Family ties: deciphering the DNA of the Amesbury Archer and the Companion

Twenty years ago, one of the richest Bell Beaker burials ever found in Europe was discovered close to Stonehenge. At that time, DNA analysis was not sufficiently advanced to learn more about the individual, dubbed ‘the Amesbury Archer’ – but the intervening decades have seen significant scientific advances that have shed illuminating light on this enigmatic figure, as well as his relationship to a younger man buried nearby. Andrew Fitzpatrick, Jacqueline McKinley, Alistair Barclay, Ian Armit, Iñigo Olalde, and David Reich report on what has been revealed.

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Current Archaeology

January 31, 2022

Since the discovery of his 4,600-year-old grave by Wessex Archaeology in 2002, the Amesbury Archer has become one of the most-celebrated individuals in European prehistory. Buried around three miles from Stonehenge in the 24th century BC, he was accompanied by one of, if not the, largest and most-diverse collections of grave goods of any Bell Beaker burial in Europe (see CA 184 and 265). Burials like these represent part of a Copper Age and early Bronze Age cultural phenomenon (named after the characteristic bell-shaped ‘Beaker’ pots often accompanying the dead) that arrived in Britain from the Continent c.2450 BC. Examples have been excavated at sites across the Isles, but the Amesbury

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