Archaeologists are unearthing the most powerful women who ever lived

The young man, no older than 25, had gone to the afterlife with an opulent assortment of grave goods, including an entire elephant tusk. Archaeologists who excavated his 5000-year-old remains in 2008 from a site near Seville, Spain, dubbed him the “Ivory Man” and suggested that he might have been the most important person on the Iberian peninsula in his lifetime. So it came as a shock when, 13 years later, analysis of proteins in his tooth enamel revealed that he wasn’t male at all. The Ivory Man was, in fact, the “Ivory Lady”. 

Perhaps this re-sexing shouldn’t have come as such a surprise. Of late, the ability to probe ancient biological remains has led to the discovery of prehistoric women in all sorts of unexpected places. It turns out they have occupied roles and positions that would have confounded 20th-century researchers. Whether in the form of Stone Age women spearing bison, Neolithic ones controlling the allocation of land, or the sensational case of a Viking warrior who, like the Ivory Lady, was belatedly identified as female, the new evidence is rocking our understanding of how ancient societies viewed gender roles. 

Nobody is suggesting that women and men were treated as equals in the ancient world, much less that it was a feminist paradise. Indeed, man-centred societies were probably the norm. But enough exceptions have come to light to suggest a breathtaking variety of social organisation. “There’s no one idea of womanhood or masculinity,” says archaeologist Rachel Pope at the University of Liverpool, UK. “Instead, there’s real variation in social norms across time and space.” Finally, we are unearthing prehistory’s powerful women. 

Despite huge leaps in equality over the past century, today’s societies are still largely patriarchal. Archaeologists have long been taught that this status quo got its foothold when farming became widespread, starting around 10,000 years ago. Hunter-gatherer groups are generally seen as egalitarian, albeit with men and women doing different types of work. But, the idea goes, as societies became more sedentary and began generating wealth in the form of surplus food, people started to attach importance to inheritance, and rules were established for transferring wealth from fathers to sons. With wealth came male power and female oppression. Or so argued Karl Marx’s collaborator, the political theorist Friedrich Engels, in the late 1800s. “That model supported a particular political system and was based on no archaeological evidence,” says Penny Bickle, archaeologist at the University of York, UK.  

Beginning of the patriarchy

A rival idea, put forward in the 1960s by Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, suggested that Europe’s oldest farming societies were woman-centric and thrived until 5000 years ago, when herders arrived from the steppes and imposed their patriarchal world view. It has, however, proved equally unfounded. These grand narratives, which invoke a single inflection point, no longer fit the data, says Bickle. The advent of new archaeological tools – notably the ability to analyse not only ancient DNA (aDNA), but also proteins and isotopes, or variants of elements consumed as food – reveal both ideas to be overly simplistic. “We shouldn’t be writing origin stories like these,” she says. Instead, what’s emerging is a more complex picture, showing how economic and historical context powerfully shaped the way men and women lived – and that societies were capable of flipping from one system to another within centuries, if conditions changed.   

Analysis of these societies also highlights the distinction between biological sex – including the ability to bear children – and gender, referring to our habit of assigning people distinct cultural attributes – masculine or feminine – based on their sex. Archaeologist Jennifer French at the University of Liverpool thinks that the concept of gender emerged with symbolic thinking, and that early Stone Age art and burial rites suggest the first modern humans were familiar with it, as were Neanderthals. Despite this, some researchers prefer to talk about “males” and “females” in that period, rather than “men” and “women”. “To me, it seems a little dehumanising,” she says.   

Nevertheless, the early Stone Age is largely a black box when it comes to gender roles. “Sexed burials with accompanying material culture, and iconographic artefacts, are either absent or rare,” says French. The tiny glimpses that archaeology and aDNA have afforded, combined with ethnographic evidence from modern or historical hunter-gatherer societies, hint that patrilocality and female exogamy were the norm. In other words, couples moved to live with the man’s family. However, because these groups tended to be small, they probably had to be adaptable, so matrilocal societies, where women stayed with their kin, may also sometimes have emerged. 

