Female family ties were central to social networks in Celtic society in Britain before the Roman invasion, a new analysis shows.

Genetic evidence from Late Iron Age cemeteries shows that women were closely related while unrelated men usually came into the community from elsewhere, probably after marriage.

An examination of ancient DNA found in 57 graves in Dorset, southwest England, shows that two-thirds of the individuals descended from a single maternal line. The cemetery was used from around 100 BC. Kr. until the year 200

“It was really stunning – it had never been seen before in European prehistory,” said study co-author Lara Cassidy, a geneticist at Trinity College Dublin.

The findings, released Wednesday in the journal Naturesuggest that women remained in the same circles throughout life – maintaining social networks and possibly inheriting or managing land and property.

Meanwhile, “your husband comes in as a relative stranger, dependent on the country and the livelihood of the wife’s family,” Cassidy said.

This pattern – called matrilocality – is historically rare.

“Such a matrilocal pattern has not been described in European prehistory, but when comparing mitochondrial haplotype variation among European archaeological sites spanning six millennia, British Iron Age cemeteries stand out as markedly reduced diversity driven by the presence of dominant lineages,” the authors write in the article accompanying the study.

Archaeologists studying burial sites in Britain and Europe had previously found only the opposite pattern – women leaving their homes to join their husbands’ family group – in other ancient time periods, from the Neolithic to the early Middle Ages, Guido Gnecchi-Ruscone said. from 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 day, anthropologists have found that men join their wives’ extended family households only 8% of the time, Cassidy said.

But archaeologists already knew there was something special about the role of women in Iron Age Britain. A mixture of tribes with closely related languages ​​and artistic styles – sometimes called Celtic – lived in England before the Roman invasion of AD 43. Valuable objects were found buried with Celtic women, and Roman writers, including Julius Caesar, wrote disparagingly of their relative independence and fighting prowess.

The pattern of strong female kinship ties that the researchers found does not necessarily mean that women also held formal positions of political power, which is called matriarchy.

But it suggests women had some control over land and property, as well as strong social support, making British Celtic society “more egalitarian than the Roman world”, said study co-author and Bournemouth University archaeologist Miles Russell.

“When the Romans arrived, they were amazed to find women in positions of power,” Russell said.

Some doubted these accounts, suggesting “that the Romans exaggerated the freedoms of British women to paint a picture of an untamed society,” he told AFP.

“But archaeology, and now genetics, implies that women were influential in many spheres of Iron Age life,” he said.

“Indeed, it is possible that maternal descent was the primary shaper of group identities.”

Agence France-Presse contributed to this report.