#matrifocal

Snippets—tiny cats, hidden lakes, and a powerful reminder (from a brilliant paper in Nature about matrilocal Celtic culture in Britain) that history is just a story—and the story depends on the bias of the storyteller.

Today I’ll focus not on the ugly news topics of the week 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. Lets start with that aquifer. To quote from Live Science, “An enormous water reservoir — likely the largest aquifer of its kind on…

Iroquoian female power was part of a centuries-old tradition—based first on custom and later codified in the Constitution of the Five Nations—in which women were officially proclaimed the progenitors of the people and the owners of the land and the soil. Although they bore a resemblance to the Hebrew tribes in the minds of early missionaries, the Iroquois were not a migrating people; they did not move en masse from one territory to another. For centuries they remained settled in the general area where they first cultivated what they called "the three sisters" (corn, beans, and squash). The power of women and their title to the land evolved naturally from cultural circumstances in which wandering men followed game and stationary women developed early agriculture.

During the early Colonial period, the Iroquois could be described as matrifocal at the village level and patrifocal at the level of League and intervillage affairs. Before the establishment of the League and the tribal units that united to form the League, the Iroquois could perhaps be described as matriarchal, if this term is redefined to mean female economic and ritual centrality and not female rule. Archeological excavations of pre-Iroquoian village sites show that they were unfortified, suggesting that if there was an emphasis on warfare, it lacked major economic motivation, and conquest was an unknown objective. In these sites, horticulture clearly takes precedence over fishing and hunting, which would have been male activities. Houses contained several hearths and appeared to be early prototypes of the longhouse, in which families related through women lived. One can infer from this evidence that the village was the primary sociopolitical unit and that matrifocality superseded patrifocality.