The research forms part of The Rise II project, a large-scale initiative based at the University of Gothenburg that seeks to reinterpret key processes of European prehistory by integrating ancient DNA, isotopic investigations, linguistics and archaeology. Within that framework, the new paper, titled Exploring mobility in Bronze Age Greece: A Sr isotope perspective, set out to answer two deceptively simple questions: how did human mobility change throughout the Bronze Age, and whether the movement of people was driven by specific identifiable factors. The answers, according to the team, complicate a picture that earlier scholarship had painted in broad and often gendered strokes.

The analytical foundation of the study rests on a well-established principle of geochemistry. Strontium enters the human body through water and food, both of which are typically gathered from the immediate environment in premodern societies. Because the strontium isotope signature of a landscape reflects the age and composition of its underlying geology, that signature is transferred into human bones and teeth during growth and mineralization. Dental enamel, which forms in childhood and does not subsequently remodel, preserves the isotope composition of the place where a person spent their early years. By comparing the values measured in skeletal samples against so-called bioavailable baselines established for the region surrounding each burial site, researchers can determine with a significant degree of certainty whether an individual was local or grew up elsewhere.

Applying this method to 199 individuals from six sites, the team found that non-local people were present in every community examined. The consistency of the figure, holding at roughly five to ten percent across the sampled populations, suggests that foreign-born residents were a normal and enduring feature of Bronze Age Greek society rather than an occasional anomaly tied to a single period or place. The Mediterranean world of the third and second millennia BCE witnessed profound socio-cultural and economic transformations, varying across regions and over time, and expanding exchange networks are known to have played an important role in these developments. What remained poorly understood until now was the extent to which the movement of goods was accompanied by the migration and settlement of foreign individuals within local communities.

One of the study’s most striking findings concerns gender. Previous research has often suggested that women were more likely to move between communities, particularly through marriage in patrilineal societies, a pattern documented in various prehistoric contexts and widely invoked to explain the spread of technologies and styles. The new data do not support such a one-sided picture for Bronze Age Greece. The number of non-local women and men proved to be comparable, indicating that several different factors, rather than marriage alone, may have driven an individual’s mobility. As Serena Sabatini, associate professor of archaeology at the University of Gothenburg, noted, this balance suggests a more complex set of motivations behind movement, potentially including trade, craft specialization, diplomatic exchange and other forms of contact that the expanding Bronze Age networks encouraged.

Status, too, appears to have had little bearing on who moved. Non-local individuals were identified across different burial practices, appearing both in unremarkable graves and in richly furbished ones. This distribution reveals that people were mobile regardless of their wealth or social standing, and that foreigners were integrated into their adopted communities to the point of receiving burial treatment consistent with local norms. For archaeologists, the finding is significant because burial opulence is often used as a proxy for social hierarchy; the new evidence shows that a wealthy grave could belong to someone born far away just as easily as to a member of the local elite, and that mobility was not the privilege of a mobile merchant class alone.

The age profile of the migrants adds another layer of nuance. No foreigners were identified among the investigated children, which is to say that the youngest individuals in the sample all carried isotope signatures matching their burial regions. Young adults under the age of thirty, by contrast, were the group most likely to be non-local. Taken together, these patterns suggest that mobility and migration in Bronze Age Greece concerned, to a considerable extent, single young individuals rather than the relocation of entire families. Whether these young movers arrived as traders, craftspeople, marriage partners, or in other capacities, the data indicate that they arrived as individuals and were buried within the communities that received them.

The methodological strength of the study lies in its scale and its grounding in regional baselines. Strontium isotope analysis has become one of the most powerful tools in modern archaeology precisely because it sidesteps the assumptions embedded in grave goods or architectural styles, which can travel through trade without any human movement at all. By measuring the isotope ratios directly in human tissue, researchers gain a biological record of where a person drew their food and water during the years their skeleton was forming. The 199 skeletal samples analyzed here, drawn from excavations across central and southern Greece, allowed the team to track how mobility behaved across both space and time within the Bronze Age, rather than relying on isolated case studies that might reflect local idiosyncrasies.

