Tag Archives: gender

Was Iron Age Britain matriarchal?

Posted on by
27

No one can give us a solid answer, but we do have some hints. A group of geneticists and archeologists have analyzed a cluster of burials in Dorset and report that they show a matrilocal society. In other words, the women stayed in the village and the men moved out when they married, being replaced by men from outside, who married in. 

The tribe–the Romans called them the Durotriges; we don’t know what they called themselves–didn’t cremate their dead, which was unusual for the time and place. From around 100 BCE–more or less 150 years before the Romans invaded–they buried them in the hills around their farmsteads, leaving an important resource for archeologists.

Who cares? Pretty much everyone who was involved in the arrangement, and I can’t think why we shouldn’t as well, because it tells us a lot about the roles of the men and women. Or–hell, let’s throw out a patriarchal habit that’s so deeply ingrained it’s damn near invisible and say “the roles of the women and men.”  

Semi-relevant photo: This is Fast Eddie, who’s relevant only because we’ve been told (sort of) that women with power become childless cat ladies.
Okay, I’m stretching it, but hey, he’s a great cat and I needed a photo to drop in here.

Does it matter who stays and who goes? Yup, it does. The partner who stays in place has the unbroken support of an extended family. The one who comes in comes as an outsider and an individual, without that built-in support. They may acquire it over time, but they may not. And if the tribe considered land as something a person could own–they were farmers, so let’s guess that they did–then land ownership is likely to have been held by the person who stayed in place. It’s awkward, taking land with you. So it would presumably have been passed down through the female line.  

Matrilocality also means–or at least hints–that women would have the primary shapers of the group’s identity. 

It’s kind of mind-boggling, isn’t it? 

 

How do they know any of this?

DNA. Mitochondrial DNA is passed down from mother to daughter, making matrilocality relatively easy to trace. The Y chromosome is passed from father to son. Everything else is a grab-bag.

Geneticist Dr. Lara Cassidy, said, “This was the cemetery of a large kin group. We reconstructed a family tree with many different branches and found most members traced their maternal lineage back to a single woman, who would have lived centuries before. In contrast, relationships through the father’s line were almost absent.

“This tells us that husbands moved to join their wives’ communities upon marriage, with land potentially passed down through the female line. This is the first time this type of system has been documented in European prehistory and it predicts female social and political empowerment.”

The find casts a new light on smaller samples from other cemeteries, where the same pattern shows up: most of the individuals trace back to a small set of female ancestors. Dan Bradley, a professor of population genetics, called it “a widespread phenomenon with deep roots on the island.” 

 

This changes the way earlier information is interpreted

The first thing it changes is the earlier discoveries of Celtic women buried with what archeologists call rich grave goods–what we might call stuff–mirrors, combs, the occasional chariot. The standard interpretation is that these were the burials of high status women. Fair enough, but that tells us nothing about why they had high status and I’d bet a chocolate cake that most people reading it will think, Right: wives of important men, just like most people would write men and women, as I started to in the second paragraph, instead of women and men. Old, nearly invisible thought patterns, underlining the importance of men, the peripheral status of women. But if the village’s continuity was in the hands of its women, it’s not unlikely that much of the power was as well. Or–let’s go out on a limb and see if we fall off–possibly all the power. 

It’s a safe limb to go out on, because we can’t know. So don’t take the possibility as fact but don’t dismiss it either. We do have some facts that make it look likely. The Durotriges men were buried with a joint of meat and maybe a pot with something to drink on their way to the  afterlife. Many of the women were buried with mirrors, combs, jewelry, and the occaisonal sword. 

All this comes with a reminder that being buried with expensive stuff may or may not indicate that the person was a leader. To make that leap, we need to go back to those Greek and Roman texts, which takes us neatly to the next paragraph:

The second thing the new findings change is how we read what Greek and Roman writers said about pre-Roman (or Iron Age if you prefer) Britain. The Britons, inconsiderately, didn’t develop a system of writing, so yeah, they didn’t leave written records. We have to depend on what outsiders wrote.

