2023-07-07 11:39:56
Updated Friday, July 7, 2023 – 11:39
His remains were found in 2008 during emergency excavations in an area where a supermarket had been planned.
Recreation of ‘La Señora de Marfil’. UNIVERSITY OF SEVILLA Basque Country A 2,100-year-old bronze hand found in Navarra uses words in the Basque language
‘The Lady of the Ivory’ He was one of the most prominent people in the copper age in the Iberian peninsula, but for years it was thought to be a man. A new technique of analysis of the remains has established that she was a woman and, due to the wealth of her burial, she held a leadership position.
The finding that it is a woman is “very important because it puts on the table the reality of a social situation in which it seems that women were also leaders,” he told EFE. Marta Cintas-Peaarcheologist of the Sevilla University and lead author of the study published today by Scientific Reports.
About 5,000 years ago, the one who has been baptized by the team that made the find as ‘the Lady of the Ivory’, was between 17 and 25 years old and was buried in a very special megalithic tomb at the site of Valencina de la Concepción-Castilleja de Guzmán (Seville).
The burial, compared to that of another 1,800 individuals for which there are records, “stands out by far as that of the person with the most sophisticated, rich and luxurious grave goods,” he explains. Leonardo Garcia Sanjunalso a signatory of the study and from the same university.
His remains were found in 2008 during emergency excavations in an area where a supermarket had been planned and were dated to between 2900 and 2800 BC. c.
The skeleton was complete, but poorly preserved, especially the pelvis, which is the bone that is usually used to find out the sex, for which reason the examination of various morphological indicators of the skull was used, “which are not so precise”, which which determined that it was possibly a man.
Everything changed when the Andalusian archaeologists established a collaboration with the University of Viennawho was experimenting with a new method of sex identification based on analysis of peptides in tooth enamel and which, for Cintas-Pea, “opens a window of immense possibilities for prehistoric archaeology.”
The team expected confirmation that those remains were male, but to their “surprise” the results said, without a doubt, that it was a female. The researcher remembers that they sent a second sample to analyze and be sure.
The Copper Age covers from 3200 and 2300 BC. C, at that time there were some early complex societies that still did not have a state configuration, but more accentuated forms of leadership already appear. However, little is known about the social position of women, sums up García Sanjun.
These results “are really shocking“Yes, because they open up a completely new path of knowledge and research” that until now was not suspected, because in “maximum political leadership positions” there is a woman, she points out.
The tomb of the ‘Ivory Lady’ was individual, at a time when burials were usually collective, and in it an exceptional grave goods was found, which included defenses of African and Asian elephants, amber probably from Sicily and a dagger with a rock crystal blade and an ivory handle.
Tomb of ‘the ivory lady’. UNIVERSITY OF SEVILLE
For two hundred years, the area around his tomb was used as a burial and cult space, but always respecting a space of about 35 meters around it, which suggests that the memory and memory of its existence and importance was maintained for at least eight years. and ten generations.
The team also highlights that the scarcity of child burials, as well as the lack of grave goods associated with non-adult individuals, suggests that high-status individuals achieved their social position through merit in life, and not by family inheritance. .
García Sanjun indicates that the only Copper Age burial in the Iberian Peninsula that may be closer to the level of this woman is the tomb of Montelirioalso in the Valencina deposit.
It is a great megalithic monument that was built some two or three generations after the death of ‘La Señora del Marfil’. In its main chamber there were 20 people, of which 15 are probably women and of the others the sex could not be established.
García Sanjuan recounts that when this burial was created, a new offering was also made on the tomb of ‘La Señora del Marfil’, which was “just as spectacular or more”, with objects “unique worldwide”like a dagger with a rock crystal blade and an ivory handle.
This study comes days after other research has established that women also hunted, not just men, in hunter-gatherer societies.
Cintas-Peas believes that these discoveries and others that may come about thanks to these new analysis techniques “put on the table the need to review and reinterpret” things that have sometimes been assumed to be true, due to a misunderstanding. “important androcentric bias”.
The researcher points out the need to “rethink a little about some interpretations of the past, some models, and go to the archaeological record with a more open mind” to generate a story that “counts on all the people who lived in it.”
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