The broader implications reach well beyond the Aegean. The Bronze Age Mediterranean is often narrated as a world connected by the exchange of metals, textiles and prestige goods, with palatial centers in the Aegean, the eastern Mediterranean and beyond linked by maritime routes. The new findings demonstrate that this connectivity had a human dimension that was demographically meaningful yet socially diffuse: a small but persistent fraction of every community was foreign-born, drawn from both sexes and all levels of wealth. Such a pattern implies that prehistoric exchange networks did not merely move objects between distant elites but also moved people into the everyday fabric of local life, where they lived, worked and were eventually buried alongside their neighbors.

The study also serves as a corrective to lingering stereotypes about prehistoric societies. The assumption that women moved and men stayed, rooted in models of patrilineal marriage exchange, has shaped interpretations of genetic and archaeological data across Europe. By showing comparable numbers of non-local men and women in Bronze Age Greece, the Gothenburg-led team argues that mobility was a multifaceted phenomenon, produced by a range of social and economic forces that varied from person to person. The research, published open access in PLOS One on 23 September 2026, offers a template for future work across the Mediterranean and Europe, where the combination of large skeletal samples, regional isotope baselines and archaeological context promises to reveal, community by community, how the ancient world was knit together not only by goods and ideas but by the quiet, persistent movement of people themselves.

Subject of Research: Bronze Age human mobility in Greece determined through strontium isotope analysis of skeletal remains

Article Title: New study reveals Bronze Age mobility across ancient Greece

Article References: New study reveals Bronze Age mobility across ancient Greece. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Bronze Age, Greece, strontium isotopes, archaeology, human mobility, migration, PLOS One, University of Gothenburg, Mediterranean, isotope analysis, burial practices, ancient DNA

Carbonate deposits form naturally in Roman aqueducts as calcium carbonate precipitates from the flowing water, building up layer upon layer on the walls and floor of the channel. Because the chemistry and temperature of the water change over time, the deposits develop distinct banding patterns that can be read much like tree rings. The Mainz team extracted samples of this carbonate rock from ten locations along the entire course of the Nîmes aqueduct and subjected the layers to isotope analysis, allowing them to reconstruct variations in water source, flow volume and maintenance quality across the monument’s working life. The result is an unusually fine-grained history of water management in the western Roman Empire, written in stone by the water itself.

The deepest layers in the samples tell a story that begins with a crisis. At the base of the cores lies a carbonate layer about two centimeters thick, capped by a thin layer of clay. Both were deposited during the aqueduct’s first eleven years of operation, and their composition points to a drought affecting the western Mediterranean, an episode also recorded by the Roman historian Tacitus. The dry spell apparently reduced the flow of the original spring source enough to threaten the city’s supply. The response was decisive: after eleven years, the carbonate record shows that a different type of water entered the channel, indicating that an additional water source had been tapped to guarantee sufficient flow. This intervention correlates with structural modifications still visible today on the Pont du Gard, where the sidewalls were raised, reinforced and partially buttressed to accommodate a higher water level.

For the next century, the aqueduct functioned reliably, but around 150 AD the carbonate layers became significantly thinner, signaling a marked drop in the water level in the channel. According to Sürmelihindi, about half of the water supplying the city was diverted to irrigate fields, and the sheer volume involved suggests that this was an authorized withdrawal rather than clandestine siphoning. Such an arrangement, she notes, would likely have been possible only for highly influential individuals with the power to negotiate a formal reduction of the urban supply. The fact that the city apparently tolerated the loss without complaint also implies that Nîmes did not have a critical need for the full volume of water at that time. For roughly a hundred years afterward, the aqueduct continued to operate flawlessly, albeit delivering a reduced flow to the urban fountains, baths and distribution network.

The tone of the archive changes dramatically in the mid-third century. From that point onward, the color and composition of the carbonate shift: the deposits become more porous and begin to incorporate clay and sand, classic signs that the channel was no longer being properly maintained. This deterioration coincides with a period of great economic and political turmoil across many parts of the Roman Empire, an era of usurpations, invasions and fiscal collapse that historians call the third-century crisis. The carbonate record, in other words, mirrors the condition of the city itself, documenting a gradual loss of the administrative capacity and civic wealth that had kept the aqueduct in good repair for two hundred years.

