Goosebump moments in archaeological research
How people lived centuries ago: This volume explores their identity
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from the Bonn Center for ArchaeoSciences.
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Credit: Photo: Bernadett Yehdou/University of Bonn
How did people live centuries ago? How did they see themselves? How were they perceived by others? Today, archaeology uses modern methods to examine skeletons, personal belongings, burial practices, material culture and social and spatial relationships. The book “Human Identities in the Archaeological Record: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Late Antiquity to the Modern Period” shows how past identities can be reconstructed from this evidence.
“Identity is an extraordinarily timely topic,” says co-editor Jun.-Prof. Dr. Alice Toso of the University of Bonn’s Center for Archaeological Sciences. “We all experience identity as something shaped by belonging, difference, memory, social expectations, and personal decisions.” The scholar is fascinated by the question of how people in the past may have understood themselves and how they were perceived by others.
Of course, researchers can never fully understand people from the past. They must always be careful not to impose their own categories on them. “The possibility of reconstructing something of a person’s experiences, affiliations, or struggles after such a long time gives me goosebumps,” says the bioarchaeologist from the University of Bonn. “For me, this sense of human connection across centuries is one of the most powerful aspects of archaeological research.”
Co-edited by Annamaria Diana (Independent researcher, Ireland), Daniela Marcu-Istrate (Vasile Pârvan Institute of Archaeology, Romania), and bioarchaeologist Alice Toso (University of Bonn), “Human Identities in the Archaeological Record” brings together international perspectives on belonging, diversity, resilience, and otherness from Late Antiquity to the modern period.
Science Across Borders
Using innovative analytical methods, researchers can investigate what people ate, where they grew up and how their bodies were affected by disease, diet, work, and inequality. However, the editors emphasize the importance of a transdisciplinary approach: “Large datasets remain incomplete as long as they are not interpreted within the archaeological context, using historical evidence and incorporating social science theories”, says Diana.
Diet is an excellent example of the complexity of this research. “What a person ate depended not only on their personal preferences,” says Toso. Rather, it was also shaped by the landscape and the resources available there, as well as by religious regulations, agricultural practices, access to markets, political power, household structures, and social status.
Interpreting a burial is just as complex. “A grave does not simply express the identity of the deceased”, says Marcu-Istrate, senior researcher at the Vasile Pârvan Institute of Archaeology in Bucharest, “it also reflects the decisions of relatives, religious authorities, and the wider community.” Thus, the location, design, grave goods, and treatment of the body reflect the relationships between the individual, the community, and social institutions.
Which identities are concealed?
The fundamental question addressed by the book is how people understood themselves and others. But also, how these identities were expressed, negotiated, imposed, altered, or suppressed. “Every person is both unique and part of one or more communities” says Diana. The volume examines how individuality coexisted with collective affiliations based on religion, social status, occupation, ancestry, gender, origin, or political identity.
The researchers are asking how reliably identity can be reconstructed from material remains. Archaeological evidence is incomplete, and historical sources are often fragmentary and shaped by elite perspectives. Whose identity becomes visible, and who is forgotten or deliberately erased? “Archaeology can recover evidence of enslaved people, migrants, religious minorities, social outsiders, and communities that are absent from written history,” says Toso, who is also a member of the Cluster of Excellence “Bonn Center for Dependency & Slavery Studies” as well as the transdisciplinary research areas “Life & Health” and “Present Pasts.” “Reconstructing identity is therefore also an ethical responsibility.”
Drawing on case studies from Europe, America, Africa and Australia, the book illustrates how people and communities expressed, negotiated, and preserved their identities in various historical contexts. It is surprising how relevant these archaeological questions are today. Many of the chapters address migration, displacement, religious persecution, colonialism, and the suppression of cultural diversity. “The past reveals both the long history of these processes and the resilience of communities whose identities were preserved despite the pressure to conform”, says Marcu-Istrate.
Publication: “Human Identities in the Archaeological Record: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Late Antiquity to the Modern Period,” Bloomsbury Academic, 288 pp., 46 black-and-white illustrations, 120 US-Dollar
Ancient millipedes still had secrets to tell
Researchers completed the first evolutionary history of Earth’s first land animals, pushing their origins tens of millions of years deeper into the past.
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Hirudicryptus canariensis (left) Siphoniulus neotropicus (microscopic image at right) are the two rare millipedes whose DNA helped researchers complete the first evolutionary history of all living millipede orders.
view moreCredit: Photos by Rafael Garcia and Paul Marek for Virginia Tech.
