In Iron Age Britain, women were the pillars of society. This was before Rome, under the leadership of Emperor Claudius, decided to invade the island in 43 AD.
To find out, researchers sequenced the genomes of fifty Celts buried together in the south of England. Thanks to this discovery and the resulting analyses, the study group has solid evidence concerning descent from a female line, ScienceAlert teaches us.
Among this group, which lived before and after the Roman invasion, two-thirds were descended from a single female ancestor, while 80% of non-family members were male. For Lara Cassidy, from Trinity College Dublin, “this tells us that husbands were moving to join their wives’ communities after marriage, with land potentially passed down through the female line.”
On archaeological sites, it has also been observed that the most sumptuous burials were reserved for women, a sign, again, of notable social status.
The dig, which focused around the Dorset site, was compared to the rest of Britain, drawing on a large database of DNA identified on the island and dating back to the same time. Through this process, researchers wanted to understand whether matrilocal societies (in which couples live in the location of the wife’s mother) were common.
The winners write history, but so do genetics
They can determine this tendency thanks to mitochondrial DNA, which is transmitted exclusively from the mother. For example, in an Iron Age cemetery in Yorkshire, a dominant maternal line dates back to 400 BC. But Lara Cassidy emphasizes one point: the term “matrilocal” should not be confused with of “matriarchal”. She says why in the columns of the New York Times: “Men may also have held positions of authority in British Celtic society.”
Another surprising fact: it turned out that women could lead armies. This is what the writings of the Roman historian Dio Cassius reveal, who speaks of Boadicea, a particularly formidable warrior queen, endowed with above-average intelligence – which was, moreover, considered a constitutive characteristic of women .
Miles Russell, who heads the excavation in Dorset, explains that the role of women on the British island was probably deliberately exaggerated by the Romans: “It has been suggested that the Romans amplified the freedoms of British women to give the image of a savage society. But archaeology, and now genetics, show that women were influential in many areas of life during the Iron Age.”
According to the well-known adage, the winners write history. Genes, too, can tell us something from a distant time.
Source: www.slate.fr
