Genetic evidence from Late Iron Age cemeteries suggests that women were closely related while unrelated men tended to come into the community from elsewhere, likely after marriage.
An examination of ancient DNA from 57 graves in Dorset, south-west England, showed that two-thirds of the individuals were from the same maternal lineage. This cemetery was in use from about 100 BC to 200 AD.
“It was truly jaw-dropping – it had never been seen before in European history,” said Laura Cassidy, a geneticist at Trinity College Dublin, who co-authored the study.
The results were published on Wednesday. In the journal Naturesuggest that women remained in the same circles throughout their lives – maintaining social networks and possibly inheriting or managing land and property.
/ AP
Meanwhile, “it’s your husband coming in as a relative stranger, dependent on the wife’s family for land and livelihood,” Cassidy said.
This pattern – known as matrilocality – is historically rare.
“Such matrilocal patterns have not been described in European history, but when we compare mitochondrial haplotype variation between European archaeological sites over six millennia, the dominant matrilines in British Iron Age cemeteries The presence has significantly reduced diversity.” Authors write In an article with the study.
Archaeologists studying burial sites in Britain and Europe have previously detected just the opposite pattern – women leaving their homes to join their husband’s family group – in other ancient periods, the Neolithic. From to the early Middle Ages, says Guido Gnucci-Roskin in Max. Planck Institute in Germany, who were not part of the study.
Cassidy said that in studies of pre-industrial societies around 1800, anthropologists found that men joined their wives’ family households only 8 percent of the time.
But archaeologists already knew that there was something special about the role of women in Iron Age Britain. A patchwork of tribes with closely related languages and art styles — sometimes called Celtic — lived in England before the Roman invasion in 43 AD. Valuable objects have been found buried with Celtic women, and Roman writers, including Julius Caesar, wrote with disgust. Their relative independence and ability to fight.
The pattern of strong female kinship ties that the researchers found did not necessarily mean that women also held formal positions of political power, known as matriarchy.
But it suggests that women had some control over land and property, as well as strong social support, which made Britain’s Celtic society “the Roman world,” said study co-author Miles Russell, an archaeologist at Bournemouth University. makes it more egalitarian than
“When the Romans arrived, they were shocked to see women in positions of power,” Russell said.
He told AFP that some doubted these accounts, suggesting that “the Romans exaggerated the freedom of British women to portray a more insecure society.”
“But archaeology, and now genetics, means that women were influential in many areas of Iron Age life.”
“Indeed, it is possible that maternal ancestry was the basic structure of group identity.”
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report.