#Ancient Britain

[coochiequeens]

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.”

[vox-anglosphere]

A mystical sunrise at Stonehenge on an August morning

[illustratus]

Imogen in Cymbeline - (The Tragedy of Cymbeline, King of Britain) by Henry Courtney Selous

[thesilicontribesman]

Roman Mosaic Pavement from Abbots Ann, 4th Century CE, Abbots Ann, Hampshire

The Roman villa at Abbots Ann, near Andover, was discovered in the early 1850s. The portions of mosaic floors uncovered were in a bold and simple style, using large tesserae in a limited range of colours, but following traditional Roman geometric designs.

[ancientstuff]

Absolutely astonishing discovery.

[survivethejive]

Why did Celts of the British Isles build over 4000 hill forts during the Iron Age? The answer may have something to do with the conflict between those Bronze Age cowboys who maintained traditional pastoralist transhumance lifestyles, and those in the forts who depended more on arable farming. This can also explain why British Celts were the most lactose tolerant people on Earth at that time. In this documentary I visited Barbury Castle in Wiltshire, Castle an Dinas in Cornwall and several other magnificent Iron Age hill forts.

[little-desi-historian]

Lughnasadh 2024

Happy Lughnasadh!

Lughnasadh playlist.

Lugh.

[philrayart]

Boudica (2023) poster

[karagin22]

[kalosis91]

Boudica: Dreaming the hound

This book broke my heart and does so everytime I read it. It covers the relationship between Prasutagos and Boudica when she returns from Mona to take her place as Queen of the Iceni.

Its also during this that the beginnings of the Boudican rebellion begins, at least as history knows it. This author believes, which logic supports, that Boudica had started to rebel in secret by making and stockpiling the weapons that would be needed by the war host that faced the Roman army. Considering that the Romans had taken and destroyed the weapons the natives to Britain had it makes logical sense that the weapons they had to fight with were made somehow.

Manda Scott has Boudica discovered after the death of Prasutagos and his will reading and it then that the whipping of Boudica and the rape of her daughters takes place. Thankfully these scenes take place towards the end of the book which means that the majority of the book is enjoyable.

I do advise caution when reading this book because while the description of the rape and whipping is limited, it's still enough to paint a very clear picture of what happened.

[bluntblade]

Guess H. R. Giger got his start in making ancient coins. Also I'm amazed that I haven't seen this sigil on a death metal album cover. Anyway get a load of this fucked-up wolf

[marshmyers]

The acclaimed author of Sistersong transforms the story of Herla and the Wild Hunt into a rich, feminist fantasy in this stunning tale of two great warriors, a war-torn land, and an ancient magic that is slowly awakening.

Britain, 60AD. Hoping to save her lover, her land, and her people from the Romans, Herla makes a desperate pact with the king of the Otherworld. But years pass unheeded in his realm, and she escapes to find everyone she loved long dead. Cursed to wield his blade, she becomes Lord of the Hunt. And for centuries, she rides, leading her immortal warriors and reaping wanderers' souls. Until the night she meets a woman on a bloody battlefield--a Saxon queen with ice-blue eyes. 

Queen Æthelburg of Wessex is a proven fighter. But when she leads her forces to disaster in battle, her husband's court turns against her. Yet King Ine needs Æthel more than ever. Something dark and dangerous is at work in the Wessex court. His own brother seeks to usurp him. And their only hope is the magic in Ine's bloodline that's lain dormant since ancient days. 

The moment she and Æthel meet, Herla knows it's no coincidence. The dead kings are waking. The Otherworld seeks to rise, to bring the people of Britain under its dominion. And as Herla and Æthel grow closer, Herla must find her humanity--and a way to break the curse--before it's too late.

PURCHASE

[vox-anglosphere]

The summer solstice has dawned over Stonehenge for millennia.

[shutterfox5555]

Carving of the Celtic warrior god Cocidius, early roman in age.

Bronica ETRS with 75mm lens, taken on Ilford FP4+ and developed with Ilford Ilfotec DDX

[thesilicontribesman]

Iron Age Coinage, The Yorkshire Museum, York

[ancientstuff]

It's an attempt at an invasion. I always thought the Vikings were in and out with their raids, but this puts the lie to that.