The Matriarchs of Wetwang Slack

Exciting news in the worlds of ancient DNA and Celtic archaeology:

Kinship practices underpin all traditional societies, forming the basis for socially sanctioned reproductive unions, residence patterns and the inheritance of rights and property. Although the relationship between biological relatedness and kinship is not always straightforward, ancient DNA studies are increasingly used to examine the extent to which biological relatedness underpinned social constructs of kinship in prehistoric societies. Here, we report the analysis of genome-wide data for 534 individuals from the Arras Culture of Middle Iron Age northeast England (including 390 from Wetwang Slack, 100 from Pocklington, and 29 from Melton), finding evidence for communities with kinship systems structured along matrilineal lines. At Wetwang Slack, we reconstruct a 13-generation pedigree comprising 195 individuals structured around female-line connections: matrilineal transmissions greatly outnumbered patrilineal ones and male reproductive partners were largely absent from the cemetery, plausibly because they were buried in their own natal communities. Furthermore, the three main sites with robust sample sizes were characterised by non-overlapping dominant mitochondrial haplogroups, implying a maternal clan-based structure. Reproductive unions at Wetwang Slack suggest a recurrent alliance between two dominant maternal descent groups, with members of each group never reproducing with members of their own maternal lineage. Meanwhile, three individuals from lavishly furnished chariot burials at Wetwang Slack were close maternal relatives belonging to a lineage with consecutive generations of close kin unions, a pattern largely absent among other individuals at the site. These results indicate highly distinctive social practices among an elite group embedded in the wider kinship network of the Arras community.

Besides having an awesome name, Wetwang Slack is a very famous archaeological site, especially because of the three chariot burials, all of which were women.

View of one of the burials

Wetwang Slack is generally associated with the Arras Culture of northeastern Britain, which dates from around 450 BC to the Roman conquest. Who these people were is a complicated question. They certainly seem culturally Celtic – just look at their jewelry! – but it has been much disputed whether they were recent immigrants. The new study says no:

The cultural affiliation of the Arras Culture has long been debated because of its use of square barrows, chariot burials and La Tène-style objects, which have often invited comparison with Iron Age communities in continental Europe, particularly groups from the Paris Basin. However, our genetic data do not support a model in which the individuals buried in Arras Culture cemeteries derived from a recent migration of individuals from the Continent. Genome wide ancestry was highly homogeneous across Arras sites and burial contexts, and qpAdm modelling using Iron Age individuals from France as the sole ancestry source provided a poor fit. . . . These results suggest that the distinctive Arras funerary tradition of East Yorkshire reflects local British communities participating in broader La Tène-connected cultural networks, rather than the establishment of a recently arrived continental population.

Reconstruction of a Wetwang Slack chariot

Now these folks, the elite of Bronze and Iron Age Europe, were the descendants of invaders from the steppes. Those invaders were patrilineal and, so far as we can tell, patriarchal as well. So how did the people of the Arras Culture end up matrilineal? Good question! 

The authors of this study don't have a clue.

Another interesting discovery is that members of two of the three great matrilineal lineages married each other regularly, as if they were moities, or reciprocal clans, something documented by archaeologists around the world but not mentioned in any written source about the Celts:

Among 45 reproductive unions for which both maternal 374 lineages could be assigned, 25 involved one partner carrying the major T2e1a1b haplotype 375 and the other H1ao (Fig. 3e). Thus, more than half of the reproductive unions at Wetwang 376 Slack joined the two dominant matrilines at the site.

My overall take is that the Arras Culture was a unique thing, obviously influenced by continental Celts but preserving many aspects of local Bronze Age culture, including, perhaps, matrilineal descent and prominent political roles for women.

Fascinating.

Olalde et al., Ancient DNA reveals matrilineal organisation and recurrent unions between dominant matrilines in Iron Age Britain, bioRxiv preprint

Scarabs

Here is the Met's explantion for why ancient Egyptians were obsessed with dung beetles:

The scarab was shaped like a dung beetle, scarabaeus sacer, which is also the source of its modern name. The dung beetle was "kheperer" in ancient Egyptian. Having watched the small creatures push huge balls of dung, the ancient Egyptians compared the sun being pushed into the sky at dawn to the beetle, and they referred to the rising sun as "Kheperi." The word for "to become" or "come into being" was "kheper," and the beetle hieroglyph was used to spell all of these words. As such, the scarab became a powerful amulet for rejuvenation in this life and reincarnation in the next. 