Matrilocal societies tend to give women greater participation in communal life, says anthropologist Carol Ember at Yale University, probably because, with family around, women are less likely to be defined exclusively as wives and mothers. This is especially true if resources – importantly, land – pass through the female line. And this matrilineal system of inheritance often goes together with matrilocality. According to a hypothesis developed by Ember and her husband Melvin Ember, who was also an anthropologist, matrilocality is most likely to emerge when women are the main workers in a subsistence economy – making it preferable that daughters stay at home – and when there is no threat of war, so families have no need to keep their sons close to help defend the household. This suggests that matrilocality would have been the exception in prehistory, because intergroup violence was so common. But there are other factors favouring women-centred societies, including situations where the paternity of children is uncertain and where groups have a history of migration. 

That covers the theory. On the ground, studying gender in prehistoric remains is complicated by the fact that how people were placed in burials may not reflect how they lived. Stable isotope analysis can help, by showing – through the detection of dietary changes – whether people died in the same place where they grew up. Genetics can help too, by revealing biological links among groups that recurred over generations and regions. Even then, interpreting the evidence can be tricky. Power maps onto patterns of post-marital residence and inheritance in different ways. Trickier still, says Pope, is that “there isn’t a demonstrable link between grave wealth and power”. 

Grave goods for women

A case in point is the early farming community that inhabited the 9000-year-old site of Çatalhöyük in modern Turkey. Archaeologists consider this group to have been egalitarian, in that men and women had similar diets and did similar kinds of work. But, in a new genetic study, Eren Yüncü at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara and her colleagues show that the society was matrilocal and that young women were accorded more lavish grave goods than men. This doesn’t necessarily mean that women pulled the strings at Çatalhöyük, however. “Grave goods often express the lost reproductive potential when young women die,” says archaeologist Katharina Rebay-Salisbury at the University of Vienna, Austria. 

Exceptional though they have been, matrilocal or matrilineal societies have now been documented on every inhabited continent in the ancient world. The first humans to reach the remote islands of Oceania, around 3000 years ago, were matrilocal, according to a 2022 study led by geneticist Yue-Chen Liu at Harvard University. The earliest farming societies in Thailand probably were, too. And in 2017, geneticists detected a high-status matrilineal group that persisted for more than 300 years in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico – an important ritual and political centre in North America around the 10th century – whose modern descendants include the matrilineal Zuni and Hopi peoples.  

But there is a paradox. “In the matrilocal, matrilineal societies that we have studied in the recent anthropological record, women were never political leaders,” says Ember. They had higher status and more influence than women in patrilocal, patrilineal societies, but they didn’t make the decisions. That was typically the preserve of their brothers, who were often more heavily invested in their sisters’ children than in their own. This prompts the question of what we mean by power. There are famous cases of women who took on the trappings of masculine-coded hard power, with an emphasis on physical strength and domination. The Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut, who reigned in the 15th century BC, sported kingly regalia, commissioned monuments and initiated at least one military campaign. The Mayan ruler Lady K’awiil Ajaw of Cobá presided over a formidable group of warriors and statesmen in the 7th century and is thought to have built a 100-kilometre road to display her authority. In general, though, women have exerted power differently from men. 

Strength in soft power

This is highlighted in a study by political anthropologist Paula Sabloff at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, who compared the roles of royal women across eight pre-modern states. The women included queens who had acted as regents, such as Lady Fu Hao in China’s Shang dynasty more than 3000 years ago, and spouses who had deputised for their royal husbands, like the wives of Zimri-Lim, who led the Mari in what is now eastern Syria in the 18th century BC. The states spanned five continents and more than 4000 years and had different cultural norms regarding inheritance, post-marital residence and female rulers themselves. Yet, Sabloff found that in all eight, women wielded power in the same ways: by influencing policy; influencing the actions of those above and below them in rank; acting as go-betweens; and patronising clients. “That’s real power, too,” says Rebay-Salisbury. 

