This month, a team of researchers from Trinity College Dublin and Bournemouth University published a new study in the journal Nature that upends our understanding of women’s roles in ancient Celtic society in Britain.
Missing burials in Iron Age Britain
Prior to the publication of this study, relatively little was known about the social structure of Iron Age populations in Britain due to the scarcity of human skeletal remains from this period. Researchers are uncertain why so few burials have survived from this period, but it is possible that it is related to how ancient Britons treated the dead. They may have placed burials in environments like bogs or wetlands, where bones are less likely to preserve, or practiced cremation, leaving limited remains behind.
This shortage of skeletal evidence has made it challenging to answer important questions about Iron Age social organization, such as how people moved within society after marriage. However this changed when archaeologists discovered a rare, well-preserved Iron Age cemetery in Dorset in southern England, where members of a tribe known as the Durotriges—a name preserved in the writings of Ptolemy, the 2nd century Greek geographer and astronomer—were buried.
Discovering a matrilocal society
The research team sequenced the genomes of 55 individuals who were buried in this ancient cemetery—in addition to two other Durotrigian women who were buried nearby—in order to investigate the family structure of Celtic populations in southern Britain during the Late Iron Age.
They discovered that most of the people buried in the cemetery descended from a single maternal lineage that spanned generations. This discovery suggests that the society practiced matrilocality—where men moved to live with their wives’ families. In human history, matrilocality is far less common than patrilocality, where women join their husbands’ families. Remarkably, this study uncovered the earliest known case of matrilocality among ancient Europeans.
When the researchers expanded their analysis to other ancient European sites with available ancient DNA, they found that similar patterns of matrilocality were observed only in other Celtic populations in Britain. This suggests that matrilocality may have been a distinctive feature of Iron Age Britons, setting them apart from other ancient European societies.
These findings align with Roman accounts of the unique and influential roles women held in Celtic Britain. For instance, Julius Caesar wrote about British women taking multiple husbands, while historical records highlight two prominent female leaders: Cartimandua, the warrior queen of the Brigantes, and Boudica of the Iceni, who led a revolt against Roman rule.
While matrilocal societies are not necessarily matriarchal (where women hold higher social status than men), such practices are more likely to occur in matrilocal systems than in patrilocal ones.
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Interested in learning whether you share a genetic connection to this lineage of Celtic women? Thanks to Historical MatchesSM our 23andMe+® Premium membership feature, you can find out if you share a genetic connection with the individuals whose DNA was sequenced as part of this study.
