Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: The Role of History in Ethnic Identity Formation

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The goal of this research is to understand the creation of an ethnicity rooted in the past and still very important today, the Balkan Muslim identity established during the Ottoman Empire's control of European lands. In many European historical accounts, the Ottomans are depicted as brutal, foreign invaders. In recent decades, the descendants of these Islamic communities in some areas have been subjected to violence, adverse political policies, and a constant designation as "other" in predominately Christian Europe. The perception is often that these groups did not originate in the lands they occupy today. This notion is questioned however, by historical accounts of the mass conversion of European Christians to Islam, indicating that these communities may in actuality be closely related to those that remained Christian in the Ottoman's European territories. In general, questions of ethnicity and identity are extremely important considerations with far-reaching social and political consequences in both the past and the present. While often thought to be defined by genetics, ethnicity and identity are in actuality dynamic, fluid, and shifting aspects of human groups. The establishment or justification of a modern ethnicity is frequently traced to a group of people in the past, making archaeology a discipline capable of studying these phenomena. Understanding the processes and people who created the Balkan Muslim communities in Southeastern Europe is very important for public understanding and acceptance of the religious heterogeneity in these societies today.Ms. Kathryn Grow Allen and colleagues will investigate the makeup of Ottoman military communities in the hinterlands of the Ottoman Empire's European territory with an aim to better understand the biological and ancestral background of the people from which many modern Muslim communities in the region are descended. The project will utilize the archaeological record of Ottoman garrison towns from three countries with territory formerly ruled by the Islamic empire (Romania, Hungary and Croatia) and focus on a largely under-utilized source of archaeological data-human skeletons previously excavated and stored in regional museums. Understanding the Ottoman group identity and how similar or distinct they were from the local communities will be done using two established techniques: a biodistance analysis and strontium isotope analysis. The first, biodistance, requires the collection of a large number of metric and non-metric traits found on human bones. These biological traits are known to be influenced by genetics and informative on group identity and relatedness. The second method, strontium isotope analysis, is frequently employed by archaeologists to trace the movement of people utilizing isotopic signatures found in human teeth informative of an individual's birthplace. These methods, employed on a regional scale, will provide important information regarding the creation of the Ottoman Muslim communities and ethnicity in Southeastern Europe. They will deliver data regarding the extent to which the immigration of individuals from Anatolia or the conversion of European Christians influenced the biological makeup of these groups.