The remarkable wealth and variety of the archaeological record offers unique opportunities for the refinement of the Early Avar chronology and, as consequence, for the reconstruction of the cultural and possibly ethnic conditions in the Carpathian Basin in the late 500s and during the seventh century. Any attempt at studying the ethnic and cultural interactions within the early Avar qaganate must start from identifying those phenomena and artifact assemblages, which off er new information about dress, spirituality, social stratifi cation, lifeways, and modes of production. This chapter is a survey of the most recent advances in the archaeology of the Avar age.

In the north-western territory of Romania (Fig. 1), four sites were recorded where cemeteries and graves were discovered, which, based on the grave-goods, belonged, beyond any doubt, to Avar warriors. The archaeological remains come from: Căuaș, Dindești, Săcueni/Veresdomb, Valea lui Mihai/Rétalj (see Table 1 and the catalogue of finds). According to the chronology of the metal pieces, the Avar warrior graves from north-west Romania may be framed in the last two great periods within the evolution of the Avar Khaganate (Table 2). North‑west Romania lay on the periphery of the “political border” of the Avar Khaganate. Very likely, the north-western corner of Romania represented a territory which politically was subordinated to the secondary Avar centre of power located on the territory of the city of Nyíregyháza, on the Upper Tisza. From there, high-ranking warriors within the hierarchy of the Khaganate, like the ones from Valea lui Mihai/Rétalj, Căuaș, and Dindești were sent to control the human communities in the north-western areas of Romania.As a general conclusion, one may argue that strategically, not the entire north-western territory of Romania was an area of interest for the Avar Khagans from Pannonia during the 7th – 8th centuries. The Avar cemeteries and graves are found and cluster only in the Upper Er River Basin. The northern part of Sătmar, Oaș, Maramureș and the western parts of Sălaj lay outside the effective borders of the Avar Khaganate. For Maramureș, current data disprove even the existence of a ‘control’ of the territory carried out by Avar warriors. Instead, for Oaș, north of Sătmar, and the western parts of Sălaj one may invoke the term of ‘control from a distance’, a strategy used by the Avar Khagans for certain territories situated outside of the effective borders of the empire.

In this study 66 individuals from the Carpathian Basin were analysed, including the eight richest Avar graves ever discovered, overflowing with golden objects. The study included other individuals from the region prior to and during the Avar age “We address a question that has been a mystery for more than 1400 years: who were the Avar elites, mysterious founders of an empire that almost crushed Constantinople and for more than 200 years ruled in Carpathian Basin? The Avars did not leave written records about their history and these first genome-wide data provide robust clues about their origins. The historical contextualization of the archaeogenetic results allowed us to narrow the timing of the proposed Avar migration. They covered more than 5000 km in a few years from Mongolia to the Caucasus, and after ten more years settled in what is now Hungary. This is the fastest long-distance migration in human history that we can reconstruct up to that point. Besides their clear affinity to Northeast Asia and their likely origin due to the fall of the Rouran Empire, we also see that the 7th-century Avar period elites show 20-30% of additional non-local ancestry, likely associated with the North Caucasus and the Western Asian Steppe, which could suggest further migration from the Steppe after their arrival in the 6th century. The East Asian ancestry is found in individuals from several sites in the core settlement area between the Danube and Tisza rivers in modern day central Hungary. However, outside the primary settlement region we find high variability in inter-individual levels of admixture. This suggests an immigrant Avars elite ruling a diverse population with the help of a heterogeneous local elite.

After 568 AD the Avars settled in the Carpathian Basin and founded the Avar Qaganate that was an important power in Central Europe until the 9th century. Part of the Avar society was probably of Asian origin; however, the localisation of their homeland is hampered by the scarcity of historical and archaeological data. Here, we study mitogenome and Y chromosomal variability of twenty-six individuals, a number of them representing a well-characterised elite group buried at the centre of the Carpathian Basin more than a century after the Avar conquest. The studied group has maternal and paternal genetic affinities to several ancient and modern East-Central Asian populations. The majority of the mitochondrial DNA variability represents Asian haplogroups (C, D, F, M, R, Y and Z). The Y-STR variability of the analysed elite males belongs only to five lineages, three N-Tat with mostly Asian parallels and two Q haplotypes. The homogeneity of the Y chromosomes reveals paternal kinship as a cohesive force in the organisation of the Avar elite strata on both social and territorial level. Our results indicate that the Avar elite arrived in the Carpathian Basin as a group of families, and remained mostly endogamous for several generations after the conquest. The Carpathian Basin in East-Central Europe is generally regarded as the westernmost point of the Eurasian steppe, and as such, its history was often influenced by the movements of nomadic people of eastern origin. After 568 AD, the Avars settled in the Carpathian Basin and founded their empire which was a powerful player in the geopolitical arena of Central and Eastern Europe for a quarter of a millennium 1,2. The hypothesis of the Asian origin of the Avars appeared as early as the 18th century. Since then various research approaches emerged indicating different regions as their home of origin: i.e. Central or East-Central Asia (see SI chapter 1b for explanation of this geographic term). This debate remained unresolved, however a rising number of evidences points towards the latter one 1,2. The history of the Avars is known from external, mainly Byzantine written accounts of diplomatic and historical character focusing on certain events and important people for the Byzantine Empire. As an example, the description of a Byzantine diplomatic mission in 569-570 AD visiting the Western Turkic Qaganate in Central Asia, claimed that their ruler complained about the escape of his subjects, the Avars 2-4. The linguistic data concerning the Avars are limited to a handful of personal names and titles (Qagan, Bayan, Yugurrus, Tarkhan, etc.) mostly of East-Central Asian origin, known from the same Byzantine written accounts.