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More and more, archaeological evidence directs a big re-think of women's roles in the ancient world. [1]
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Date: 2023-07-29
In the nature journal Scientific Reports, it turns out a chalcolithic-era body dubbed the “Ivory Merchant” and presumed male when found in 2008 in Valencina, Spain, monumentally buried and with uniquely rare and magnificent grave goods a 260 foot distance from a communal grave of the same period, was a woman.
And the denizens of the also luxurious communal grave —one in a garment made of thousands of carved seashell beads— appear to be female as well. Perhaps patriarchy was not the social order there 4,900 to 4,650 years ago.
Valencina was a mega-site of the Copper Age, the biggest-known settlement in the time in that area. It featured monumental construction, communal burials and high-end material culture, the team writes. ... in the graves, they found luxuries made of exotic materials such as shiny crystals (which humankind seems to have coveted for over 100,000 years), amber, imported ostrich eggs (also prized in deeper antiquity). And ivory.
The woman ... interred alone ... was at first thought to be a young man aged 17 to 25, of local origin based on isotope analysis, and unfortunately suffered from high exposure to toxic mercury (... likely exposed to cinnabar, which is mercury ore). Her grave goods included a large pottery plate on which the researchers detected traces of wine and cannabis, a plant indigenous to Eurasia. She had a copper awl, flint tools (which remained in wide use through the Copper Age and subsequent Iron Age) and [remarkable] objects made of precious ivory .. even ... a 1.8-kilogram (4-pound) [African] elephant tusk by her head.
The fact that communal burial was the rule —and children of great houses not interred differently from other children— with this isolated monument receiving intense ritual attention across some 200 to 250 years, with over 60 smaller tombs and other deposits at respectful distance around hers, in addition to the unique offerings of in-Iberia-of-that-era unmatched rarity, value, “sophistication, quality, and quantity”, underlines the tremendously prominent social standing of the regal Ivory Lady and suggests that it was a stature earned by personal achievement and merit, not inherited from parents nor acquired through marriage.
By all the evidence, “established interpretations about the political role of women at the onset of social complexity should be revisited,” the authors tell us.
<big><big>Another example:</big></big> in 1941, near Birka, Sweden, a burial of splendor —artifacts included armor-piercing arrows, other weaponry, and two horses— which finally in 2016 researchers postulated to be of a female based upon skeletal morphology, was shortly proven by DNA to be precisely that, after 76 years of conventional belief to the masculine contrary.
“Viking scholars have been reluctant to acknowledge the agency of women with weapons,” the lady-warrior team wrote.
<big><big>And in 2019, four Scythian warrior women</big></big>, comprising three generations from 2,500 years ago were found together in a magnificent barrow among 18 lesser ones by a ten-year study near the western Russian village of Devitsa, the youngest about 12 or 13 years of age, the eldest 45 or 50 —still wearing an engraved gold headdress called a calathos, apparently missed by past grave robbers— and two in their twenties. The grave goods included practical items as well as wealth: dozens of iron arrowheads and knives. Their sex was no great surprise to the well-informed, however: chief excavator Valerii Guliaev stated that “women warriors were the norm, not the exception, in Scythian culture.” Already In 2014,
Guliaev’s project has averaged finding a burial a year of young armed women,
There are innumerable examples more.
<big><big>And yet, as late as 2021,</big></big> in the European Journal of Archaeology, (and elsewhere), Ulla Moilanen and colleagues reported that the presence of an intact sword and other weapons as well as jewelry in the Suontaka Vesitorninmäki find in Finland, dated c. 1040–1174 AD, provoked conventional voices to insist that the sword must have been hidden in the grave after the burial, or else a male warrior must originally have been a co-resident. Some of those voices were made less discontented when DNA analysis found XXY chromosomes, so the figure buried in female garb at least was only partly female after all.
if you are buried with fanfare, sacrificed helpmeets and mainly if your grave bristled with weapons, and if your remains were not sufficiently well preserved to say otherwise – you were a man.
At least until microscience happens to prove otherwise. And if it hasn’t, by default you must be. Until recently, children found interred with weaponry or other masculo-typic objects were routinely considered male when DNA was too deteriorated to help, the skeletal remains at that age being pretty much indistinguishable. But amelogenin to the rescue! The sex of Ivory Person was determined by analysis of this protein, which is involved in tooth enamel and coded on both the X and Y chromosome. yet distinguishably. So, if analysis of a body’s enamel amelogenin finds Y chromosome type, the body is a male, which means it should “[work] for the kiddies of antiquity too.” Whether it “works” in the case of ancient intersex individuals is unclear, perhaps. As may also be the gender with which the individual personally identified in life: you don’t necessarily get to choose what apparel and gear will accompany you into eternity.
<big><big>Lagniappe: 2,500 year old tomb of honored women hints at a goddess of the crossroads.</big></big>
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/29/2183982/-More-and-more-archaeological-evidence-directs-a-big-re-think-of-women-s-roles-in-the-ancient-world
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