The Spice Girls need to move aside, as a new study has revealed that girl power may have started 2,400 years ago.
Researchers from Trinity College Dublin say that Britain’s Iron Age society centred on women.
According to the experts, women inherited land and made their husbands move to live with them.
These Iron Age settlements, including sites in Cornwall, Dorset and Yorkshire, are among just eight per cent of known pre-industrial societies where women controlled the land and their husbands had to leave their own families to live with them, experts believe.
Women likely took control because, in the violent Iron Age we know about from hill forts and weapon stashes, men were often away and engaged in warfare.
However researchers caution that this is not known for sure, and just a reasonable assumption based on DNA analysis,
A team of geneticists from Trinity College Dublin, working with archaeologists from Bournemouth University, looked at evidence from 157 archaeological sites in use before and after the Roman invasion of 43AD.
This included their own in-depth analysis of DNA from 55 prehistoric people whose remains were in burial grounds in Winterborne Kingston, Dorset.
Researchers from Trinity College Dublin say that Britain’s Iron Age society centred on women. Pictured: Durotrigian burial of a young woman from Langton Herring sampled for DNA. She was buried with a mirror (right) and jewellery, including a Roman coin amulet showing a female charioteer representing Victory
A team of geneticists looked at evidence from 157 archaeological sites in use before and after the Roman invasion of 43AD. This included their own in-depth analysis of DNA from 55 prehistoric people whose remains were in burial grounds in Winterborne Kingston, Dorset
The Dorset remains, including 40 Iron Age people, revealed six men who did not fit into the family tree and eight who did not belong to the female line of the family tree.
This suggests they moved in from outside the community – with women staying where they were born.
In most communities where this is the case, women have relatively higher status and land is passed down through the female line.
Dr Lara Cassidy, lead author of the study from Trinity, said: ‘These days most couples both leave their families entirely and set up home somewhere else, but traditionally, women have usually gone to live with their husbands.
‘This finding that husbands moved to join their wives’ communities upon marriage is rare.
‘It suggests female empowerment and influence, which may not fit with how some people have imagined the Iron Age.
‘This comes from our reconstruction of a family tree where most members traced their maternal lineage back to a single woman, who would have lived centuries before.’
The Iron Age people analysed in the study lived at around the time of warrior queen Boudicca, who famously led an uprising against the Roman invasion, destroying three Roman towns.
The Dorset remains, including 40 Iron Age people, revealed six men who did not fit into the family tree and eight who did not belong to the female line of the family tree. Pictured: excavating a Late Iron Age Durotriges burial at Winterborne Kingston
They lived in agricultural settlements, where it is more common for women to stay put and control the land, with men moving into the area.
In this kind of community, where children inherit land through their mothers’ families, and not their father’s, it tends to be less important for men to make sure their wife is faithful, as they will not be passing land down to any illegitimate children by mistake.
This could be evidence for Julius Caesar’s claims that women in Iron Age Britain had multiple husbands, the researchers tentatively suggest.
But they warn that this may have been Caesar telling a colourful story to suggest to Romans that their women were more loyal and faithful than those in Britain.
The study, published in the journal Nature, discusses ‘matrilocal’ societies, where men move to be with women’s families when they marry.
The evidence from the 157 archaeological sites suggests this kind of community existed in six English Iron Age sites – Worlebury in Somerset, Bottle Snap in Dorset, Gravelly Guy in Oxfordshire, Trethellan Farm and Tregunnel in Cornwall, and Pocklington in Yorkshire.
