gothlovingoth

[gothlovingoth]

Womens history just got richer.

When the deeply patriarchal Romans first encountered Celtic tribes living in modern-day France and Great Britain in the first century B.C.E., their reaction to the roles of the sexes was one of surprise and dismay. The tasks of men and women “have been exchanged, in a manner opposite to what obtains among us,” wrote one Roman historian.

New evidence from Celtic graves now confirms that at least one part of Britain was a woman’s world long before the Romans arrived—and for centuries afterward. One ancient British tribe known as the Durotriges based its family structure—and perhaps property inheritance—on kinship between mothers and daughters. Men, meanwhile, left home to live with their wives’ families, a practice known as matrilocality that has never been seen before in European prehistory.

The work, published today in Nature, helps explain why women in Iron Age Britain are often buried with high-status grave goods such as mirrors and even chariots, says Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich archaeologist Carola Metzner-Nebelsick, who was not involved with the research. “It’s a fantastic result,” she says. “It really helps explain the archaeological record.”

Ancient histories—not least Julius Caesar’s 50 B.C.E. account of invading Gaul—hinted at female empowerment among the Celts. “They wrote about it because they found it so weird,” says Trinity College Dublin geneticist Lara Cassidy.

Many modern historians assumed the accounts were exaggerated; they dismissed rich female graves from the time as outliers. But over the past few decades, archaeologists comparing burial practices at hundreds of Iron Age sites from Britain to Germany began to think there was a kernel of truth to the Roman reports.

The Durotriges cemeteries, located in the far south of England near the city of Bournemouth, offered a way for Cassidy and her team to investigate. Burials there began around 100 B.C.E., roughly 150 years before Roman forces invaded the island. Unusually for Iron Age Britain, the tribe didn’t cremate their dead. Instead they buried them close to home, in the hills surrounding their farmsteads.

Whereas men were laid to rest with a joint of meat and perhaps a pot containing a beverage to sustain them on their journey into the afterlife, Durotriges women are often found with elaborate offerings including mirrors, combs, jewelry, and even swords. “If you judge social status by burial goods, then female burials have vastly more than male,” says Bournemouth University archaeologist Miles Russell, a co-author of the new paper.

Over the past 4 years, researchers sequenced DNA from dozens of Durotriges skeletons in a set of cemeteries in Dorset, England. By matching identical fragments of genetic material from different individuals, they reconstructed a family tree that spanned six generations—many of whom were female descendants of a single female founder. Two-thirds of the people in the kin group buried in the cemetery shared a rare type of mitochondrial gene, a form of DNA inherited only from the mother, including some of the men who shared the same female ancestor.

Other genetic evidence from the Durotriges cemeteries pointed to matrilocality, showing that men joined the clan from other families. “Women are staying close to family and are embedded in the support network they’ve known since childhood,” Cassidy notes. “It’s the husband who’s coming in as a stranger and is dependent on the wife’s family.” Women were evidently a force to be reckoned with in this part of Iron Age Britain.

Archaeologists have found that members of Great Britain’s Durotriges tribe often buried women with more grave goods than men.Miles Russell/Bournemouth University

Such patterns could help explain finds elsewhere in the Celtic world, where women were sometimes buried with rich grave goods or even chariots. “We’re thinking this could have been quite widespread,” Cassidy says.

To gather further evidence, she and her colleagues re-examined previously published genomes from more than 150 sites in Britain and Europe stretching back to the Stone Age. Starting around 500 B.C.E., the diversity in people’s mitochondrial DNA declined, the team found, suggesting more of them shared the same female ancestors. There was no matching decline in the diversity of Y chromosomes, which are passed from fathers to sons.

That suggests communities across Britain were anchored by specific female lines, with men marrying in from outside. “The signal they see in [the Durotriges] case study can be reproduced in other British sites,” says Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology archaeogeneticist Joscha Gretzinger, who was not involved with the work. “That’s quite a smoking gun.”

