Snippets of the past—tiny cats, massive lakes, women ruling Iron Age Britain

Today I’ll focus not on the ugly news topics of the week—there are plenty; go find them for yourselves if that’s what floats your boat—but on fascinating bits of life in the past, in the form of massive hidden aquifers, cats small enough to curl up on your hand, and—saving the best til last—the proof that in Late Iron Age Britain women ruled.

Let’s start with that aquifer. To quote from Live Science, “An enormous water reservoir — likely the largest aquifer of its kind on Earth — sits inside the volcanic rocks of the Oregon Cascades…” We’re talking nearly 20 cubic miles of water. “It is a continental-size lake stored in the rocks at the top of the mountains, like a big water tower,” according to study co-author Leif Karlstrom, an Earth scientist at the University of Oregon. That is a lot of water. A lot. Naturally I worry what humans will do to/with this marvel formed in geological time—it could be used up recklessly in the blink of an eye—but for today I just revel in its existence. It’s like something from a Victorian adventure novel: a huge, hidden lake1 deep inside a mountain…

Also found underground, this time in a cave in Hualongdong, southern China (for those without academic access—like me, sigh—Live Science has an okay write-up), the fossilised teeth of a previously unknown species of cat, Prionailurus kurteni, that lived about 300,000 years ago. Its closest living relatives are the leopard cat genus (Prionailurus) that live in South Asia. But P. kurteni is smaller—much smaller—than those cats. It may be the smallest felid that ever twitched its whiskers in disdain. How small? Small enough to curl up and sleep on the palm of your hand. Smaller than the world’s smallest living feline, the rusty-spotted cat. (Take a look at two-minute BBC video of a young adult male rusty-spotted cat to see just how small those are—smaller that Charlie and George did as kittens.) The fossils were found in a cave also used by ‘early humans’ (I don’t know what species). Perhaps it scavenged leftovers, but perhaps—people being people—it was a pet. (Yeah, okay, that’s unlikely, but it’s lovely to imagine.)

Best and last, a Nature paper (lead author Dr Lara Cassidy), “Continental influx and pervasive matrilocality in Iron Age Britain,” which pleases me enormously. (This one is open access—yay Nature!—but if you’d rather read a summary I can recommend the Guardian.) Cassidy tells us that in Dorset (the south and west of England) the Durotriges, an Iron Age ‘tribe,’ were matrilocal. She and her co-authors determined this by looking at 57 ancient genomes from Late Iron Age burials spanning 100 BCE – 100 CE (pre- and just post-Roman invasion). This showed that most of the women were related to each other but few of the men were. Which means women owned the land and ran it and passed it along to their daughters, and it was men who came as single strangers and married into the powerful local lineages. (I’m using the term ‘marriage’ loosely. We don’t know if marriage, as we know it, was practised by these people at this time.) The paper then further suggests that this was true for the whole of Britain, which was not only matrilocal but matrifocal.

This is really rather amazing. As far as we know those Celtic tribes such as the Iceni (East Anglia) and Brigantes (a confederation of peoples that covered the entire north of England and a chunk of the Midlands) did not have written language. What we know of their culture and power relations are therefore based on classical writers such as Caesar and Ptolemy. As Romans had a tendency to exoticise ‘barbarian’ cultures—to provide excuses for conquering, colonising, and exploiting them and their territory in the name of bringing civilisation and its benefits to the barbarians2—historians have treated their descriptions with caution.3 On some level, when these classical writers talked about Celtic queens and war leaders, about these women taking multiple husbands—that is, behaving as kings have done throughout history—modern readers rolled their eyes and laughed. Only now, well, it looks like Cartimandua (queen of the Brigantes for 30 years) and Boudicca (queen of the Iceni, and leader of the famous uprising that destroyed London and other major Roman centres and came within a whisker of kicking the Romans out altogether) really did wield the power, really did run Iron Age Britain.

Seriously. Go read the paper. As the Guardian says, quoting Cassidy, the author, “There’s an awful habit that we still have when we look at women in the past to view them solely within the domestic sphere with little agency, and studies like this are highlighting that this is not the case at all. In a lot of societies today and in the past, women wield huge influence and huge power, and it’s good to remember that.”

Exactly. It’s important to remember that history is just a story we tell about the past to help make sense of what we think we know of it in light of what we understand of the world today. What we understand depends on wo we are and what we’ve experienced. That is, the story depends on the storyteller. It’s therefore prudent when reading any story about history to bear in mind who is telling it.4

It’s a bit of a stretch to call an aquifer a lake, which is usually visualised as an open body of water. I think of an underground lake being open to the air inside a soaring cavern. This most likely is not like that. But it’s pleasant to imagine it so. ︎This tactic is a perennial favourite. See the reasoning and explanations given by Britain, France, America and other imperial powers in the last century or two. ︎A polite way of saying that scholars of English history, mostly men, dismissed as laughable those Roman assertions of women running things: Women? Rule? Ridiculous! ︎I’ve written about this many times. You could start with “My Story, Mystery: A Letter to Hild of Whitby.” ︎