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“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.”

Pause for a moment and consider – how did you react on reading that?

Perhaps you felt a surge of irritation at the implication that female power has a starting point at all. At the implied assumption that women’s influence only gained traction in the 1990s with the Spice Girls, and that this accolade instead belongs to women in the Iron Age. Or maybe it was the wording itself that snagged, the demeaning associations of “girl power”.

Perhaps your curiosity was sparked. What does it mean for an Iron Age society to have been women-centred? What did that look like? Might this discovery challenge existing narratives about power structures?

Or did you feel frustrated that this is presented as a revelation at all? That it is still, to some, a surprising idea that societies have existed outside the patriarchal norms we take for granted today?

Of course, for some, it might have even prompted outright denial that such a thing could have ever occurred.

Sadly, some readers have had the latter response, judging by the comments on the article (in the Daily Mail). But despite the tone, this story shares something with the vast majority of coverage of this study – a sense of surprise, even shock.

I’m interested in thinking about what this says about the way we view history. But first, the research itself.

Here’s The Evidence

The study, published in the journal Nature, uses genetic analysis of Iron Age burials in southwest Britain to provide the first confirmed evidence of something called “matrilocality” in European prehistory. This is where men move to join their female partner’s family communities, rather than the other way around. Matrilocality is a strong predictor of women’s social and political empowerment – although of course how this plays out in practice varies enormously.

The bulk of evidence from European Neolithic, Copper and Bronze Age sites (the periods preceding the Iron Age), indicate that patrilocality was the norm. British Iron Age human remains, however, are rare, probably because these societies tended to cremate their dead or deposit them in wetlands, and so the evidence of social structures in this period are more patchy. The Iron Age in Britain began around 750 BC and ended in AD 43, when the Romans invaded.

While many have previously suggested that women in these societies tended to have a high status, no genetic evidence supported this. But the signs were there: the distributions of grave goods in multiple western European Celtic cemeteries have been interpreted as supporting high female status, with women more commonly associated with a greater quantity and diversity of prestige items in these burials.

Historical accounts from Roman writers describe Celtic women in Britain as enjoying inheritance rights, having multiple partners as well as holding political authority and military leadership positions, as in the case of Boudica, a queen of the Iceni tribe who led an uprising against the Roman occupation of Britain. These stories have traditionally been seen as suspect by historians – attributed to a Roman exoticisation of the people whose land they were invading, or an attempt to portray the Celts as barbaric.

Now it seems that there was more to them after all. The Durotriges tribe, which occupied the central southern English coast around 100 BC to AD 100, buried its dead in cemeteries unlike many communities at the same time. This allowed researchers from Trinity College Dublin and Bournemouth University to conduct DNA analysis on 57 Durotriges people at a site in the modern-day county of Dorset.

They found clear evidence that most of the people buried there could be traced through their maternal line of descent back to a single woman, who had lived centuries before. Most of the unrelated individuals buried there, on the other hand, were found to be male migrants. This means that kinship and social organisation in this Celtic community were structured around female lineage, with women remaining in their ancestral communities while men migrated in.

The researchers then tested other British Iron Age sites, finding similar results. The study provides strong genetic evidence that matrilocality was common practice across Iron Age Britain.

‘Jaw-dropping’

Multiple news stories have called the findings “jaw-dropping”. But given the existence of previous evidence, why was this study presented as so surprising? As Jay Silverstein, an archaeology of warfare expert, points out: “If historic accounts were more honest, the find would have been received as a confirmation of the role of women in Iron Age Britain. Instead, it is being framed as a breakthrough that contradicts the innate assumption of patriarchy in history.”

In the 1970s, Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas argued that, based on an abundance of female figurines, Neolithic Balkan societies (6300–5000 BCE) were matrilineal and matriarchal. Her theories contradicted the dominant academic idea, formulated at Cambridge, that patriarchy began in the Neolithic age as a natural result of agriculture. While some aspects of her arguments were overstated, the ferocity of the backlash to her work was striking. Her research is only now being seriously revisited.

This period is especially interesting because Gimbutas’s theories also fuelled the idea, widespread in certain feminist circles, that matriarchal societies were dominant in prehistory. Professor of Religion Cynthia Eller recalls seeing an advert for a T-shirt in a feminist magazine that read: « I Survived Five-Thousand Years of Patriarchal Hierarchies”.

In her book The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, she argues that this narrative – while emotionally powerful and sometimes politically useful – often relies on selective readings of archaeological evidence and can reinforce traditional gender stereotypes rather than dismantle them.

She tells me: “I don’t think that patriarchy is a monolith, and surely there are cultures which are kinder for women and ones that are worse. I suspect that this was the case in prehistory. »

What links all these narratives is the search for a single, linear story of human history, a grand narrative where societies progressed in some way – from egalitarian to hierarchical, from primitive to advanced, from matriarchal to patriarchal. Why does there seem to be such a strong desire to impose rigid, gendered models onto the past in the first place? In fact, a growing body of evidence, including the Celtic matrilocality study, suggests something very different.

The capacity to imagine

“It shouldn’t come as such a surprise that archaeologists are uncovering more evidence of earlier societies that weren’t patriarchal,” says Angela Saini, author of The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule.

“For a long time, historical and scientific evidence has shown that the further back we go into history, the more varied societies tend to be in how they organise themselves. To this day, there are matrilineal societies all over the world, particularly in Africa and Asia, in which status and property run from mothers to daughters, rather than fathers to sons, including some with matrilocal patterns of residence.”

This aligns with the argument made by the late anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow in their bestseller The Dawn of Everything. They argue that modern capitalist society is a historic outlier in its rigid structuring of power and its resistance to change. For most of history, they argue, human societies have been far more diverse and experimental in how they organised themselves – challenging the idea that social evolution has followed a linear path.

Archaeologist Rachel Pope has spoken of a “trend in archaeology more generally, where we have returned to data and material evidence to lead narrative, rather than imposing narratives that confirm our own biases.” She says the archaeology of the Celts reveals vast regional differences in social norms, even between neighbouring communities.

This growing recognition of complexity matters – not just for understanding the past, but for shaping how we see the present. Too often, we impose modern biases onto history, forcing the past into neat narratives that reflect our current assumptions. But if history shows us anything, it’s that human societies have always been fluid, adaptable, and open to reinvention.

The critic Mark Fisher once wrote that it has become “easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.” But what if we let history’s complexity expand our sense of what’s possible, rather than confining it?

Of course, the past isn’t a blueprint for the future. “How we build future societies or how we choose to live in the present shouldn’t be predicated on how ancient people lived,” Saini says. “The future I imagine for myself hasn’t changed just because I understand global history better.”

And yet, the more we see history for what it really is – messy, diverse, full of possibility – the harder it becomes to accept that our current systems are the only way things can be. If history is open-ended, so is the future. The real challenge is to expand what we believe is possible.

Research Round-up

Here’s what else is making the news:

1. 🎥 Women led 42% of 100 top-grossing films of 2024 in the US, the same percentage as their male counterparts. This is the first time we’ve seen gender parity on the big screen.
2. 🏳️‍⚧️ A mandate from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for its researchers to erase mention of queer, intersex and transgender people from future scientific research will have dire consequences.
3. 💶 Women with endometriosis earn less, national research in England has shown.

About The Evidence

The Evidence is a supplement to the Impact newsletter designed to help you understand gender inequality – and show how we might fix it. Impact is a weekly newsletter of feminist journalism, dedicated to the rights of women and gender-diverse people worldwide.

This is the English version of our newsletter; you can read the French one here.