The study is part of a growing use of DNA to reconstruct genetic kinship in the deep past—and use it to shed light on the structure of past societies. University of Liverpool archaeologist Rachel Pope says the research is starting to highlight the wide variety of social organization people practiced in the past, something archaeology has hinted at over the past 2 decades.

Some of the earliest kinship studies using ancient DNA, for example, showed that Stone Age farmers in Britain and France living in the fifth millennium B.C.E. were organized patrilocally, with women leaving their homes to marry while men stayed put. The new data from Durotriges suggest that by the Iron Age, 4000 years later, something had shifted. “This is quite exciting,” Pope says. “There are moments in time in which societies seem to have a lot of high female status.”

[gothlovingoth]

[gothlovingoth]

[gothlovingoth]

i have never met an unpsychotic person who knows what it actually means to “not encourage the delusion” …not a single one

[gothlovingoth]

JUDAS ISCARIOT | Official Trailer

Judas Iscariot is an animated retelling of The New Testament of the Holy Bible, featuring details from the Apocrypha (The "Unofficial" Gospels) with a fresh stylized reinterpretation of the story's core figures. The goal of this project is to illuminate this text for both a religious and non-religious audience, placing it back into the historical context of Jesus’s role as a political figure during the Roman occupation of Judea. This film explores mature themes pertaining to love, devotion, and control. The film is expected to be 15-20 minutes long, depending on how much can be raised with the kickstarter campaign. It is expected to take 1-2 years to finish writing, storyboarding, animating, and painting assets for this project, with an additional period of time devoted to film festival screenings before it is ready for the public.  Judas Iscariot will be the second short film written and directed by Charles Kugler, who has worked in the animation industry for clients like Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, and FOX. 

Kickstarter campaign link:

[gothlovingoth]

we need to slow down a little I'm so serious. all these quick short videos on tiktok, ig reels, and youtube, artists releasing quick little songs for the trend, tv shows releasing episodes at once, people using chat gpt and google ai overview because they get answers quickly but no validation done for the source, we need to sloww downn i really do not think our brains should be running this fast

[gothlovingoth]

2018 tumblr post:

1: why do they call it a boner when theres no bone in it

2: there used to be

3: why does this sound so ominous

2025 tumblr post:

1: forward my shambling soldiers and slay without thinking. let blood flow into every crevice of this rotten land

2: yes my lady

3: yes my lady

[gothlovingoth]

[gothlovingoth]

[gothlovingoth]

Our Japanese class found it funny that in common terminology "food" isn't very distinguished from specifically "rice" until it was pointed out to us that in English "meal" is "loose roughly ground grain"

[gothlovingoth]

being self aware suuuucks like yeah this thought pattern/behavior is stupid and pointless and a symptom. i know this. [does it anyways

[gothlovingoth]

smoked the molly

[gothlovingoth]

No joke, go read The Open Veins of Latin America before even trying to send me a political ask. Mandatory reading.

It's a cliché that every Latin American leftist has read it and quotes it, but that's because it's written in such a clear language with undeniable strenght on its facts. It presents the history of Latin America solidly just in the first few pages, and it only gets more engrossing the more it goes on. While it is now a bit outdated in the sense that it was first published in 1971, the historical, social and political issues presented are -in an unfortunate way- still current. It is a relatively short book, passionate and in a clear, poetic language.

Sometimes it's good to return to the basics, and this is THE basic book if you want to understand the effects of imperialism in Latin America, and our struggle for freedom and identity.

Instead of losing your time with half baked twitteroid takes, go read it. Here you go, for free, in Spanish, Portuguese and English:

[gothlovingoth]

Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa have all seen their right-wing parties collapse in popularity since Trump took over.

We were headed for a hard-right turn, but this shift is absolutely unprecedented in modern times. The stark reality of a right wing nationalist future really got people to pay attention.

Unfortunately, it's at the cost of the millions of us in the US who will now suffer