About 4500 years ago, farmers on the Orkney Islands off Scotland’s north coast had a sophisticated way of life, likely holding ceremonies amid great stone circles that may have served as templates for Stonehenge. But within 1 millennium, their lifestyle had changed: Their grave goods were less ostentatious, their tools simpler, and their farming has switched from cattle-focused to sheep herding.
Across the water, people living in what is today the mainland United Kingdom and nearby regions adopted a new way of life around 2500 B.C.E.—but the transition from Stone Age farming to the so-called Bronze Age was much more dramatic. Archaeologists found new styles of pottery, and fancier graves indicating a more hierarchical society. Based on DNA evidence from across Europe, researchers suspect the transformation was part of a massive wave of migration originating in the steppes of Eurasia around 3000 B.C.E. that swept rapidly across the continent, perhaps overturning prior societies by force.
The contrast between the mainland and the Orkneys led some to conclude the islands were a Bronze Age backwater, untouched by the changes taking place on the mainland. But a new study, drawing on DNA unearthed from an ancient cemetery on one of the Orkney Islands, suggests the picture was more complex, and possibly peaceful—and that women may have led the way.
“This is not an invasion scenario,” says Thomas Booth, a geneticist at the Francis Crick Institute who was not involved with the research. “It’s a really cool find,” he says, that may show how the details of large-scale migration patterns varied more than previously recognized.
In the new study, archaeologists excavated a site called the Links of Noltland, a seaside cemetery on Westray—part of the chain of Orkney Islands. The land was once part of an agricultural settlement that thrived on the island’s northern coast from 3000 B.C.E. to 1000 B.C.E. Gradually, shifting dunes buried the pastures nearby, forcing people at the site to adapt and change their lifestyle. “Eventually, there’s too much sand, and the area gets abandoned,” says co-author Graeme Wilson, an archaeologist at EASE Archaeology, a commercial firm in the United Kingdom.
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The sand that spelled the settlement’s end has been a boon for archaeologists and geneticists, preserving ancient houses, artifacts, and human remains for millennia. Beginning in the 1980s, coastal erosion linked to climate change revealed the site once more. Researchers have been excavating in Noltland’s dunes for almost 10 years, says Hazel Moore, a co-author also working with EASE Archaeology, “trying to recover what we can before it’s destroyed.”
The ruins of houses show the village once had a population of between 60 and 100 people, buildings made of stone and wood, and even a stone sauna big enough to seat 10. Nearby, a cemetery held the remains of about 100 people buried around 1800 B.C.E.
Ancient DNA analysis of the human remains revealed a surprise: Men buried there retained the genetic signature of their Stone Age farmer ancestors long after it disappeared on the mainland, the team reports today in Antiquity. The women buried in the cemetery, meanwhile, had steppe ancestry, similar to the Bronze Age people who dominated mainland Great Britain.
That shows men on the island stayed put, whereas women moved in from other islands or the nearby mainland over the course of centuries, a marriage system anthropologists call patrilocality. Such a system would have had to be widespread to work over many generations: Rather than a “mass migration,” Wilson says, the influx of women onto the island was “more of a constant trickle” occurring in other places nearby at the same time.
The phenomenon could help explain why Bronze Age artifacts are scarce on the Orkney Islands: Women married into an existing society a few at a time over the course of centuries, mostly adopting the culture and customs of the island.
Meanwhile, the island’s economy slowly shifted from cattle herding to a lifestyle more focused on sheep and barley farming. “It’s a very old way of life that merges with new ideas, and you get a hybrid culture,” Moore says. “The fact that they managed to do it successfully within a few generations is likely thanks to lessons from elsewhere.”
Not everyone is convinced. Archaeologist Alison Sheridan, an emerita curator at National Museums Scotland, sees no sign of a major influx of women into the Orkney Islands during the Bronze Age. “There is no evidence for large numbers of people migrating to Orkney at any time between 2500 B.C.E. and 1500 B.C.E., even though there was clearly contact and interaction with the outside world,” she says. “This paper, while interesting, poses more questions than it answers.”
Booth says the finds are a step toward a more nuanced understanding of this pivotal period in Europe’s prehistory. Although an invasion scenario may apply in many places, it doesn’t fit the Orkneys, he says. “Clearly different things are happening in different places.”