In Iron Age Britain, Descent Was Matrilineal

A scientific study with important implications for archaeology in Britain and France was published in January. Using ancient DNA analysis and testing, a team led by geneticists Lara Cassidy and Daniel Bradley from Trinity College Dublin successfully demonstrated that Iron Age people who were buried in Dorset from 100 B.C. to A.D. 100 practiced matrilocality.

This is where women from a community remain with their family group, or at least are buried with them, and take a partner from an outside group. Meanwhile, the men from that same community join another group when they find a partner. An alternative pattern is patrilocality, in which the men stay put and the women move into other groups. This social pattern was practiced on Early Bronze Age Orkney.

The new findings come from individuals buried at the Late Iron Age cemetery of Winterborne Kingston in Dorset. It’s an excellent piece of science, born from one of the U.K.’s leading research excavations, the Durotriges project of the University of Bournemouth. The Durotriges were a Late Iron Age group that lived in what is mostly now Dorset and parts of southern Wiltshire.

Not only did the Trinity team establish that the society in question was matrilocal, but they also showed that there was matrilineal descent, which is where women stay in the community and pass their genes on to the next generation. Most of the Winterborne Kingston individuals could trace their maternal line of descent back to a single woman who lived centuries before. However, the male lines of descent were very diverse, reflecting new, unrelated males coming into the community.

While some of the press coverage about the new research portrayed the findings as a surprise, archaeologists were far from shocked. Headlines suggesting that this was the first evidence of its kind failed to convey the fact that female-focused social structures have previously been suggested for some Iron Age groups by archaeologists—and for some time.

THE WIDER DEBATE

In the 1860s, Swiss anthropologist Johann Bachofen theorized from the information available to him at the time that there was a move from a matriarchal, or female-led society, to a patriarchal society only by the time of ancient Greece, meaning during the 1st millennium B.C., equivalent to the Iron Age period in Western Europe, which ran from 800 B.C. to A.D. 43.

In the U.S., anthropologist Lewis Morgan, writing in the 1870s, broadly accepted Bachofen’s proposal—also supporting this later development of patriarchal norms. He also placed such norms relatively late, in Late Iron Age Germany and Rome.

By the 1880s, these ideas were rejected by what the German scholar Friedrich Engels would later call “chauvinistically inclined English anthropologists.” These anthropologists preferred what Engels believed was the “completely mistaken” theory of John Ferguson McLellan—a contemporary Scottish amateur trained in law and mathematics—who believed that patriarchy was the natural order, existing much earlier than even ancient Greece, a position that was legitimized using evolutionary theory.

In the 1970s, Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas proposed that the social structure of the Neolithic Balkans (from around 6300 B.C. until about 5000 B.C.) was matrilineal and matriarchal based on her analysis of the archaeology, including the high number of female figurines. Gimbutas was heavily critiqued by English archaeologists, and her work is only recently being revisited.

Critically, this eastern European work contradicted the contemporary idea, formulated at the University of Cambridge, that patriarchy instead began in the Neolithic. The Cambridge idea, building out of a theoretical link suggested by Engels, was that patriarchy was tied to agricultural production. Nonetheless, recent ancient DNA work is now revealing patrilineal descent for some Neolithic groups in Britain. The error perhaps was in believing that this was a single event in a linear, evolutionary understanding of humanity through time.

Similarly, in European Iron Age studies, following the 1953–1956 discovery of the high-status Vix and Hohmichele burials—Early Iron Age women in France and Germany—European archaeologists again began to consider the possibility of matrilineal society in Early Iron Age Europe. The first to suggest this was the German archaeologist Ludwig Pauli in his 1972 discussion of the Early Iron Age burials of northern Württemberg in southwest Germany.

Subsequently, the suggestion of matriarchal Iron Age society came from French archaeologist Pierre Roualet in his 1997 discussion of the early La Tène communities, of around 450 B.C., in Champagne, where very high wealth sits with the female burials. Yet contemporary work in the U.K. focused on male “warrior” burials and romantic narratives of warrior society.

As archaeology moved into big data analysis in the 1990s, University College London archaeologist Roy Hodson published his seriation (analyzing a group of archaeological finds) for the discoveries from the Early Iron Age Hallstatt graves in Austria in 1990, showing that men and women had equal apex high status. In 2004, archaeologist Thomas Evans published his analysis of early La Tène burials in the Paris basin showing at least equally high social status between men and women, as a further apex high-status woman was excavated near the Heuneburg in Germany.

In 2011, my own analysis of the Middle Iron Age burials in Britain revealed equal treatment and access to high-status goods for men and women, with elder status more important socially than gender. At this time, the first of a series of osteological reports (the scientific study of human bone) began to suggest that some women in Britain had physically fought against Rome, interestingly enough in the Late Iron Age in Dorset.

In 2012, archaeologist Melanie Giles, from the University of Manchester, published her unparalleled analysis of Middle Iron Age Yorkshire burials, showing that some cemeteries were organized around larger, female founder burials. In 2018, I demonstrated the presence of female lineages in the Early Iron Age record from France, as Caroline Trémeaud’s big-data analysis of burials from the North Alpine region again revealed consistent high levels of female burial wealth.

Of course, we must remain clear that grave wealth may not equate to leadership, and archaeologists remain critical about that link. Yet we do find some mention of female leadership in classical texts.

Roman texts mention that women in Britain inherited wealth, led battles, and engaged in polyandry (having more than one male partner) rather than a strict marriage system. We hear of female political leaders, Boudica and Cartimandua. Further back, the ancient Greek texts tell us of the German La Téne female leader Onomaris. The Greek philosopher Plutarch mentions that Celtic women acted as political judiciary, and the ancient Greek geographer Strabo reported that among the Celts, women’s and men’s tasks “have been exchanged.”

However, such texts were rejected in the late 20th century as attempts by the authors to “barbarianize” and exoticize the people of Western Europe, which worked well alongside the contemporary theory that patriarchy began in the Neolithic.

So, for archaeologists, the possibility of matrilocality is not shocking, and Late Iron Age Dorset was probably not the first example of this. The archaeology of the Celts increasingly demonstrates variations in social norms, even between neighboring regions. The science of ancient DNA can now work to test further groups, helping to build a more complete picture of social structure in the past—perhaps returning to early scholarship before it was set off course by evolutionary theories in amateur anthropology.