Our late Edinburgh colleague, David Sellar, was interested in the question of matrilineal succession amongst the Picts in Scotland. He would have been interested in an article in today’s Times that reported that archaeological research suggested that it was women who “held the power in Celtic Britain”. To the patriarchal Roan this no doubt seemed astonishingly barbaric along with woad and men with moustaches. The foundation of the claims is research in DNA, showing that there were societies that descended from one or a small number of women. The genomic investigations suggest that the husbands were incomers to a male-dominated society. The research started with investigation of a well-preserved community iron-age cemetery in Dorset, a cemetery of a people known to the Romans as the Durotriges. In this cemetery it was clear that the group were all descended form one woman who must have lived centuries earlier. The conclusion is that the land was passing through the female line, with group identity founded on matrilineal identification. The detailed study of the bones in this one cemetery has allowed the reinterpretation of smaller sets of surviving cemeteries suggesting that matrilineal succession and culture was widespread in Britain. An excellent account of the study, carried out by archaeologists at Bournemouth University and Trinity College Dublin can be found in the webpages of Bournemouth University