This is the sema-tawy, the symbol of the unification of Egypt. These are all images of the under sides; the tops are all shaped like beetles. I love them because they can be almost anything.

Here we have Ramesses IV riding a chariot and trampling an enemy.

Here's one the Met doesn't attempt to explain.

Two goddesses with lions' heads

Wonderful little things.

Anglo-Saxon Horned Warrior

This wonderful artifact is known as the Lynsted Die Stamp. It was found by a metal detectorist in Kent, and purchased by the British government through the Portable Antiquities Scheme. It measures 3x4 centimeters, or 1.2 x 1.6 inches.

According to the PAS,

The die would have been used to produce rectangular Pressblech foils, probably to decorate helmets or other high-status military equipment. The Lynsted die is very close in size to some of the decorative rectangular panels on the Sutton Hoo helmet, though its design differs from those on that artefact.

This dancing warrior with the horned helmet has several parallels in Scandinavian art.

This example, one of the Torslunda Plates, seems to be blind in one eye, which is one reason why this figure is usually interpreted as Odin.

The other reason people see this as Odin is that the "horns" are actually birds, likely ravens.

What a terrific find.

Intaglios from the Roman World

These little carved gems are one of the great delights to come down to us from the Classical world, each one a little surprise, each one a wonder, because they can depict almost anything.

This one is in the Met, which glosses it as "Mummy of Osiris carried on the back of a lion, accompanied by Anubis and flanked by two winged goddesses (Isis and Nephthys), inscribed around margin: bainchoooch abrasax, and on reverse two lines of characters with the seven Greek vowels in order." Abrasax was a common magical world, but I can't remember ever seeing bainchoooch before. Thinking of making this my battle cry, or maybe posting it as a response to really inane tweets. Bainchoooch!!!

The Met explains this one as a "mystical invocation" of the uterus. 

Anybody out there who can read the text on the back? Is it really mystical or is that a highbrow euphemism?

Rat and elephant

Huntsman spearing a boar

Jason and the Golden Fleece

Sea chariot with a being who may be a sea god, or perhaps the deified Augustus

A sculptor at work

Snake

Cupid on a Hippocampus

Ancient American Art from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Two gold pendants depicting shamans, of obscure origin; the museum web site says only "Central or South America, c. 100-900 AD."

Headdress ornaments, also obscure. A lot of this stuff must come from oil barons who bought it from dealers in the 1920s, before export controls.

Maya vase featuring two nearlyt identical paintings fo the maize god.

"Whistle in the Shape of a Bird Man," says the catalog. Dancer? Eagle Warrior? Probably Mexico, probably AD 600 to 900.

Pair of Tlaloc Eye Pieces, Maya, AD 900 to 1200.

Bell pendant in the shape of a pelican, likely Panama, AD 300 to 1500

Stucco Maya head, AD 600 to 900. Lots more at the Museum web site.

Were there Wild Lions in Ancient Greece?

Greek myths tell us about several lions: Herakles and the Nemean lion, etc. There were no lions in Greece in classical times and have been none since, but, on the other hand, there certainly were at some point in the distant Ice Age past. So when did they die out? Do the appearances of lions in Greek legends record memories of real lions in Archaic times, or were those stories transplanted from Asia?

Though such theories were long dismissed by other researchers, in 1978, two prominent German zooarchaeologists made a startling discovery. During an excavation of Tiryns—the same city whose legendary king dared Hercules into action—they chanced upon a feline heel bone near a human skeleton. It was unmistakably from a lion, they concluded, and possibly of the same species that inhabits parts of the African continent today.

The bone was only the first of dozens to surface in Tiryns and elsewhere over the following decades. Though some details remain unclear, many archaeologists and historians now use this evidence to conclude that modern lions once lived alongside people in parts of what is today Europe, including Greece, for hundreds of years. Today lion bones offer a rare glimpse into the Bronze Age world and the fraught relationship humans had with these fierce predators, animals that inspired legends and creative works for centuries.

