Investigating the origins of the Cherniakhiv community at Voitenki, East Ukraine, through strontium isotope analysis

Abstract This paper presents strontium isotope data of human burials from Voitenki, a cemetery attributed to the Cherniakhiv Culture (1 st Millennium AD), in East Ukraine. Intending to use strontium isotope analysis to distinguish between local and non-local origins, we sampled 30 out of 113 inhumation graves that were excavated until 2018. The sample set included 22 adults, 4 juvenile individuals and 4 children, among them 11 anthropologically identified as male and 11 as female. The selection represents different variants of the burial rites concerning grave construction and composition of the grave furnishings. In contrast to the common wheel-made pottery, two graves contained hand-made ceramic vessels of non-local, probably Sarmatian, origin that indicates a potential non-local origin of the deceased. The 87 Sr/ 86 Sr values in the tooth enamel of 20 out of the 30 analysed skeletons agree with the estimated “local” Sr range, among them all of the children and most of the women. Ten out of the 30 sampled gave 87 Sr/ 86 Sr ratios that were outside the range of local bioavailable Sr suggest human mobility and immigration – but mainly restricted to the wider region. This suggests an influx of new people to the community and changes in the population composition across all chronological use-phases of the cemetery. Outlying Sr values and a hand-made vessel in Sarmatian pottery tradition coincide as “non-local” evidence for grave 43, but the disagreement between isotopic and archaeological outliers, for example in grave 51, shows that “non-natives” or “foreigners” cannot be detected by the archaeological analyses of grave inventories alone and that cultural identity is much more complex.