Celtic women held sway in 'matrilocal' societies

A tantalizing vision of a women-centric society has emerged from an ancient cemetery in the bucolic countryside of southwest England.

Whereas women commonly left home to join their husbands' families upon marriage, the Durotriges, a Celtic tribe that lived in Dorset 2,000 years ago, bucked the mold with a system called matrilocality, wherein women remained in their ancestral communities and men migrated for marriage.

By analysing the genomes of 57 Durotrigan people buried sometime from about 100 BC to AD 100, scientists found maternal lineages typical of matrilocality. This was the first time this system had been identified in European prehistory.

Meanwhile, individuals with ancestries unrelated to the dominant line were mostly men, suggesting that they had moved from other communities to live with the families of their wives, according to a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

"I was not expecting such a strong signature of matrilocality," said Lara Cassidy, an assistant professor in genetics at Trinity College Dublin who led the study. "When that came out of the data, it was a bit of a shock."

"But upon reflection, if you look at what classical writers were talking about and if you look at the archaeological context, there are a lot of hints that women were able to attain high status in these societies," she added.

The liberties of Celtic women have been a hot topic for thousands of years. Roman writers were scandalized by reports of their sexual freedoms, which included taking multiple husbands. Cartimandua and Boudica, early female leaders in Britain, demonstrated that women could reach the highest levels of power, commanding armies and heading tribes.

Archaeological evidence also hints at flexible gender dynamics that varied widely depending on local traditions. For instance, Celtic women were sometimes buried with luxurious grave goods such as jewelry and mirrors, a marker of high status. Patrilocality, whereby women live near their in-laws, is still far more culturally common, but female-centric societies are not as unheard-of as they were even a decade ago.

"It's a generational paradigm shift," said Rachel Pope, an associate professor in European prehistory at the University of Liverpool with expertise in matrilocality who was not involved in the study. "It's partly a trend in archaeology more generally, where we have returned to data and material evidence to lead narrative, rather than imposing narratives that confirm our own biases."

In other words, scientists are working on big data projects, such as genome analysis, to pin down patterns in social structures with a level of accuracy that cannot be obtained from other sources like the accounts of classical writers with their own agendas and biases.

Britain's Iron Age peoples left behind few human remains, but the cemetery at the heart of the new study is the rare exception. Generations of Durotrigan people are buried at the site, which was discovered in 2008 near the town of Winterborne Kingston and is still being excavated.

The remains sampled in the study were "hot off the press, so to speak," Cassidy said. "It's quite a rare opportunity to get a site like this, where you have lots of unburned burials in the same cemetery. It was a really unique opportunity to study the composition of a British Iron Age community and look at family relationships and social organization."

The team's analysis revealed that dozens of individuals were descended from a single rare matriline, including an adult woman, her daughter, her adult granddaughters and a likely great-grandson. Eight of 10 family members who were not part of this matriline were male, some of whom presumably married into the community.

The team also searched for genetic markers of matrilocality across remains from more than 150 archaeological sites spanning 6,000 years, and discovered several groups with similar patterns of female-line descent. Comparative studies of ancient DNA could reveal the extent and the distribution of matrilocal societies in the Iron Age. Cassidy cautioned, however, that matrilocality should not be equated with matriarchy, a system where women are the main power brokers.

Matrilocality offers "better outcomes, empowerment for women, relative to a patrilocal setup," Cassidy said. "But you still see, in matrilocal societies, that men tend to dominate in formal positions of authority. They tend to be the village chief more often, but they might not get elected without the help of their daughters, sisters and wives, who have soft power and a lot of influence. They aren't just confined to the domestic sphere."

Bettina Arnold, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, said in an email that the new study raised "some intriguing questions" about variations in gender configurations in Iron Age Europe.

"The fact that women appear to have had greater influence and autonomy in the Celtic-speaking areas of Europe has been hypothesized for some time and in that sense these findings are not novel," said Arnold, who was not involved in the study. "What is new is the fact that the males in the sample appear to have been marrying in and then were buried with their wives' kin group." She suggested that future studies should untangle the origins of these men to discern how far they traveled to be in this community.

Pope called the study "groundbreaking" and said it validated what many archaeologists had long suspected about the fluid nature of Celtic life.

"Human society, even in one time slice from the Iron Age, is radically different in different regions of Europe," Pope said. "We're getting closer to an increasingly scientific understanding of all these differences -- the burials, the genetics and the textual evidence as well. It's really quite cool."