Bronze Age ‘shaman,’ previously assumed to be a male metalworker, was actually a woman

Artifacts found in the Upton Lovell G2a Bronze Age burial displayed in the Wiltshire museum in Devizes, England. (Journal of Antiquity)

London — Bronze Age remains once thought to belong to a revered male metalworker are in fact female, new DNA analysis has found, calling into question long-held beliefs about ancient British society.

The 4,000-year-old skeleton, which became known as the Upton Lovell Shaman, was found in a barrow, a special type of burial mound reserved for high-status individuals, researcher Tom Booth, senior research scientist at the Francis Crick Institute in London, told CNN on Thursday.

When the burial in Upton Lovell, southern England, was first uncovered at the beginning of the 19th century, archaeologists found a “wide range of interesting grave goods,” including axes, a gold necklace and bone points, he said.

The axes had traces of gold on the edge of them, suggesting this person worked with gold and probably other metals such as copper and bronze, Booth said.

“They were buried with their tools in a special way because they were considered particularly eminent,” he added, with the number and variety of items making it a unique Bronze Age burial both in Britain and in Europe more widely.

“There’s no other burials that really compare in terms of the types of grave goods that are in there,” he said.

This association with high status, as well as a rudimentary analysis of the size of the bones, led archaeologists to conclude that the burial belonged to a man.

With no DNA testing available at the time, this conclusion persisted, until Booth and his colleagues studied the skeleton as part of a wider ongoing genome sequencing project.

Testing produced a female result, “which is not what we were anticipating,” Booth said.

“We’re overturning sort of two centuries of thought about this skeleton here, so we’d better be careful,” he said, adding that he tested two further samples of the skeleton to be sure.

“Both came back as female as well, so that essentially confirms that the skeleton was female, and this was probably a female metalworker, and specifically a gold worker, who had some kind of special status within their community in order to be not only afforded a burial underneath one of these round barrows, but also to be buried with this huge, unique diversity of grave goods as well,” Booth said.

The discovery also calls into question previous assumptions that female burials found with grave goods must have necessarily been the wives of important men, he said.

“This subverts the idea that women or females in these societies couldn’t be powerful in their own right and special in their own right,” he added.

Booth also underlined that the fact that the woman found in Upton Lovell was taller than average for the time — closer in height to the average Bronze Age man, at around 5 foot 4 inches — meant it was plausible for previous research to conclude that she was male.

The fact that she died at around 45 years of age and was postmenopausal also made it more difficult to ascertain her sex from bone analysis alone, Booth explained, as female bones start to appear more like their male equivalents with age.

As for the fact that the individual was named the Upton Lovell Shaman, due to the suggestion that her grave goods were connected with rituals and mysticism, Booth believes metal working itself would have held a ritualistic quality because of its importance in Europe-wide Bronze Age trading networks.

“It kind of shows the importance of metalworking as this sort of intrinsic thing that’s linked to the ritual lives of people and the economic lives of people to some extent as well,” he said.

“This metalworker would have been very much embedded within that kind of network of trade and metalworking and exchange,” Booth added.

The results form part of a new free exhibition at the Francis Crick Institute named “We Go Way Back,” which opened Thursday.

Pontus Skoglund, a population geneticist who leads the Ancient Genomics laboratory at the institute, said the wider project to genetically sequence the remains of around 1,000 ancient individuals will help to advance our scientific understanding.

“As we continue to build an ancient genetic record, that is publicly available, that will provide a rich source of information for archaeologists and everyone else to build a better understanding of past societies and the people in it,” he told CNN on Thursday.