Woman-centered Celtic society unearthed in 2,000-year-old cemetery

DNA recovered from an Iron Age burial ground in southern England reveals a Celtic community where husbands moved to join their wives’ families — a rare sign of female influence and empowerment in the ancient world.

The new study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, brings to light an unusual society that that defied the norm by centering female economic and social power. The DNA recovered from 55 individuals buried at a cemetery active from around 100 B.C. to A.D. 100, instead suggests a matrilocal social network, in which women married outsiders — and their male partners moved in and left their homes behind.

For these people, thought to be members of a Celtic tribe known as the Durotriges, the bonds of kinship inherited through mothers determined where they lived.

“From what we know … patrilocality is the prevailing pattern, where wives move to be with their husbands. And that isn’t always beneficial to women — it separates them from their families, their support networks,” said Lara Cassidy, a geneticist at Trinity College Dublin and lead author of the study published in Nature. “Matrilocality is the mirror image. … Women in matrilocal societies tend to be empowered.”

Cassidy was quick to clarify that a matrilocal society doesn’t mean a matriarchy, in which women have higher status than men. Instead, it often reflects a culture in which women play a central role. They are involved in food production and labor or play a role in land inheritance. When men are absent, possibly due to warfare, matrilocal social organization is theorized to develop.

Much remains mysterious about society in Iron Age Britain. Human remains from this period are rare. The acidic soil is not suited for preservation, and many individuals may have been burned, not buried.

That’s part of what made the discovery of the burial ground near the village of Winterborne Kingston in Dorset, England, so exciting. Previous archaeological studies had revealed Iron Age women buried along with prestige items: “the girl with the chariot medallion,” for example. But the interpretation of such discoveries has been open to debate.

“Whenever you find a wealthy female burial,” Cassidy said, people assume it must have been an important person’s wife, “instead of someone important herself.”

The study adds a new line of evidence to the debate, showing definitively that a pattern of female power existed. Archaeologists at Bournemouth University have spent years excavating the cemetery. To learn more about these individuals, they partnered with experts in ancient DNA, recovering sufficient genetic material from 55 individuals to analyze whether they were related.

This confirmed they had found an extended kin group — 34 people had a genetic relative at the site. The surprise came from the analysis of their mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down from mother to child. Two dozen of them traced their maternal lineage to a common female ancestor.

The researchers then reexamined other burial sites and found 10 other communities from Iron Age Britain where maternal lineage dominated, suggesting the pattern of female power was more widespread.

Lindsay Allason-Jones, an archaeologist and honorary fellow at Newcastle University who was not involved in the study, said the research was “fascinating,” especially given how little is definitively known about this time period in Britain, when many different chiefdoms or tribes of Celtic peoples existed.

“It’s very interesting when you get something solid like this,” Allason-Jones said. But was it the dominant pattern of societal organization across Iron Age Britain? She hopes to see more evidence before making a generalization.

“Given the paucity of Iron Age bodies, it’s really quite hard to say whether this covers the whole country,” Allason-Jones said.

Another line of evidence on powerful Celtic women comes from classical texts, from potentially unreliable narrators — the Romans.

Julius Caesar wrote that British women could take multiple husbands. Descriptions of Cartimandua, a warrior-queen who ruled a tribe in the north called the Brigantes, showed that women could inherit property and divorce. Boudica of Iceni was portrayed as a tall, fierce woman, who led an uprising against the Romans.

But historians have long debated whether these stories are factual, or whether they are tainted by Roman bias — perhaps used as a cautionary tale about women who gain too much power.

Writings about “sexual promiscuity of British women: Is that propaganda, to make them seem wild and untamed, and not like good Roman women?” Cassidy said. “Julius Caesar wasn’t a trained anthropologist, and how much you can trust him is up for debate.”

In an accompanying perspective article being published in Nature, Guido Alberto Gnecchi-Ruscone, an archaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, writes: “Although Roman writers often exoticized these societies, the genetic evidence … validates some of their claims about the special role that women had in Celtic Britain.”

But the debate won’t be settled without more evidence, hopefully from more sites.

“The Romans didn’t like dealing with female rulers. Therefore, they tend to mention it,” Allason-Jones said. “I can’t help feeling if females were dominant throughout the country, it would have been mentioned [more often]. When it is mentioned, it is seen by the Romans as being weird.”