The written sources tell us the Romans were shocked to find women in positions of power. They inherited wealth, led battles, and practiced polyandry–the flip side of polygamy, with the woman having more than one husband. Going both further back and to Celts outside of Britain, ancient Greek writers said women’s and men’s tasks “have been exchanged” and Celtic women acted as “political judiciary.” (That last quote is from an article in The Conversation, not an ancient Greek source. I’m leaving you to figure out what political judiciary means.) 

For a long time that was widely dismissed on the theory that the Romans overstated British women’s freedom and power to make the country sound barbaric. Because surely we can’t take that literally? It upends too many of our assumptions. But this latest find makes it look like they were reporting accurately. It undermines the idea that pre-Roman Britain was a land where men were hairy-chested warriors and women stayed home and did what a much later culture expected them to do. You know, look in their mirrors, comb their hair, and stay the hell off those chariots.

Were all early societies matrilocal or matriarchal, then?

Nope. Early Bronze Age Orkney was patrilocal: the men stayed put and the women moved to other communities. And early iron age Hallstatt graves in Austria showed men and women equally achieving high status. Middle Iron Age British burials show men and women having equal status. Age seems to have been more important than gender in giving them status.  

A rampage back through 150 British and European genome studies in light of the Dorset findings shows the diversity in mitochondrial DNA declining over a period that spans the Stone, Bronze, and Iron ages. To translate that, increasing numbers of women stayed in place as time went very slowly on. 

None of this gives us a simple picture, or even a decisive one, but it does mean that patriarchy hasn’t been in place since forever and isn’t built into our DNA.

Telling the girls from the boys in Anglo-Saxon England

Posted on by
46

We seldom know less than when we’re sure of ourselves, and since we all know that the men in Anglo-Saxon England were warriors and the women were, um, you know, women, a recent article revisiting those assumptions makes for good reading.

What did it mean to be an, um, you know, woman in Anglo-Saxon England? Oh, hell, we all know the answer to that. They pottered around the house, fussing over whether it needed new curtains. In their spare time, they birthed children and kept them from falling into the fire or the lake or the river, and they spun, wove, dyed, sewed, embroidered, cooked, baked, healed, fed, cut hair, made fires, sharpened blades, worked in the fields, churned butter, chopped wood, and basically didn’t matter one little bit to the economy or the culture.

I don’t sound sour, do I? I don’t have any reason to be.

Irrelevant photo: I’m reasonably sure these are  honeysuckle berries. Some species of honeysuckle have edible berries and some don’t, although as someone or other said about mushrooms, “They’re all edible, but some of them only once.” So beautiful as they are, I won’t be making jelly out of them. Especially since I don’t make jelly.

So what’s with this new study?

It re-examines pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon burials, focusing on the ones that were dismissed as outliers because they didn’t fit the expected pattern.

The pre-Christian part of that sentence is important, because people buried stuff with their dead–the things that mattered to them; the things they used in life–so they tell us a good bit about how people lived. Christian cemeteries don’t give us that gift. 

As a general rule, weapons, horse-riding equipment, and tools (as in, not household tools) are associated with men. Jewelry, weights for spinning yarn, sewing equipment, and beads are associated with women. But that’s not an absolute. The exceptions are those outliers, and for years archeologists dismissed them because they messed with their expectations. 

A study by James Davison looks at what’s been swept aside, arguing that the Anglo-Saxon approach to gender may have been more fluid than we’ve assumed. Working with burials that took place between the fifth and eighth centuries in Buckland, Dover, he finds that grave goods don’t always align with the sex of the skeleton, and in an article about his work he talks about two burials in particular, both of people who had high status in the community.

How does he know their status? From how much effort went into digging the graves. Digging graves is hard work. I haven’t dug any myself, but I’ve planted plants and dug a drainage ditch, both of which are easy by comparison, and I can testify that the earth we live on is heavy and full of rocks and roots and clay and other fun stuff. People put more effort into the graves of people they considered important.

