New analysis suggests that female family ties were at the heart of social networks in Celtic society in Britain before the Roman conquest.
Genetic evidence from a Late Iron Age cemetery shows that women were closely related while unrelated men tended to come into the community from elsewhere, most likely after marriage.
that Ancient DNA examination A find recovered from 57 graves in Dorset, southwest England, shows that two-thirds of individuals are descended from a single maternal line. The cemetery was used from about 100 BC to 200 AD
“This was really amazing, and had never been observed before in European prehistory,” said study co-author Lara Cassidy, a geneticist at Trinity College Dublin.
The findings, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, suggest that women remained in the same circles throughout life — maintaining social networks and being more likely to inherit or manage land and property.
Meanwhile, Cassidy said, “It’s your husband who comes in as a relative outsider, and is dependent on the wife’s family for land and livelihood.”
This pattern – called matriarchy – is historically rare.
Archaeologists studying grave sites in Britain and Europe had previously discovered only the opposite pattern – women leaving their homes to join their husband’s family group – in other ancient time periods, from the Neolithic to the early Middle Ages, said Guido Genici Rusconi of Maxx University. The Planck Institute in Germany, which was not part of the study.
In studies of pre-industrial societies from about 1800 to the present, anthropologists have found that men join their wives’ extended 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 group of tribes with closely related languages and artistic styles – sometimes referred to as the 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 disdain for their relative independence and martial prowess.
The pattern of strong female kinship ties the researchers found does not necessarily mean that women also hold formal positions of political power, called matriarchy.
But this suggests that women had some control over land and property, as well as strong social support, making Celtic society in Britain “more egalitarian than in the Roman world,” said study co-author and Bournemouth University archaeologist Miles Russell.
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