VIENNA, AUSTRIA—According to a Live Science report, radiocarbon dating and the analysis of DNA samples taken from the remains of two people buried in the same grave with a horse some 1,800 years ago in northern Austria reveals that they were first-degree relatives—either mother and daughter or sisters. It had been previously thought that the two individuals may have been a married couple that lived during the medieval period. The older woman is estimated to have been between the ages of 40 and 60, and the younger, whose arm was wrapped around the older, was between the ages of 20 and 25 at the time of death. This difference in the women’s ages makes it likely they were a mother-daughter pair, said Sylvia Kirchengast of the University of Vienna. Two gold pendants, one in the shape of a wheel and the other a crescent moon, were also found in the grave, which is located in a cemetery in the Roman city of Ovilava. The presence of the horse and the jewelry in the grave suggests that the women were not Romans, but were perhaps high-status members of a Celtic culture, said archaeologist Dominik Hagmann of the University of Vienna. The older woman’s bones show signs of frequent horseback riding, Kirchengast added. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. To read about infants buried some 31,000 years ago in northeastern Austria, go to "A Twin Burial."
