From Neanderthals to royal courts, history seems awash with women upping sticks to join men’s families, but researchers have found that the tables were turned in Britain’s Celtic communities.
Researchers studying DNA from iron age individuals in Britain have found evidence that men moved to join their wives’ families – a practice known as matrilocality.
Dr Lara Cassidy, first author of the research from Trinity College Dublin said the findings challenged assumptions that most societies were patrilocal, with men staying put.
“Potentially there are periods in time where matrilocality is much more common and that has really important knock-on effects for how we view women in the past and their roles and their influences in society,” she said.
“There’s an awful habit that we still have when we look at women in the past to view them solely within the domestic sphere with little agency, and studies like this are highlighting that this is not the case at all. In a lot of societies today and in the past, women wield huge influence and huge power, and it’s good to remember that,” she said.
Writing in the journal Nature, archaeologists report how they studied the genomes of more than 50 individuals buried in a cluster of cemeteries in Dorset. Most of these individuals were associated with the Durotriges tribe, a Celtic group that occupied the central southern coast of Britain from about 100BC to AD100.
These sites have previously been of interest to experts, not only because iron age burials are rare but because the women tended to be buried with valuable items more often than the men.
“That is suggesting not much of a status difference between men and women, or even perhaps higher-status burials for women,” said Cassidy. “How that actually then translates into the role of women in the society, that’s hard to say. And that’s why genetic data adds another important dimension there.”
Cassidy and colleagues analysed DNA and mitochondrial DNA – genetic material from within the cells’ powerhouses – revealing that the majority of individuals were related to each other.
Crucially, many shared the same mitochondrial DNA – genetic material that is passed down only from mothers to their offspring. “They all were female-line descendants, [from the] same woman,” said Cassidy.
The team say this genetic evidence and modelling work suggest the community was matrilocal: in other words, the women stayed put, with men moving into the group to join their wives.
The conclusion was supported by considerable diversity in the Y chromosome of the men, with males showing significantly lower levels of genetic relatedness to other individuals, and by males being more likely to have different mitochondrial DNA than that which was widely shared.
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The team then looked at DNA from other iron age burial sites across Britain, again finding signs of matrilocal communities. “It’s looking that this is quite widespread across the island by that period,” said Cassidy.
While the study does not reveal whether the iron age societies had tribal groupings organised specifically around the maternal line, or suggest there was a matriarchy, the results offer new insights into the communities.
“Matrilocality is a strong predictor of female social and political empowerment,” Cassidy said, noting that if the women stayed put, they were more likely to inherit, control land, be players in the local economy, and have influence.
Writing in an accompanying article, Dr Guido Alberto Gnecchi Ruscone from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, said the findings echoed Roman writings that depicted Celtic women, such as Boudicca, as empowered figures.
“Although Roman writers often exoticised these societies,” he wrote, “the genetic evidence shown by Cassidy and colleagues validates some of their claims about the special role that women had in Celtic Britain.”
Source: theguardian.com