“Now it’s possible to say that some [lion images] could have been recalled from real experiences on the [Greek] mainland,” says art historian Nancy Thomas. The finds, she adds, cast “a whole different light on the art … and how hunting real lions could have played into the elite structure development that was going on in Greece at the time.”

Reported finds of post-Ice Age lions

The number of bones reported from across southeastern Europe is somewhat convincing, but I don't know anything about how the bones were dated (lots of older radiocarbon dates on bone are wrong). The many representations of lions in art don't help the case much, because many are obviously copies from renderings of lions in the art of Mesopotamia or Egypt. 

Anyway it is fun to imagine that a tale like Heracles and the Nemean Lion represents one of the last wild lions in Greece, a time when they still existed but were so rare as to be truly remarkable.

David Reich on Bronze Age Genetics

In this interview with Dwarkesh Patel, genetist David Reich says that human genetic change was fastest between 5,000 and 2,000 years ago. Changes associated with the Bronze and Iron Ages seem to have been far more dramatic than those that took place during the agricultural revolution:

In this part of the world—Europe and the Middle East—we are actually in a period of accelerated natural selection. One way to see this is to look at the enrichment pattern we’re observing, where immune traits are unusually associated with these selection signals. We could compare the last 5,000 years of our time period, what’s called the Bronze Age and further onward, to the previous 5,000 years. What we see is that this intensification of selection around immune traits, and similarly the intensification around metabolic traits, has accelerated over this time period.

It’s not like natural selection has been at the same rate over all places and times. It’s increasing over the time period we’re analyzing. Plausibly the whole time period has increased compared to previous periods. We’re in a period of intensified selection. That’s not implausible, because this is a population that went through a huge shock in terms of the way people live and the culture. Almost everyone we’re analyzing are farmers or food producers in one way or another. Farming was invented for the first time anywhere in the world in the Middle East 11,000 or 12,000 years ago. The people who invented farming exploded into Europe after 8,500 years ago, spread across the continent, and expanded rapidly.

In the Bronze Age, there was an intensification of how people lived, with much higher population densities. People were living more and more next to their animals and getting their diseases, and exchanging their diseases with the animals and with each other. This is a period of rapid change in how people are living, resulting in different biological needs of this population. It’s not surprising, perhaps, that in the context of these dramatic changes, the biology of the population might not be ideally adapted.

There might be what some people call an evolutionary mismatch, where you take a genetic variation that evolved in hunter-gatherers and put it into farmers or pastoralists, and it’s not exactly right. What you’re seeing is the DNA of this population, which descended from hunter-gatherers only 10,000 years ago, reacting to the shock of having been moved into an agricultural, Bronze Age, high-population-density, urban environment. A hypothesis is that what we’re seeing is the adaptation that occurs as a result.

One example:

One of the things we do in this work is look carefully at many of these positions in the DNA. . . . One of the things we see is that, while for the most part the signals of natural selection we detect are consistent with constant natural selection over time, in a handful of them we’re able to see that there’s been a reversal or a radical change in natural selection. Very often that occurs in the period between 5,000 to 2,000 years ago, which is the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, a period of rapid population growth and rapid movement to intensive use of many technologies that were not used that way before.

An example of this is the TYK2 genetic variant that is a major risk factor for severe tuberculosis, which is the most important infectious disease killer in the world today. If you look at this major risk factor for tuberculosis, this variant rockets up in frequency from 8,000 or 6,000 years ago to maybe 9% or 10% in this part of the world. Then it rockets down in frequency in the last 3,000 years. In both cases, there’s very clear evidence of natural selection, in the first case to increase in frequency, and in the next case to decrease in frequency.

A possible reason is the spread of tuberculosis. It maybe becomes endemic in the population 2,000 or 3,000 years ago. That’s potentially consistent with pathogen sequence data and other lines of evidence. And maybe this variant was protecting against something before then, but then tuberculosis became significant after that point, and it was so bad that it pushed in the opposite direction. That’s speculative.

