The research group undertakes an exemplary analysis of the Merovingian grave field of Essenbach-Altheim. With the help of archaeogenetics and isotope analysis, preferred scientific methods are currently used to test their historical significance. The aim is to gain additional information through scientific methods and to reach further conclusions in combination with the archaeological finds. In this way, essential structures of the local society are to be reconstructed. However, this can only be achieved in close cooperation between the sciences and the humanities. Only through the contextualization of scientific data historical interpretation can be achieved. Biology, for example, is only one half of kinship, in that children and their parents and thus generational sequences are to be recorded. Archaeology can contribute indirectly to the other, social half of kinship - both by analyzing grave furnishings and by examining the topographical location of graves. In parallel, information on diet should be compared with the grave furnishings to allow reconstructions of social status as well as the range of relationships or contacts.
My project during the fellowship is exactly this archaeological interpretation. Scientific data will be available by the fall of 2023. Their archaeogenetic and isotope-analytical interpretation will then enter its decisive phase. Thus, this is the best time to reflect together on historical implications. My task will be to prepare the archaeological data accordingly. They are available in a monograph oof 2019 by Johannes Seebrich, but need a detailed thematic evaluation and comparative assessment in the sense of the Tübingen project. For this purpose, it is necessary to go beyond the Essenbach-Altheim cemetery and to take into account the archaeology of the Merovingian period, at least in southern Germany, in order to avoid constructing Essenbach-Altheim as a supposed special case.
Questions concern, for example, the structuring of the cemetery in comparison with the biological data: are relatives or families close together, or is it rather the date of death that determines the neighborhood of the graves? Are there nutritional and social differences within or between kinship groups? To what extent are biological clues to non-local origins linked to grave goods that also point beyond the region? Do scientific and archaeological data give the same impression of a stable or dynamic local society? And finally: can Essenbach-Altheim be regarded as representative, or do certain aspects show special features? To answer the last question will not be easy, since no similar study is available so far - the biological focus was primarily on diachronic population-historical (not to say phylogenetic) questions and was hardly interested in local communities.
The Tübingen research group offers the best prerequisites for interdisciplinary discussion. It brings together representatives of different disciplines and from very different locations to think about and debate questions of "Migration and Mobility in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages" without restrictions. For me and the intended project, this context proves to be an ideal case in order to arrive at new insights for Essenbach-Altheim as an example. It is about local structures, which were nothing less than immobile: already the marriage partners should not be local, but from the nearer neighbourhood, and individuals from further away are to be expected, because the archaeological finds reflect far-reaching networks. This is not to follow a traditional ethnic interpretation of archaeological finds and not a migration narrative - on the contrary: the focus is on the complexity of local relationships, viewed from archaeogenetic and isotope analytical, archaeological and historiographic perspectives.

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