Longing won’t bring him back sooner

“Longing won't bring him back sooner,” counselled the World War II posters, picturing a woman with a faraway look in her eyes, clutching letters to her breast. “GET A WAR JOB!” The flood of American women entering the workforce while their men were fighting overseas became known as the Rosie the Riveter phenomenon. The war opened up new opportunities for women in America. And according to archaeologist Bettina Arnold of the University of Minnesota, women in western Europe benefited from a similar phenomenon—more than 2,000 years ago.

Arnold has been re-examining burials of the Celtic people who inhabited central and southern Germany in the Iron Age. Before about 480 B.C., high-status burials—marked by gold neck rings, wagons, bronze drinking vessels, and daggers—were for the most part given only to males. But after 480 B.C., says Arnold, there was a sudden drop in the number of elite male burials—accompanied by the appearance of female graves containing objects of power. Arnold thinks that the appearance of these graves marks a major change in Iron Age society. Archaeological sites and references in classical literature show that in the fourth century B.C., not long after they spread north and west to the places, such as Ireland, that we now know as Celtic, the Celts also started migrating out of Germany to the south and east, toward the Mediterranean. The first of the latter migrants were men—bands of mercenaries who fought for Mediterranean rulers as far away as Macedonia. With elite males fighting abroad, Arnold argues, high-status women took over their roles in social and political leadership. The equipment that went along with these roles, like gold neck rings and drinking vessels used in elaborate feasting rituals, became part of their identity as members of the ruling class and would have been buried along with them.
[A] “No one has tried to explain the appearance of these elite female graves,” says Arnold. [B]  Some archaeologists, she says, are even reluctant to identify the burials as female. [C]  One argued that the slim body found in the most elaborate burial of the period, which contained a gold neck ring and a wagon along with feminine items like bronze anklets, bracelets, and hair ornaments, was not a powerful young woman but actually a transvestite priest. [D] “On the one hand, my theory is a feminist interpretation,” Arnold says. “But even without the politics, we can't afford not to include gender in our studies of the past. If it's ignored, we get a skewed image of what was going on.”