Long before vertebrates walked on land, millipedes had the place to themselves.
Hundreds of millions of years before dinosaurs arrived, these early decomposers were helping establish Earth's terrestrial ecosystems. But despite their ancient history, scientists still hadn't fully unraveled their evolutionary story.
Now, a Virginia Tech-led team of international scientists has solved one of the last major mysteries in millipede evolution, revealing new clues about a group of animals that helped pave the way for life on land.
The findings, published in Current Biology, complete the first evolutionary history of all living millipede orders. By combining genomic data from living species with morphological evidence from fossils, researchers traced the group's origins to nearly 460 million years ago — suggesting millipedes may have been present long before the oldest known millipede fossils.
"Millipedes beat vertebrates onto land by more than 80 million years," said Paul Marek, the study’s lead investigator and associate professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’ Department of Entomology. "They really set the stage for later life on land, including humans and vertebrates."
Reconstructing the missing pieces
For more than a century, scientists knew that two rare groups of millipedes — Siphoniulida and Siphonocryptida — existed, but without fresh specimens for DNA analysis, they couldn't confirm where they belonged in the millipede family tree.
One of the groups includes millipedes barely a centimeter long that spend their entire lives underground. The other survives in just a few known locations.
"These last two were kind of like our white whales," Marek said.
Researchers traveled to Los Tuxtlas, Mexico, and Spain's Canary Islands to collect Siphoniulus neotropicus and Hirudicryptus canariensis, two millipedes whose DNA had never been included in an evolutionary analysis.
"It took 10 people over a week just to find this one tiny 10-millimeter adult," said Luisa "Fernanda" Vasquez-Valverde M.S. '21, Ph.D. '24, the paper's first author and an assistant in Marek's lab. “Finding them in the field was hard because we were just seeing this little white nematode. We didn’t know for sure it was a millipede until we looked under the microscope."
By sequencing DNA from the two groups, comparing hundreds of genes across 82 millipede species, and combining those results with evidence from 29 fossils, researchers were able to determine where the groups fit in millipede history and when their lineages emerged. The effort generated terabytes of genetic data and relied on Virginia Tech's Advanced Research Computing resources to reconstruct relationships stretching back hundreds of millions of years.
One group, Siphonocryptida, turned out not to be a distinct order after all, but part of an existing lineage. The other, Siphoniulida, was finally placed among its closest relatives on the millipede evolution timeline.
Colonizing an alien Earth
The analysis revealed that millipedes may have originated nearly 460 million years ago — roughly 35 million years before the oldest known millipede fossils and much earlier than previously believed.
"The biggest surprise was just how ancient some of these lineages turned out to be," Marek said.
Back then, life on Earth looked dramatically different. Marek said millipedes helped pioneer life on land by breaking down organic material and recycling nutrients in some of the planet's first ecosystems.
"There were no vertebrates, no trees, no leaves, no flowering plants, no plants with seeds," Marek said. "Millipedes were feeding on decaying mosses, decomposed slime, and primordial gunk on the surface of the Earth."
The completed family tree also helped reveal when one of millipedes' most important adaptations first emerged.
"They made the first chemical weapons," Marek said. “They're little chemical factories.”
The study traces those chemical defenses to about 260 million years ago, providing the clearest picture yet of when millipedes first developed them.
Unheralded heroes of the ecosystem
Today, millipedes remain among nature's most important detritivores, breaking down decaying plant material and returning nutrients to ecosystems.
"It's really kind of puzzling that they have such an important function in the ecosystem, and yet they're so poorly known," Marek said.
For all that scientists have learned, millipedes still hold many new discoveries. Scientists have described more than 14,000 millipede species worldwide, but experts estimate there could be tens of thousands still undiscovered. Marek and his students have helped identify new millipedes in locations ranging from Virginia Tech's Blacksburg campus to the city of Los Angeles.
For a new generation of millipede researchers like Vasquez-Valverde, that's part of what makes the animals so compelling.
"There is all this potential for discovery," she said. "It keeps me wondering what else we're going to find."
The research, funded by the National Science Foundation, also included scientists from the Field Museum of Natural History, Hampden-Sydney College, Universidad de La Laguna, Virginia Tech’s School of Plant and Environmental Sciences, the Australian National Insect Collection, West Virginia University, and Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Hidalgo.
Journal
Current Biology
Article Title
Reshaping the millipede tree of life by inclusion of the last two unsampled orders
Article Publication Date
12-Jun-2026
