Scientists Discover Celtic Society Where Men Left Home to Join Their Bride’s Community

In 2008, archaeologists discovered a large cemetery in southwest England. Located near the village of Winterborne Kingston in Dorset, the burial ground contained human remains dating back to Britain’s Iron Age, which lasted from around 800 B.C.E. to 43 C.E. The bodies belonged to a Celtic tribe known as the Durotriges.

Since intact remains from this period are rare, the researchers were happy to have discovered the cemetery in the first place. But when they began to sequence DNA from dozens of bodies buried at the site, they were in for an even bigger surprise.

The DNA analysis showed that many of the individuals in this community shared the same mitochondrial DNA, which gets passed down from mothers to children. They were related through the female line.

This indicates that the group was what’s known as a “matrilocality,” in which newly married men left their families to join their bride’s community. Matrilocalities are relatively rare in prehistoric Europe: After marriage, women typically left their community to join their new husband’s village in an arrangement known as a “patrilocality.”

The Durotriges who lived in southwest England are thought to be among the first recorded matrilocal systems in European prehistory, reports the New York Times’ Becky Ferreira. The researchers reported their findings in a new study published this week in the journal Nature.

In total, the team studied the genomes of 57 individuals buried at the site between 100 B.C.E to 100 C.E. Many of the Durotriges could be traced back to the same shared female ancestor, including an adult woman, her daughter, her granddaughters and potentially her great-grandson. Most of the individuals who did not share the same matrilineal DNA were male, which suggests they married into the group.

“My jaw dropped,” says lead author Lara Cassidy, a geneticist at Trinity College Dublin, to New Scientist’s James Urquhart. “This was a clear signature of matrilocality, or husbands moving to live with their wives’ families—a pattern we’d never seen before in prehistoric Europe.”

Armed with these results, the researchers began to look for other traces of matrilocality across prehistoric Britain. They investigated human remains from more than 150 archaeological sites covering a period of roughly 6,000 years—and found several other examples of matrilocal communities in Britain.

“The results are intriguing because they show a very, very different scenario in comparison to other regions of Europe,” says Marta Cintas Peña, an archaeologist at the University of Seville who was not involved with the research, to NPR’s Ari Daniel.

It’s still not clear exactly how prevalent matrilocal communities were in Iron Age Britain, but future studies might help answer that question. Additional research might also take a closer look at the unrelated men buried at the site, investigating where they grew up and how far they traveled to join their wives.

“Given the paucity of Iron Age bodies, it’s really quite hard to say whether this covers the whole country,” says Lindsay Allason-Jones, an archaeologist at Newcastle University who was not involved with the research, to the Washington Post’s Carolyn Y. Johnson.

Women living in matrilocal communities likely had more influence than women living in patrilocalities. They also had the benefit of staying with their families and support networks. But even in matrilocalities, men still typically held positions of power.

“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,” Cassidy tells the Times. “[Women] aren’t just confined to the domestic sphere.”

After the Romans invaded Britain during the first century C.E., they wrote about British women with high levels of power and multiple husbands. But scholars are divided as to whether the Romans actually observed these women or were merely spinning cautionary tales.

“Is that propaganda, to make them seem wild and untamed, and not like good Roman women?” Cassidy tells the Washington Post. “Julius Caesar wasn’t a trained anthropologist, and how much you can trust him is up for debate.”

But the new DNA evidence seems to suggest there was at least some kernel of truth in the Roman depictions, writes Guido Alberto Gnecchi-Ruscone, an archaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in an accompanying perspective article.

The new findings echo “Roman-period written sources describing Celtic women as empowered figures,” Gnecchi-Ruscone writes. “Although Roman writers often exoticized these societies, the genetic evidence … validates some of their claims about the special role that women had in Celtic Britain.”