ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Epistemic Life of a Tooth: Excavation, War, and Deep-Time Claims in Ukraine, 1954-2025

• In Event: Histories of Archaeology 2

English Abstract

In February 2025, Nature published two ancient-DNA studies on the North Pontic–Caspian steppe that reached contradictory conclusions about the origin of the Yamna archaeological culture and, by extension, the ‘Proto-Indo-Europeans.’ The Russian-led paper placed the Yamna ‘homeland’ in the Lower Volga, while the Ukrainian one placed it in the local Dnipro basin. This paper does not adjudicate between the two. Instead, it examines the conditions of possibility for turning ancient human remains into plausible stories of origin and into scientific facts. We follow the journey of one tooth belonging to a fifteen year old girl classified as ‘Core Yamna’ and forming the evidence base for the Ukrainian paper – Mykhailivka I32534, dated to 3635–3383 BCE – from its unearthing in the 1950s to its analysis and destruction in 2021. We treat I32534 as a scientific object whose authority is produced through a frail, at times accidental chain of events. Using methodologies borrowed from the field of ‘forensic architecture,’ we reconstruct its journey from the 1950s salvage Soviet excavations ahead of the construction of the Kahovka Dam in 1956, to the explosion of that same dam by the Russian military in 2023, to the publishing of the Nature papers in 2025. Concurrently, we historicize archeology’s long-standing obsession with an ‘Indo-European’ homeland, while placing the tooth in a genealogy of classificatory traditions that privilege biological essentialism above competing, more holistic narratives of origin.

Authors

• chiara di leone, UCLA

• Maksym Rokhmaniiko, Sci-Arc