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A scientific study with important implications for archaeology in Britain and France was published in January. Using ancient DNA analysis and testing, a team led by geneticists Lara Cassidy and Daniel Bradley from Trinity College Dublin successfully demonstrated that Iron Age people who were buried in Dorset from 100 B.C. to A.D. 100 practiced matrilocality.
This is where women from a community remain with their family group, or at least are buried with them, and take a partner from an outside group. Meanwhile, the men from that same community join another group when they find a partner. An alternative pattern is patrilocality, in which the men stay put and the women move into other groups. This social pattern was practiced on Early Bronze Age Orkney.
The new findings come from individuals buried at the Late Iron Age cemetery of Winterborne Kingston in Dorset. It’s an excellent piece of science, born from one of the U.K.’s leading research excavations, the Durotriges project of the University of Bournemouth. The Durotriges were a Late Iron Age group that lived in what is mostly now Dorset and parts of southern Wiltshire.
Not only did the Trinity team establish that the society in question was matrilocal, but they also showed that there was matrilineal descent, which is where women stay in the community and pass their genes on to the next generation. Most of the Winterborne Kingston individuals could trace their maternal line of descent back to a single woman who lived centuries before. However, the male lines of descent were very diverse, reflecting new, unrelated males coming into the community.
While some of the press coverage about the new research portrayed the findings as a surprise, archaeologists were far from shocked. Headlines suggesting that this was the first evidence of its kind failed to convey the fact that female-focused social structures have previously been suggested for some Iron Age groups by archaeologists—and for some time.
THE WIDER DEBATE
In the 1860s, Swiss anthropologist Johann Bachofen theorized from the information available to him at the time that there was a move from a matriarchal, or female-led society, to a patriarchal society only by the time of ancient Greece, meaning during the 1st millennium B.C., equivalent to the Iron Age period in Western Europe, which ran from 800 B.C. to A.D. 43.
In the U.S., anthropologist Lewis Morgan, writing in the 1870s, broadly accepted Bachofen’s proposal—also supporting this later development of patriarchal norms. He also placed such norms relatively late, in Late Iron Age Germany and Rome.
By the 1880s, these ideas were rejected by what the German scholar Friedrich Engels would later call “chauvinistically inclined English anthropologists.” These anthropologists preferred what Engels believed was the “completely mistaken” theory of John Ferguson McLellan—a contemporary Scottish amateur trained in law and mathematics—who believed that patriarchy was the natural order, existing much earlier than even ancient Greece, a position that was legitimized using evolutionary theory.
In the 1970s, Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas proposed that the social structure of the Neolithic Balkans (from around 6300 B.C. until about 5000 B.C.) was matrilineal and matriarchal based on her analysis of the archaeology, including the high number of female figurines. Gimbutas was heavily critiqued by English archaeologists, and her work is only recently being revisited.
Critically, this eastern European work contradicted the contemporary idea, formulated at the University of Cambridge, that patriarchy instead began in the Neolithic. The Cambridge idea, building out of a theoretical link suggested by Engels, was that patriarchy was tied to agricultural production. Nonetheless, recent ancient DNA work is now revealing patrilineal descent for some Neolithic groups in Britain. The error perhaps was in believing that this was a single event in a linear, evolutionary understanding of humanity through time.