Understanding this female propensity for soft power lends a different hue to some recent findings from prehistory. For instance, a man and woman found together in a grave in southern Spain, along with 30 precious metal and gemstone artefacts, are among several examples of couples who seem to have ruled jointly in the Bronze Age. They may have had equal status, while deploying different leadership skills. Or consider two kings who ruled over the Celtic Hallstatt culture of south-west Germany around 2500 years ago. Their graves are among the richest burials in European prehistory. A recent aDNA analysis reveals that they were probably a nephew and his maternal uncle, indicating that a woman linked them, even though she wasn’t buried with them.  

But not all female power was so indirect, as new findings about another Celtic tribe make clear. The study, by geneticist Lara Cassidy at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland and her colleagues, looked at the Durotriges, who inhabited southern Britain two millennia ago – around the time that the Romans invaded. The genomic analysis of 57 individuals showed that the society was matrilocal and matrilineal, with men joining the group from outside, and that Durotrigian women went to the afterlife with more grave wealth than their male counterparts. Add to this evidence that they took up arms against the Romans and the assertion, by Roman chroniclers, that the Celtic women of Britain were fierce and liberated – most famously Boudica, who led the Iceni tribe in a revolt against the Roman invaders – and there seems little doubt that the Durotriges themselves recognised female power. 

The line between male and female power isn’t always clear-cut, though. Also around two millennia ago, an individual was buried on one of the Scilly Isles off the south-west coast of Britain with a mirror and a sword. “Up to the Roman period, we only find mirrors in graves that we are comfortable saying were female,” says Pope. “We would tend to find swords in male graves.” The combination of the two intrigued archaeologists when they discovered the grave in 1999, but they had to wait almost a quarter of a century for aDNA analysis to show that the individual was biologically female. If her grave goods reflected her role in life, a team led by osteoarchaeologist Simon Mays of Historic England concluded, she may have been a high-ranking woman who participated in active combat. 

She and the Durotriges wouldn’t have been the first warrior women. There are graves of indisputably female fighters in what is now Armenia, south of the Caucasus, dating from 3000 years ago. On the steppes of Ukraine, Iron Age burials identified as Scythian include a woman interred with gold and silver treasure, arrows and her horse – hinting that the Amazons may not have been entirely mythical. Likewise, the Valkyries of Norse mythology find echoes in evidence of Viking women who charged into battle – notably the individual found in a grave at Birka, Sweden, along with weapons including a sword, axe, spear and battle knife, as well as two horses. Assumed for over a century to be a man, geneticists reassigned her in 2017. 

As the discoveries stack up, researchers have been asking what other roles, usually attributed to men, might have been performed by women in the past – and finding that there was really no limit. In the earliest Mexican farming villages, women oversaw ceremonies involving communication with ancestors. The so-called Siberian Ice Maiden, whose tattooed body was buried in the Altai mountains of Central Asia around 2500 years ago, is thought to have been a high-ranking spiritual leader – a shaman. And women also performed shamanic rituals in pre-farming Europe. 

Other prehistoric women, meanwhile, overturned the long-held trope of “man the hunter, woman the gatherer”. One buried with hunting implements points to the presence of female big-game hunters in the Americas 9000 years ago. Millennia later, Indigenous women acted as trackers and guides to the first European fur traders in North America. Indeed, anthropologists Sarah Lacy at the University of Delaware and Cara Ocobock at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, make the case that women hunted throughout the Palaeolithic. In some ways, they say – notably a metabolism built for endurance – they were better adapted to the task than men.  

Bringing all the evidence together, it is becoming clear that few roles have been off-limits to all women for all time. As new tools make fine-grained analysis possible, researchers expect more diversity to come to light. “I think it’s going to be blown wide open in the next few years,” says Cassidy. Already it is clear that, in the past, whole societies have tilted more towards gender equality than many modern ones do. Patriarchal systems damage both men and women, says Bickle, but they aren’t inevitable, and our concepts of man and woman can be reimagined.

“Gender is not stable,” she says. “It’s subject to continuous change.” 

Source: Humans - newscientist.com