Wiltshire<\/a> Museum, which holds the remains. \u201cIt\u2019s a fantastic revelation of the position of women in society. We\u2019re so used to the assumption of men do everything, men are the leaders, men are the metalworkers. Here we have smoking gun evidence of a female metalworker. And metalworking was the space science of its day.\u201d<\/p>\nThe grave, first discovered in 1801 in the village of Upton Lovell, about 10 miles (16km) west of Stonehenge, contained the almost complete skeleton, with pierced animal bones arranged around the neck and the legs, suggestive of a ceremonial cloak and, possibly, a bone necklace.<\/p>\n
Artefacts in the Upton Lovell Shaman display. Photograph: Wiltshire Museum<\/p>\n
Alongside the skeleton was an array of goods linked to metalworking, including the remains of a pouch decorated with boar\u2019s tusks, four fossil sponges hollowed out into cups, flints, metalworking scribes and a touchstone, a dark-coloured stone that could be used to assess the quality of metal.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt shows the depth of understanding of her craft,\u201d said Dawson. \u201cThe people she left behind wanted her to take her tool kit into the afterlife.\u201d<\/p>\n
An earlier analysis revealed gold traces on the surfaces of stones, suggesting the individual may have crafted ornaments such as clasps, which would include a \u201ccore\u201d of bone, wood or copper, covered in a thin sheet of gold.<\/p>\n
The grave also contained what has been described as a battle axe, made from greenstone brought from Cornwall. \u201cWhether that was for fighting or for stunning an animal before it becomes your hog roast, we can\u2019t be sure,\u201d said Dawson.<\/p>\n
A secondary grave, containing a skeleton in an upright seated position, was previously assumed to be the shaman\u2019s wife, although this skeleton has been lost.<\/p>\n
The findings are unveiled in a new exhibition on ancient DNA that opens at the Francis Crick Institute in London on Thursday and looks at how genetic techniques are giving new insights into the movements of ancient people and their lives.<\/p>\n
The Upton Lovell skeleton was initially sent for DNA analysis with a view to better ascertaining the ancestry of the individual who lived at a time when Britain had an unusually valuable combination of tin and copper (which make bronze). The full details of this analysis are yet to be released, but it appears that the shaman had Beaker ancestry, which was typical in Britain at the time. The skeleton\u2019s biological sex came as a surprise, however.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe field of ancient DNA has surged in technical capability over the last two decades, now giving us answers to questions that were previously inaccessible,\u201d said Pontus Skoglund, senior group leader of the ancient genomics laboratory at the Crick, which performed the analysis. \u201cIt feels really good to give this to archaeologists.\u201d<\/p>\n
The team subsequently analysed two other bones, a tooth and a toe, which gave consistent results and there was no evidence that the grave contained more than one skeleton.<\/p>\n
A detailed analysis of the bones suggested that the individual would have been tall for a bronze age woman (165cm or 5ft 4in) and robustly built. There was also evidence of arthritis in the right (but not left) wrist, suggestive of having repeatedly used the metalworking tools she was buried with for much of her life.<\/p>\n
Prof Mary Beard, the classicist and broadcaster, who is a member of the exhibition steering group, said ancient DNA promises to transform some important parts of our understanding of the past. \u201cSo often we have assigned the sex of an ancient skeleton partly on the basis of our own assumptions about sex and gender roles \u2013 if it is buried with a sword, it\u2019s male, with a necklace, it\u2019s female,\u201d she said. \u201cAs with the Upton Lovell shaman, DNA analysis can help us correct those assumptions and think harder about the roles of men and women in the deep past \u2013 and perhaps also about in our own world too.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Upton Lovell Shaman, a bronze age individual who has been depicted in museum exhibits as a bearded…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":692327,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-692326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=692326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692326\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/692327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=692326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=692326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=692326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}