probably buried at or around the same time, although some may have been added to graves sequentially. The lack of close biological relationships therefore raises the question of why these particular people were buried together.
The researchers suggest that more distant biological relationships, common origins, membership in the same household, or other community connections may have influenced the decision. Their analysis found numerous more distant genetic relationships across the cemeteries, but only about 6.38% of these relationships involved people buried together.
This does not mean that family relationships were unimportant in medieval Scandinavian burial practices. Instead, the evidence suggests that kinship could structure a cemetery on a broader level without determining precisely who shared an individual grave.
Boys and girls in medieval cemeteries
The DNA evidence also allowed researchers to investigate another difficult question: how children were treated in death. Determining the biological sex of children’s skeletons from their physical remains is notoriously difficult. Genetic analysis allowed researchers to identify the biological sex of individuals who could not reliably be identified as male or female through traditional osteological methods.
The results suggest that children often followed the same gender-based burial conventions as adults. This was particularly clear at Västerhus, where the cemetery was divided spatially by sex. Boys and girls broadly followed the same pattern as adult men and women. Mixed-sex graves, meanwhile, were concentrated mainly on the eastern and western sides of the church rather than following the usual north-south division.
Same-sex adult-child graves were particularly common. Of the 28 graves containing adults and children, 17 contained adults and children of the same biological sex, compared with eight mixed-sex graves and three where the sex of at least one individual could not be determined.
”The children were not treated as a separate category. In death, they appear to have been treated according to the same social and religious principles as adult men and women,” says Anders Götherström, Professor of Molecular Archaeology, Centre for Palaeogenetics, Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies, Stockholm University.
There were exceptions. Four infant girls at Västerhus were buried in the southern part of the churchyard, an area normally associated with males, and were buried with males. Another infant girl was buried with males beneath the southern wall of the church atrium.
The researchers found no comparable examples of young boys buried with adult women in the northern part of the cemetery. Mixed-sex graves also appeared more frequently in particular areas, including along the chancel and beneath the church porch, suggesting that social status or other circumstances could sometimes take precedence over gender conventions.
The researchers caution that the pattern was not identical everywhere. The Sigtuna churchyards have not been completely excavated, making their spatial organisation harder to determine, while no spatial segregation by sex could be identified at Viking Age Fjälkinge.
Lady 56 and a medieval pilgrimage
Among the individuals studied at Västerhus, one woman offers a particularly striking glimpse into medieval family networks and mobility.
Known to researchers as Lady 56, or wes056, she died before the age of 30. DNA connected her with several people buried elsewhere in the cemetery, including her parents, her brother and two daughters. Rather than being buried together in a family grave, members of this extended family were distributed across different parts of the churchyard.
The wider family group appears to have enjoyed an important position within the community. Genetic analysis revealed an extended kindred whose members were frequently buried close to the church, something the researchers suggest may reflect long-standing social position or elevated status.
Lady 56’s grave contained another important clue about her life: a scallop shell. Only two such shells were discovered at the Västerhus cemetery. Scallop shells were closely associated with pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain, one of the most important pilgrimage destinations in medieval Europe. The researchers interpret the shell as evidence that Lady 56 had completed the pilgrimage.
If so, she had undertaken an extraordinary journey from Scandinavia to the Iberian Peninsula and back. Her burial offers evidence not only of the mobility possible for some medieval Scandinavians but also of the participation of women in long-distance Christian pilgrimage.
Family beyond the grave
The findings suggest that biological kinship remained important in medieval Scandinavian communities, but that the modern concept of the nuclear family may be a poor model for interpreting their graves.
Households in Viking Age and early medieval Scandinavia could encompass extended relatives as well as servants, employees and enslaved people. Social relationships could also include fostering, apprenticeship, concubinage and friendship alliances. These connections created communities in which biological relationship represented only one form of belonging.
At Västerhus in particular, DNA revealed numerous relationships between people buried in different graves. The researchers therefore suggest that family and fellowship extended well beyond the nuclear household, even though members of those wider networks were not necessarily buried together.
The study also leaves room for more practical explanations. Some people may have shared graves because they died at the same time through warfare, accidents or disease. However, the researchers did not find widespread evidence of trauma or the demographic patterns normally associated with epidemic mortality, making it impossible to identify a single explanation for the multiple burials.
Instead, burial arrangements probably resulted from a mixture of religious rules, social relationships and practical circumstances.
The authors also caution that the research was designed specifically to investigate relationships within multiple burials rather than reconstruct the populations of the three sites as a whole. Larger, site-wide studies will be needed to determine how widely the patterns apply.
Still, the DNA evidence demonstrates that being placed together in a medieval grave did not necessarily mean two people were close biological relatives. The people who buried them may have understood relationships and community in ways that cannot be reconstructed from bones and burial position alone.
The article, “Equal in death: Ancient genomic analysis of children’s early Christian burials,” by Maja Krzewińska, Anna Kjellström, Reyhan Yaka, Ricardo Rodríguez-Varela, Zoé Pochon, Vendela Kempe Lagerholm, Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, Torun Zachrisson, Natalija Kashuba, Verónica Sobrado, Thijessen Naidoo, Kıvılcım Başak Vural, Mattias Jakobsson, Gülşah Merve Kılınç, Jan Storå and Anders Götherström, is published in Science Advances. Click here to read it.
Top Image: The Västerhus church ruin, Frösö parish, Jämtland, before 1951. Media: Riksantikvarieämbetets arkiv
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