Ancient DNA from graves reveals "jaw-dropping" discovery about Iron Age women in U.K., scientists say
Scientists analyzing 2,000-year-old DNA have revealed that a Celtic society in the southern U.K. during the Iron Age was centered around women, a study said.
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New tech helps archaeologists explore the past
Female family ties were at the heart of social networks in Celtic society in Britain before the Roman invasion, a new analysis suggests.
Genetic evidence from a late Iron Age cemetery shows that women were closely related while unrelated men tended to come into the community from elsewhere, likely after marriage.
An examination of ancient DNA recovered from 57 graves in Dorset in southwest England shows that two-thirds of the individuals were descended from a single maternal lineage. The cemetery was used from around 100 B.C. to 200 A.D.
"That was really jaw-dropping – it's never been observed before in European prehistory," said study co-author Lara Cassidy, a geneticist at Trinity College Dublin.
The findings, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, suggest that women stayed in the same circles throughout life – maintaining social networks and likely inheriting or managing land and property.
This photo provided by Bournemouth University in January 2025 shows burials being investigated at an Iron Age Celtic cemetery as part of the Durotriges tribe project dig in Dorset, southwest England. / APMeanwhile "it's your husband who is coming in as a relative stranger, dependent on a wife's family for land and livelihood," said Cassidy.
This pattern – called matrilocality – is historically rare.
" Such a matrilocal pattern is undescribed in European prehistory, but when we compare mitochondrial haplotype variation among European archaeological sites spanning six millennia, British Iron Age cemeteries stand out as having marked reductions in diversity driven by the presence of dominant matrilines," the authors write in an article accompanying the study.
Archaeologists studying grave sites in Britain and Europe have previously only detected the opposite pattern – women leaving their homes to join their husband's family group – in other ancient time periods, from the neolithic to the early Medieval period, said Guido Gnecchi-Ruscone at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, who was not part of the study.
In studies of pre-industrial societies from around 1800 to the present, anthropologists found that men join their wives' extended family households only 8% of the time, said Cassidy.
But archaeologists already knew there was something special about the role of women in Iron Age Britain. A patchwork of tribes with closely related languages and art styles – sometimes referred to as Celtic – lived in England before the Roman invasion in 43 A.D. Valuable items have been found buried with Celtic women, and Roman writers, including Julius Caesar, wrote with disdain about their relative independence and fighting prowess.
The pattern of strong female kinship connections that the researchers found does not necessarily imply that women also held formal positions of political power, called matriarchy.
But it does suggest that women had some control of land and property, as well as strong social support, making Britain's Celtic society "more egalitarian than the Roman world," said study co-author and Bournemouth University archaeologist Miles Russell.
"When the Romans arrived, they were astonished to find women occupying positions of power,"Â Russell said.
Some had doubted these accounts, suggesting "that the Romans exaggerated the liberties of British women to paint a picture of an untamed society," he told AFP.
"But archaeology, and now genetics, implies women were influential in many spheres of Iron Age life," he said.
"Indeed, it is possible that maternal ancestry was the primary shaper of group identities."
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report.
In: Britain DNA© 2025 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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