Exotic Pets in Roman Berenike

Berenike is an old port on the Red Sea in southern Egypt. The site had long been known, and serious archaeology began in 1994. I have a general post about the site and two others on interesting religious discoveries (statue of the Buddha, cool shrine with headless falcons). Now there is an interesting article out about the town's pet cemetery:

To date, the burial ground, located on a small sandy hill in the foreground of the city, has yielded almost 800 burials spread over an area of 127 m2. Cats (Felis silvestris catus) were by far the most dominant species, accounting for 88.2% (688 individuals). The second most abundant species in the cemetery were dogs (Canis lupus familiaris), 54 individuals (7%) having so far been recorded. The third important taxonomic “component” in Berenike were monkeys from the Cercopithecinae sub-family (35 individuals). These included two identified genera of macaque species (Macaca), and a representative of the Chlorocebus species, the grivet. Monkeys accounted for 4.5% of the total number of burials. The zooarchaeological data, that is, age at death, sex, morphology, and pathological changes, clearly indicate that the animals buried in this cemetery were companion animals: brought in, cared for, fed, and well treated.

All of the monkeys found in the Berenike cemetery were female and young, which are said to make the best pets. They came from both India and sub-Saharan Africa. The monkeys seem to have died young because of nutritional deficiencies – hard to get good food for tropical forest monkeys in the Egyptian desert – and possibly also the drinking of salt water.

Also very interesting was that many monkeys were buried with grave goods. No dogs were so honored, and only 3 percent of cats. But 40 percent of the monkeys received burial offerings that included copper and iron collars, sections of iridiscent shell, clasps that were presumably part of leather or cloth collars,, and a woven basket containing some greasy material.

And then there were combined burials, like this one:

In this case, a young grivet monkey (Cercopithecus aethiops) appears to have embraced in its arms a young cat (3–6 months old). The kitten was facing the monkey and clutching its body. A wooden clasp next to the grivet’s body was most likely part of a body harness/ collar that the monkey had worn. Similar remains of collars, made of various materials, were discovered in many monkey and cat graves in Berenike.

Another monkey was buried in an iron collar, immersed in oil.

Fascinating people, the Romans.

Marta Osypińska1, Piotr Osypiński and Iwona Zych, "A centurion’s monkey? Companion animals for the social elite in an Egyptian port on the fringes of the Roman Empire in the 1st and 2nd c. CE." Journal of Roman Archaeology 38 (2025).

Civilization and Evolution

From an excellent, fascinating interview with geneticist David Reich:

The context that lot of my work in the last few years has been focused on, and that I'm tremendously excited about right now, is to try to use genetics from ancient people to understand how people got to be the way they are today biologically. So what we've done in our research group in the last few years is that we've generated data on an absolutely huge number of people. 

The paper that we are currently publishing has data from more than 10,000 ancient people from Europe and the Middle East. These individuals are from all over and from all time depths up to 15,000 years ago. So the last 10,000 years, this is the time period when, in Europe and the Middle East, agriculture comes in. It's a very eventful period culturally, it's a period of extreme population growth, when people began to live differently. We can compare the rate of evolution at the beginning of the time period to the end of the time period and it's gotten faster. And not only has it gotten faster, but genetic variants that were under positive natural selection before in some cases switch to negative selection, so it's a period of oscillation of natural selection. 

What seems to have happened is that there's cultural change, due to differences in the way people live, with agriculture, living more densely, living with animals, urbanization, other things that are changing, and they are prompting changes in the genome that are resulting in, on average, changes in frequency of the genetic variants that might be useful for people living in these new and differently challenging environments. But if you look at the individual positions that are significant in Europe, they tend to move in the same direction in East Asia, even though the histories are completely independent in this time period.

If that is right, then cultural change, in particular agriculture and urbanization, has caused a sort of convergent evolution across Eurasia, with the same genes being favored in widely separated populations. Which is fascinating.

Weapons of Bronze Age Scotland

The Scottish National Museum is putting on an exhibit called Scotland's First Warriors featuring weapons and shields from the Bronze Age. Personally I think there was already war in the Neolithic, if not earlier, but this stuff is cool so we'll let that slide. Above is a sword from the Carnoustie Hoard.

Sword from the same hoard. This stuff was deliberately buried just outside a large wooden hall. A fragmentary wooden scabbard was found with the sword, radiocarbon dated to around 1000 BC.

But the best thing in the exhibit is these six shields. Wow.