Then comes the abrupt end. Around 270 AD, carbonate deposition stops entirely in the samples taken near the city: the urban water supply was completely cut off. Crucially, however, the rural sections of the aqueduct show continuous carbonate deposition through this same period, revealing that owners of vast estates upstream were diverting the water for their own use. The channel had not failed physically; it had simply stopped serving the city. The researchers interpret this pattern as evidence that something happened to the population of Nîmes, leaving too few urban consumers to justify maintaining the supply or defending it against private appropriation.

The prime suspect is the Plague of Cyprian, the pandemic named after the bishop of Carthage who described its ravages, which swept the Roman Empire roughly between 250 and 270 AD. The disease is primarily documented in North Africa and in Rome, where it claimed many lives, but very little is known about its impact in Western Europe. Study co-author Professor Andrew Wilson of the University of Oxford has suggested that the plague may also have posed a serious problem in southern France, and the carbonate evidence from Nîmes lends weight to that hypothesis. If the epidemic killed or displaced much of the city’s population, survivors may have abandoned the urban center for the countryside, a pattern of urban contraction that archaeologists have observed at many sites in southern France during this period. Some of those cities shrank following barbarian invasions, but others declined for reasons that remain unexplained.

Supporting evidence comes from an unexpected quarter. The city of Cahors, located about 300 kilometers west of Nîmes, was also in crisis at the same time, a fact that Passchier and Sürmelihindi established through their earlier study of local carbonate deposits in that city’s aqueduct. Two independent aqueduct archives, hundreds of kilometers apart, recording urban breakdown at the same moment, strengthen the case that a region-wide catastrophe such as the Plague of Cyprian, rather than purely local misfortune, lay behind the abandonment of urban water systems in Gaul.

Perhaps the most striking finding is what happened after the city lost its water. In the rural stretches of the aqueduct, the channel continued to be exploited for another 140 years, well into the fifth century. People drilled holes into the sidewalls to extract water for agriculture, a practice betrayed today by massive limescale deposits on the exterior of the conduit, formed by water leaking from these informal taps. As Passchier points out, the city could easily have repaired the aqueduct during those 140 years had there been the will and the population to do so. Apparently, however, the decline in population density and urban wealth was permanent. The famous bridge and its channel stood ready to serve, but the city that had built them never came back to claim the water, leaving the carbonate crust of the Pont du Gard aqueduct as a silent witness to one of antiquity’s most consequential pandemics.

Subject of Research: Reconstruction of the operational history of the Roman aqueduct of Nîmes from carbonate deposits and its link to the Plague of Cyprian

Article Title: Was Nîmes depopulated by the Plague of Cyprian?

Article References: Was Nîmes depopulated by the Plague of Cyprian?. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Nîmes aqueduct, Pont du Gard, Plague of Cyprian, Roman water management, carbonate deposits, isotope analysis, Geoarchaeology, third-century crisis, ancient urban decline, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Roman Empire, aqueduct maintenance

The central finding is chronological. Millet, the researchers discovered, was already being consumed in southeastern Poland around 1590 BCE, more than a century earlier than previous estimates had suggested. That revision matters because the timing of millet’s arrival has long been debated among European archaeologists. The crop, domesticated originally in what is now Inner Mongolia, spread westward along trade and contact networks that connected the steppe with the settled farming societies of Europe. Knowing precisely when it appeared in local diets allows archaeologists to align that arrival with broader developments in Bronze Age society, including population growth, increasing food demand and shifting climatic conditions.

Equally significant is the manner of the adoption. The isotope data show that millet did not sweep through the region as an instant staple. Instead, it was consumed at first by only a handful of individuals, gradually working its way into foodways that had been dominated for millennia by wheat and barley. By analysing tissues that form at different stages of life, the team could reconstruct dietary change within individual lifetimes. Several early millet consumers had clearly grown up eating the traditional cereals, only incorporating the new grain later in adulthood. This within-lifetime evidence pins down the moment the crop entered existing diets with a precision that conventional archaeological methods rarely achieve.

