Image source, BOURNEMOUTH UNIVERSITY
- Author, Georgina Rannard
- Author’s title, Science reporter, BBC
2,000 years ago women in Britain passed land and wealth to their daughters, not their sons, as communities were built around the female bloodline, according to new research.
Skeletons unearthed in Dorset contain DNA evidence that Celtic men moved to live with their wives’ families and communities.
Scientists found evidence of an entire community built around a family’s female bloodline over generations, probably originating from a woman.
“This points to an Iron Age society in Britain in which women had a lot of influence and could shape its trajectory in many ways,” explains Dr. Lara Cassidy of Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, lead author of the investigation.
Image source, BOURNEMOUTH UNIVERSITY
It is the first time in the history of ancient Europe that this evidence has been documented. of communities built around women.
Scientists believe that the communities also invested heavily in their daughters, as they would likely inherit their mother’s status.
“It’s relatively rare in modern societies, but it might not always have been that way,” Cassidy says.
The team found evidence that this occurred in numerous places in Britain, suggesting that the practice was widespread.
The communities analyzed lived around the same time as Boudica, the warrior queen who led a rebellion against Roman invaders in eastern England around AD 61.
Dr. Cassidy sequenced DNA taken from the bones of 57 individuals from a tribe called Durotriges. People lived in Winterborne Kingston, Dorset, around 100 BC to 100 AD
The skeletons were unearthed from a cemetery by a team of archaeologists from Bournemouth University, England.
By tracking mitochondrial DNA, which is only passed between women, Cassidy discovered that most of the women in the community were related by blood ties that went back to previous generations.
Instead, there was a lot of diversity in the Y chromosomes, which are passed from father to son, indicating that men from many different families married into the community.
Image source, BOURNEMOUTH UNIVERSITY
DNA analysis also indicates that most of the ancestral line can be traced back to a single woman.
The work shows that this society was what is known as matrilocal, meaning that a married man moved to live in his wife’s community.
“The most obvious benefit for a woman is that if you don’t leave home, you don’t abandon your support network. Your parents, siblings, family members are still around you,” says Dr. Cassidy.
“It is your husband who arrives, he is the stranger in the community and depends on your family for his livelihood and his land,” she adds.
The researchers they found the same evidence of matrilocality in bones from other cemeteries, including those in Cornwall and Yorkshire.
The researcher says evidence of powerful women in ancient communities has often been dismissed as isolated, not the norm, but these findings challenge that way of thinking.
Archaeologists Miles Russell and Martin Smith found other evidence that women had high status.
Image source, BOURNEMOUTH UNIVERSITY
“We found tombs decorated with great care and with objects of great value. In each of the cases they were tombs of women, so we believe that wealth was transferred through the female line,” says Professor Martin Smith of Bournemouth University.
The findings also support Roman writings of the time which suggested that women in Britain were quite powerful, more so than in Rome.
But the Romans, like Julius Caesar, saw it as a sign of backwardness.
“Women in Britain had power and it was a more egalitarian place. That was the biggest problem the Romans had with the British because Rome was a deeply patriarchal society. For them, it marked the British as the quintessential barbarians,” she says. Professor Miles Russell of Bournemouth University.
Most societies today are patrilocal, meaning that women move to their husbands’ communities.
But there are some matrilocal communities today or in the recent past, such as the Akan in Ghana, West Africa, and the Cherokee in North America.
Scientists say Iron Age Britain may have been matrilocal because men were frequently outside fighting.
Dr. Cassidy compares it to World War II, when women gained more political and economic power.
Matrilocal societies are also less likely to experience internal conflict, he says.
“They can promote feelings of unity between communities and neighboring towns. They disperse groups of related men, preventing them from developing strong loyalties and starting disputes with related men who live nearby,” suggests the researcher.
The findings were published in the scientific journal Nature.
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