From AD 567-568, at the onset of the Avar period, populations from the Eurasian Steppe settled in the Carpathian Basin for approximately 250 years1. Extensive sampling for archaeogenomics (424 individuals) and isotopes, combined with archaeological, anthropological and historical contextualization of four Avar-period cemeteries, allowed for a detailed description of the genomic structure of these communities and their kinship and social practices. We present a set of large pedigrees, reconstructed using ancient DNA, spanning nine generations and comprising around 300 individuals. We uncover a strict patrilineal kinship system, in which patrilocality and female exogamy were the norm and multiple reproductive partnering and levirate unions were common. The absence of consanguinity indicates that this society maintained a detailed memory of ancestry over generations. These kinship practices correspond with previous evidence from historical sources and anthropological research on Eurasian Steppe societies2. Network analyses of identity-by-descent DNA connections suggest that social cohesion between communities was maintained via female exogamy. Finally, despite the absence of major ancestry shifts, the level of resolution of our analyses allowed us to detect genetic discontinuity caused by the replacement of a community at one of the sites. This was paralleled with changes in the archaeological record and was probably a result of local political realignment.

ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage College of Arts Society and Education James Cook University Cairns Queensland Australia

BirthRites Lise Meitner Research Group Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Leipzig Germany

Curt Engelhorn Center for Archaeometry gGmbH Mannheim Germany

Department of Archaeogenetics Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Leipzig Germany

Department of Archaeology and Museology Faculty of Arts Masaryk University Brno Czechia

Department of Art History Istanbul Medeniyet University Istanbul Turkey

Department of Biological Anthropology ELTE Eötvös Loránd University Budapest Hungary

Department of Biological Anthropology University of Szeged Szeged Hungary

Department of Genetics Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Leipzig Germany

Department of Geological Sciences University of Cape Town Rondebosch South Africa

Department of History University of Vienna Vienna Austria

Department of Human Behavior Ecology and Culture Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Leipzig Germany

Hungarian National Museum Budapest Hungary

Institute for Advanced Study Princeton NJ USA

Institute for Medieval Research Austrian Academy of Sciences Vienna Austria

Institute of Archaeogenomics HUN REN Research Centre for the Humanities Budapest Hungary

Institute of Archaeological Sciences ELTE Eötvös Loránd University Budapest Hungary

Institute of Archaeology HUN REN Research Centre for the Humanities Budapest Hungary

Institute of History HUN REN Research Centre for the Humanities Budapest Hungary

MOE Key Laboratory of Contemporary Anthropology Department of Anthropology and Human Genetics School of Life Sciences Fudan University Shanghai China

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