In this Iron Age society, husbands moved in with their wives’ families, not other way around

Geneticist Lara Cassidy wasn’t surprised to find several generations of the same family buried in an Iron Age cemetery near Dorset, England.

But she was quite surprised to find most of them were related along a single matrilineal line.

“They were related to their mothers and their grandmothers,” Cassidy, who studies ancient DNA at Trinity College Dublin, told As It Happens host Nil Kӧksal. 

“That tells us that women are staying put, daughters are staying put. They’re not leaving when they reach adulthood.”

The findings, published in the journal Nature, suggest the Celtic tribe, known as the Durotriges, was matrilocal — meaning that when women married, their husbands joined their homes and families, and not the other way around. 

This further suggests Iron Age Celtic women were, perhaps, at the very heart of social networks in their communities, staying in the same circles throughout life, maintaining social networks and likely inheriting or managing land and property.

Very rare, but maybe not as rare as we thought

The study focused on an examination of ancient DNA from 57 graves in southwest England, which showed that two-thirds of the individuals were descended from a single maternal line.

Those who weren’t related to the dominant line were men, which, according to the researchers, suggests they likely arrived from other communities to live with their wives’ families. 

“That’s rare in societies we know from the past few centuries,” Cassidy said.

While Durotriges lived more than 2,000 years ago, Cassidy says most recorded matrilocal societies date back just a few hundred years in Africa, Southeast Asia and the Americas,.

In studies of pre-industrial societies from around 1800 to the present, anthropologists found that men join their wives’ extended family households only eight per cent of the time, said Cassidy.

Guido Gnecchi-Ruscone, an archaeogenecist from the Max Planck Institute in Germany, agrees.

He says archaeologists studying grave sites in Britain and Europe have previously only detected 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 Medieval period.

While the authors hail this as the first discovery of a matrilocal structure in European prehistory, it may not be the only one.

The researchers are sifting through data from prior genetic surveys of Iron Age Britain, and say they are already finding other examples. 

Romans shocked by women’s power

The cemetery was used from around 100 BC to 200 AD, both before and after the Roman invasion in 43 AD.

When Romans arrived, they were “astonished” to find women in positions of power, according to their writings from that period, says excavation director Miles Russel, an archaeologist at the U.K.’s Bournemouth University.

“It’s been suggested that the Romans exaggerated the liberties of British women to paint a picture of an untamed society. But archaeology, and now genetics, implies women were influential in many spheres of Iron Age life. Indeed, it is possible that maternal ancestry was the primary shaper of group identities,” Russel said in a press release.

Still, Cassidy was quick to note that, historically, matrilocal does not mean matriarchal. 

“Men still generally hold more positions of formal authority,” she said. 

That said, it’s a structure that offers woman benefits they wouldn’t have if they had to leave their homes and communities in order to join their husbands’ families and households, she said. 

“Women can also have very influential roles far beyond the domestic sphere. There’s fewer barriers to female political participation and female political leadership as well,” she said.

In fact, she says, it’s not uncommon to find women in Iron Age Britain buried with valuable items, which she says “suggests that that women could attain quite high status in their societies.”

“So we’re not saying women ruled and men were oppressed,” she said. “What we are saying is [there is] more empowerment for women in these societies.”