The DNA of more than 500 individuals who were buried in the north-east of England over a period of several centuries before the Roman invasion of Britain in AD 43 has been sequenced. It reveals a society organised around women, with large clans for which descent could be traced down the female line for up to nine generations, but where fathers were often absent from burial sites.
The study also reveals that some women had multiple male partners and shows a pattern of repeated unions between two maternal clans. “It’s revolutionary, and will totally change the way we think about the Iron Age,” says at the University of Liverpool in the UK, who wasn’t involved in the study.
It was suggested in the 1860s that early societies were female-led, but the idea was rejected by later anthropologists, who assumed male-led societies were the natural order. From the 1950s onwards, however, discoveries in Europe of of ancient women showed that in some societies women could be of high status at the very least.
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More recently, studies of ancient DNA have begun adding to the evidence. Last year a study of around 50 individuals buried in south-west England revealed that women remained in their ancestral homes while men moved around, a pattern known as matrilocality.
Now at the University of York, UK, and his colleagues have sequenced the DNA of around 500 individuals associated with the Arras culture, famed for its chariot burials. The remains of nearly 400 of these individuals were excavated by other archaeological teams at Wetwang Slack in the East Riding of Yorkshire, which was most active between the fourth and second centuries BC and is the largest known Iron Age burial ground in Britain. The rest came from nearby sites.
The Arras DNA also reveals a strong matrilocal pattern. Most of the women buried at Wetwang Slack also had close relatives buried there, such as a mother, for instance, but this was rarer for men. In a few cases, the team found direct evidence that a man originating from one site fathered children at another – in other words, that men moved around while women stayed put.
Matrilocality by itself doesn’t necessarily mean that women ruled a society. But it is generally associated with higher status and better conditions for women. An individual who leaves home to live with the family of a partner is reliant on that family and thus is in a weaker position than one who stays.
However, when the DNA evidence is combined with other evidence, it does point to societies where women could rule. “For Britain, the archaeological evidence supports a more equitable Iron Age than scholars had previously imagined, and some powerful women were certainly part of that,” says Pope. “From [bone injuries], we can even see now that some women were in combat with Rome.”
“Powerful Iron Age women abound in the texts: Onomaris, Boudica, Cartimandua, Celts with their women as judges,” she says. “Historians of the 1860s and 1870s believed in a largely matriarchal Iron Age until 1880s English anthropology asserted a patriarchal norm.”
That said, there was also regional diversity in how societies were organised, says Pope. Other DNA studies suggest that Iron Age societies in south-east England, for instance, .
At least 12 of the Arras women had children with more than one man. This could reflect serial monogamy, the team members – who declined to be interviewed for this story – write in a preprint, but it could also reflect “polyandrous reproductive arrangements within a strongly female-line-centred social structure”. In other words, women could have had multiple husbands simultaneously, as some Roman sources claim was the case.
The team did find one case where a man had children with a woman and with her daughter, but this was exceptional.
The genetics also show that individuals from the same maternal lineage avoided having children with each other. Because these people lived in small groups in which a large proportion of people were related, this must have been deliberate and based on knowledge of people’s ancestry. “[T]his avoidance demonstrates detailed knowledge of maternal-line affiliation across many generations and possibly hundreds of years,” the study concludes.
The exceptions to this were the three individuals – two male, one female – buried with chariots. “The individuals afforded chariot burials at Wetwang Slack stood apart by showing recurrent close kin unions, consistent with a reproductive strategy in which high status, identity and claims to particular forms of burial were concentrated within a restricted descent group,” the study says.
All these lines of evidence point to a society organised around women rather than men, the researchers conclude. “[F]emale-line descent was not an incidental feature of Arras culture communities, but a central organising principle, as it may well have been across the communities of Iron Age Britain more broadly.”
“It is an excellent paper, closely argued and very rich in data and inference,” says at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, who was part of the team that studied the 50 or so individuals buried in south-west England.
“We did notice a tendency for marriage across [maternal lineages] in our study, but the finding here of a sustained pattern of unions between two different maternal clan groups is really striking. It implies a deep knowledge of family histories – of which maternal social axis one belonged to – and perhaps of an alliance forming between them,” Bradley says.
bioRxiv
