Late Iron Age Durotrigan Burial at Winterborne Kingston in Dorset, UK
Bournemouth University
Genetic analysis of people buried in a 2,000-year-old cemetery in southern England has reinforced the idea that Celtic communities in Britain placed women in the spotlight, showing that women stayed in their ancestral homes while men moved from other communities, the practice. It lasted for centuries.
The work supports growing archaeological evidence that women held a high status in Celtic societies across Europe, including Britain, and lends credence to Roman written accounts that often felt exaggerated for Mediterranean audiences when they depicted Celtic women as powerful.
Since 2009, human remains of the Durotriges tribe have been unearthed during excavations of an Iron Age burial site at Winterborne Kingston in Dorset, UK. The Durotrige occupied the south coast of central England from 100 BC to BC
Human remains in Iron Age Britain are rare as they were destroyed by mainstream funerary practices, including cremation or leaving bodies in wetlands. However, the Durotriges buried them in formal cemeteries in the chalk landscape, which helped protect them. Archaeologists have found that women at Durotrigan were more often buried with valuable items, suggesting a high status and possibly female-oriented society.
Lara Cassidy At Trinity College Dublin and colleagues analyzed the genomes of 55 Durotrigan individuals from Winterborne Kingston to shed light on how they related to each other and to other Iron Age populations in Britain and Europe.
Cassidy says there were two big “aha moments.” Both were related to mitochondrial DNA, the small loops of DNA that we inherit only through the maternal line, because they are passed on through the egg cell and do not integrate with other DNA.
As the results of each individual’s mitochondrial DNA came in, the team noticed that the same genetic sequence appeared over and over again. It was evident that more than two-thirds of the individuals descended from a single maternal lineage, originating from a common female ancestor several centuries earlier.
“My jaw dropped at that moment,” Cassidy says. “This was a clear signature of matrilocality, or husbands moving in with their wives’ families, a pattern we had never seen before in prehistoric Europe.” Patrilocality, in which a woman moves into the community of her male partner, is common.
To find out whether the matrilocal pattern was a distinct phenomenon of the Durotriges, or whether it might have spread across Britain, Cassidy began digging through data from a large genetic survey of Iron Age Britain and earlier Iron Age Europe. His jaw dropped again. He noticed burial grounds in Great Britain where most individuals were maternally descended from a small set of female ancestors.
Cassidy says it adds to the growing body of evidence that Iron Age women were quite empowered. “Matrilocality usually co-occurs with cultural practices that favor women and keep them embedded in family support networks,” she explains.
In modern societies, matrilocality has been associated with greater female involvement in food production, greater paternity uncertainty, and prolonged male absence. In such societies, it is the man who migrates to a new community as a relative stranger and is dependent on his partner’s family for his livelihood.
“Men typically still dominate formal positions of authority, but women can wield considerable influence through their strong matrilineal kin networks and their central role in the local economy,” says Cassidy.
Cassidy’s team compared the DNA dataset from Britain with data from other European sites, revealing repeated waves of migration across the continent, consistent with archaeological evidence. This showed that southern Britain was a site of cultural and genetic exchange between 2500 BC and 1200 BC during the Bronze Age, as well as a previously unknown late Iron Age flood during the Durotriges period.
Previous research has suggested that The Celtic languages probably came to Britain Between 1000 and 875 Ka, but new discoveries open that window. “Celtic languages probably came in more than once,” says Cassidy.
“This is very exciting new research and is revolutionizing how we understand prehistoric society,” he says Rachel Pope at the University of Liverpool, UK, who has previously found evidence of female kinship in Iron Age Europe. “What we are learning is that the nature of European society before the Romans was very different.”
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