Scientists say ancient DNA from graves reveals ‘amazing’ find of Iron Age women in UK

Female family ties were at the heart of social networks in Celtic society in Britain before the Roman invasion, a new analysis suggests.

Genetic evidence from a late Iron Age cemetery shows that women were closely related while independent men tended to come into the community from elsewhere, probably after marriage.

An examination of ancient DNA recovered from 57 graves in Dorset in southwest England shows that two-thirds of the individuals are descended from a single maternal line. The cemetery was used from about 100 BC to 200 AD

“It was really stunning – it’s never been observed before in European prehistory,” said study co-author Lara Cassidy, a geneticist at Trinity College Dublin.

The results, published on Wednesday in the journal NatureThey suggest that women stayed in the same circles throughout their lives – maintaining social networks and probably inheriting or managing land and property.

Meanwhile “it is your husband who comes as a relative stranger, dependent on the wife’s family for land and sustenance,” Cassidy said.

This pattern – called matrilocality – is historically rare.

“Such a matrilocal pattern has not been described in European prehistory, but when we compare mitochondrial haplotype variation among European archaeological sites over six millennia, British Iron Age cemeteries stand out as having marked reductions in the diversity driven by the presence of dominant matrilines”. the authors write in an article accompanying the study.

Archaeologists studying grave 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 times, from the Neolithic at the beginning of the Middle Ages, said Guido Gnecchi-Ruscone to the Max. Planck Institute in Germany, which was not part of the study.

In studies of pre-industrial societies from about 1800 to today, anthropologists have found that men join their wives’ families only 8% of the time, Cassidy said.

But archaeologists already knew 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 AD 43. Valuable objects were found buried with Celtic women, and Roman writers, including Julius Caesar, wrote scornfully about their relative independence and fighting prowess.

The pattern of strong female kinship ties that the researchers found does not necessarily imply that women also held formal positions of political power, called matriarchy.

But it suggests that women had some control over land and property, as well as strong social support, making British Celtic society “more egalitarian than the Roman world,” said the study’s co-author and University archaeologist. of Bournemouth Miles Russell.

“When the Romans arrived, they were amazed to find women holding positions of power,” Russell said.

Some had doubted these accounts, suggesting “that the Romans exaggerated the freedoms of British women to paint a picture of a savage society”, he told AFP.

“But archaeology, and now genetics, implies that women were influential in many spheres of Iron Age life,” he said.

“Indeed, it is possible that maternal descent was the primary form of group identity.”

Agence France-Presse contributed to this report.