The multi-proxy approach at the heart of the study is what makes such fine-grained conclusions possible. Carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios in bone collagen reflect a person’s average diet over the years, capturing the relative contribution of different plant and animal foods. Oxygen and strontium isotopes, by contrast, record the geology and hydrology of the places where an individual’s food was produced during tissue formation. Radiocarbon dating anchors the timeline, palaeoproteomic analysis of tooth proteins establishes biological sex, and previously published ancient genetic data situates individuals within the region’s population history. Each line of evidence answers a different question, and only by reading them together could the researchers distinguish local dietary change from the arrival of new people.

That distinction proved crucial. Both millet consumers and non-consumers in the study shared broadly similar archaeological and genetic backgrounds, and the earliest consumers carried strontium isotope signatures compatible with local origins. The data therefore offer little support for a simple migration-based explanation, in which the crop would have arrived with an incoming population that brought its own farming traditions. Instead, the evidence points to an innovation adopted from within, by communities already rooted in the region, in response to pressures and opportunities they faced in their own environment.

The environmental dimension of the story is where the study’s implications expand beyond diet. Broomcorn millet grows quickly, matures within a single summer season, and tolerates relatively dry conditions and poor soils far better than wheat or barley. Those qualities meant that cultivating it opened up parts of the landscape that had previously seen little agricultural use. According to the researchers, the different strontium isotope compositions found in the skeletal tissues of millet consumers compared with non-consumers likely point to the use of distinct geological zones within the same territory, rather than to different places of birth. In other words, the crop’s adopters were farming different ground.

Lead author Dr Depaermentier of Vilnius University frames the shift as a deliberate strategy. In response to increasing food demand and potential changes in climatic conditions, Bronze Age societies adopted a new resilient staple crop to optimise the use of previously marginal parts of their environment and improve food security. The phrase captures a logic that will feel familiar to modern agricultural planners: diversify the crop base, exploit underused land, and buffer the community against the risk of harvest failure. What the isotope evidence adds is proof that this logic was already operating in European prehistory, centuries before written records could document it.

Just as striking is what the study reveals about who adopted the crop. Millet consumption was not restricted to any particular sex, age group or social status, as co-author Prof Makarowicz of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań observes. Together with the strontium isotope evidence, this pattern indicates that access to particular parts of the landscape, rather than social identity, was the determining factor shaping who ate the new grain. The division between consumers and non-consumers mapped onto geography, not hierarchy. Senior author Prof Motuzaitė Matuzevičiūtė, also of Vilnius University and principal investigator of the ERC-CoG MILWAYS project, notes that the study is the first to link such a division of the landscape to the cultivation of a new summer crop and to the exploitation of areas that had previously seen little agricultural use.

That conclusion reframes how archaeologists think about prehistoric innovation. The spread of new crops is often narrated in terms of diffusion, trade or conquest, as if ideas and technologies simply travelled across maps. This study instead documents adoption as a local, negotiated process, unfolding over generations, unevenly distributed across a society, and driven by the practical realities of soil, water and subsistence. A handful of individuals began eating a new grain; their communities learned to grow it on land their ancestors had left uncultivated; and over time the practice spread until the crop became a staple. No single dramatic event marks the transition, yet the cumulative result was a fundamentally different relationship between people and their environment.

The findings also carry a contemporary resonance. As modern agriculture confronts climate change, water scarcity and degrading soils, crop diversification has returned to the centre of policy discussions, and researchers increasingly look to the past for evidence of how societies have managed similar challenges. The Bronze Age farmers of southeastern Poland offer a case study in successful adaptation: they identified a crop suited to marginal conditions, integrated it gradually into existing systems, and used it to expand production without abandoning their traditional cereals. Understanding how such transitions succeeded in prehistory, the authors suggest, can inform current debates about building resilient food systems. A grain that travelled from Inner Mongolia to the Carpathian foothills three and a half thousand years ago turns out to have lessons that still speak to the present.

Subject of Research: The adoption of broomcorn millet and its impact on Bronze Age land use in Central Europe

Article Title: The adoption of a new crop reshaped land use in Bronze Age Europe

Article References: The adoption of a new crop reshaped land use in Bronze Age Europe. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: broomcorn millet, Bronze Age, Central Europe, isotope analysis, bioarchaeology, land use, food security, paleodiet, strontium isotopes, crop adoption, Science Advances, southeastern Poland