Ancient Celtic Society Revolved Around Women

For millennia leading up to 800BC, communities in Britain were centered around male bloodlines, meaning that upon marriage, women left their homes to join the communities of their husbands. But that appears to have changed with the dawning of the Iron Age. New research, based in part on a Celtic burial site in southern England, indicates patrilocality gave way to matrilocality, the societal system in which men leave home to live with their wives' families. In such a case, the man is "the relative stranger to the community," dependent on his wife "for his livelihood and land," Lara Cassidy, a geneticist at Trinity College Dublin, tells the BBC. "This points to an Iron Age society in Britain where women wielded quite a lot of influence."

Cassidy and colleagues sequenced DNA from more than 50 individuals from a Dorset burial site of the Celtic tribe known as the Durotriges, dated from 100BC to AD100, expecting to find men sharing a Y chromosome, which is passed from father to son. Instead, they found two dozen individuals with shared mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from mother to child. "I was like, 'Oh my God,'" Cassidy, lead author of the research published Wednesday in Nature, tells NPR. It's "never seen before in European prehistory to have so many people all related through the female line." It wasn't a matriarchy where women dominated positions of power, but women were the center of the social network, giving them social and economic power.

And this wasn't just one place, one tribe. Researchers found matrilocal connections across hundreds of genomes taken from 10 other Iron Age communities across Britain, per the Washington Post. They also found graves of women buried with high-status items, indicating wealth was passed down the female line, per the BBC. Researchers say matrilocality may have been a response to war, with men often away fighting. Cassidy compares it to the way women gained political and economic power during World War II. While this appears to be a first in Europe, Yale University cultural anthropologist Carol Ember notes matrilocality "does make up some 15% of the anthropological record," including in Native American communities and in Central Africa, per NPR. (More archaeology stories.)