With a curator for scale. Twenty-two similar shields are known, all but one found in Britain. The metal is quite thin, so they were probably for show rather than combat. Most of them were found in bogs, so they were ritually deposited; I wonder if they were made specifically for an elaborate ritual that ended with their being offered to the gods.

Chimpanzees and Crystals.

There is archaeological evidence that people have been into crystals for hundreds of thousands of years. So some researchers gave crystals to chimpanzees and discovered that they love them too. 

NY Times:

For the first experiment, the researchers used two pedestals that were installed in the chimps’ yards. On one, they placed a multifaceted quartz crystal that stood about a foot tall, and on the other, a sandstone rock of similar dimensions. (Dr. García-Ruiz named this experiment “The Monolith.”)

The chimps went crystal cuckoo. In one yard, they repeatedly approached the monolith until the alpha female, Manuela, wrenched it off its pedestal. After that, the crystal rarely left the troop’s sight, while they largely ignored the sandstone rock. One video shows a 50-year-old male chimp named Yvan carrying it while he climbs and eats cabbage, passing it between his hands and feet with great panache.

In the other yard, the experiment was cut short after a chimpanzee named Sandy immediately grabbed both items from their pedestals and brought them into the dormitories, where human caretakers don’t generally go. . . .

For the second experiment, researchers set out piles of pebbles in the gardens, with a few small crystals incorporated into each. The chimpanzees immediately sorted the crystals out of the piles.

Then they carried them in their mouths, turned them in the light and held them up to their eyes like old-timey prospectors.

Xeroxed and then Scanned Photo of a Cache of Crystals

I find this completely unsurprising. The human attraction to bright, shiny rocks, especially when they have interesting geometries, seems very primal to me, something so old as to defy any assignment of "meaning." Archaeologists are used to finding caches of crystals in all sorts of places; the one in the photo above was found buried next to the foundation of a house on the Manassas battlefield, probably built around 1870. The occuants were free African Americans, and an interest in in crystals seems to be a habit their ancestors brought from Africa. But they were far from the only ones to have such interests; I know of a cache of crystals hidden in the coffin of a wealthy white woman buried around 1920. Notice the stone point that was included in the collection above; this is also a common habit around the world, and many folks have been interested in the stone tools shaped by their distant ancestors.

We love bright, shiny, interestingly shaped things, and always have.

Lugdunum: Roman Lyons

The Vaise Treasure, buried around AD 260 and excavated in 1992

Lugdunum, modern Lyon, France, was in Roman times the greatest city of northwestern Europe, with a population of about 70,000. It was founded in about 43 BC as a settlement of veterans from Caesar's wars. The spot is such a great one – at the confluence of two significant rivers, perfectly positioned to control overland trade from the Mediterrean to Gaul and Britain – that it ought to have beeen settled a long time before that. Archaeologists, alas, have had a hard time documenting this. There seems to have been a small settlement on a nearby hill, but when people dig in the rest of the Roman city all they find is Roman stuff. Numerous stray artifacts from the Iron Age have turned up, but no little evidence of buildings. One interesting thing that has been found is pits full of animal bones, such as might be left from a great feast. So the reigning theory is that in the Iron Age most of the site was a sort of fair ground where people from north and south met to trade and feast, kept neutral by not allowing anyone to build there.

Roman Lugdunum grew rapidly. It got a big boost from Augustus' campaign to conquer Germania, which began in 20 BC. Lugdunum became a major supply hub, and a network of roads was built or improved radiating out from the city in all directions. By 10 BC the city had a major aqueduct and a theater that seated 4,500.

Emperor Claudius – above, on a coin minted in Lugdunum – had a great bridge built across the river, which required sinking the pylons deep through the swampy ground.

One of the most famous objects in the Lugdunum Musée et Théâtres Romains is the Sarcophagus with the Triumph of Bacchus, carved around 200 AD and found in 1845.

Bronze statue of Neptune known as the Neptune of Lyon.

Part of the Claudian Table, a large bronze plaque recording a speech Emperor Claudius gave at Lugdunum in 48 AD, found in 1526.

The "swastika mosaic," excavated in 1911 from a grand villa within the city.

Map of the Roman city.

The Circus Mosaic. Wish I were going to this museum today instead of what I have to do.