And then there are teeth. Cavities indicate that the person had access to sugar, which was a luxury, and an absence of horizontal lines on the teeth (enamel hypoplasia, in case you care) indicates that the person didn’t go short of food. All of that plus rich grave goods will tell a clear story about a person’s standing in the community.

With that bit of background tucked under our gender-appropriate haircuts, let’s consider Grave 30, which holds the skeleton of a person who was somewhere between 35 and 40 years old. The skeleton’s definitely male and the grave was particularly deep for the period–0.61 meters–so figure high status. Other markers of status are the teeth (five cavities, so a taste for sugar, and if we still measured status by cavities, I’d be a fucking queen) and no markers of malnutrition. 

If you’re still not convinced by that, you can run your virtual fingers through the grave goods: a bone comb, a silver-gilt brooch and a silver pin (standard parts of a woman’s clothing, but upscale ones), 84 beads, a silver pendant, a buckle, a knife, and a set of iron keys. High status. 

Keys? They were important markers of women as keepers of the home. Some women were buried with actual keys and some with symbolic ones–presumably because the real ones couldn’t be spared.

Hang on, though: this is a male skeleton. With the kind of things that would typically mark a woman’s burial. And they were held in high esteem by the community.

What can we make of this? It’s hard to know, since the people who could’ve explained it are dead and nobody seems to have thought it was worth documenting. Should we decide the person was a transexual? That strikes me as importing a twenty-first-century interpretation onto a seventh-century life. So should we say this was a man who was accepted as a woman? Or who was accepted as a man but lived the way women typically lived. After all, you don’t have to renounce one sex to live in a way that’s more typical of the other one. 

Basically, we can’t know. What we can know is that the picture of Anglo-Saxon culture that we’ve been given is oversimplified. 

 

Grave 93

Now let’s wend our morbid way to Grave 93, where we’ll find a skeleton of about the same age that’s written up as possibly female, since it’s not as well preserved as the one in Grave 30. The grave isn’t as deep, but it’s large, so the person was of high status, if not quite as high. The teeth are interesting: they show some evidence of cavities but also of occlusal fissures, which are often caused or exacerbated by feminizing hormones, particularly during pregnancy. 

Hoping to move our skeleton from the Possibly Female category into the Probably Female one, I asked Lord G about hormones and occlusal fissures and ended up trolling through a series of articles about dental sealants. In other words, I learned nothing of any use. So we’ll have to leave our friend in the Possibly Female file. 

Sorry. I liked the story I was building, but we’ll be boring and stick with the few facts we have at hand.

Whatever sex the person was, they were buried with a sword, a spearhead, fragments of a decorated shield, one glass bead (it was probably attached to the sword, and I could spin you a good story around that too, but we’re trying to stay with fact, remember), an iron rod, a bronze band, iron fragments from a buckle, and a bronze ring. Swords were associated with the burials of men, but not just any men. Swords were for (sorry to keep using the phrase) a high-status men. Of the seventeen graves excavated, only this one contained a sword.

If the skeleton was female, what do we make of what was buried with it? Maybe that this person lived and fought as a man and was considered a man. Maybe that women–or at least this woman–fought as a man without having to be considered a one. In other words, women could be accepted as warriors. A person doesn’t have to be transexual to mess with gender roles. It’s also possible that this woman was the last survivor of her family and was buried with the family heirlooms, although if that had been true I’d expect her to have had the traditional woman’s goods as well. 

 

C’mon, though, give us a conclusion

Sorry, I can’t. Archeologists are amazing in their ability to unearth bits of the past, but they’re frustrating creatures who refuse to give us details they don’t actually know. Or the good ones are, anyway. So hats off to the ones who refuse to oversimplify the picture of how people lived in the past, and a boot up the backside to the ones who left us with the neat and inaccurate images we’ve carried in our heads for so long.