When the Romans reached Britain in the first century, they were shocked to find “remarkable” women standing in their way.

Female tribal leaders Cartimandua and Boudica became legends, leading uprisings that destroyed Roman towns and challenged the authority of the empire, and women in their community were able to own property, divorce and lead the Celtic armies.

Julius Caesar himself noted the seemingly exotic practice of British women taking more than one husband in his book “Commentarii de Bello Gallico.”

But, because bodies were commonly cremated, excarnated or placed in wetlands during the Iron Age, proof of these powerful matriarchal lineages was absent from the archaeological record in Britain — until now.

Archaeologists working at a site in Dorset, England, found a Celtic settlement and burial grounds, dating between 1000 B.C. and 500 A.D., according to a Jan. 15 news release from Trinity College Dublin and a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.

The site was primarily used before the Roman conquest in 43 A.D., researchers said, and the team retrieved DNA samples from 55 bodies buried there, 40 of which were preserved enough to determine their lineage.

“This was the cemetery of a large kin group,” study author Lara Cassidy, a professor genetics at Trinity College, said in the release. “We reconstructed a family tree with many different branches and found most members traced their maternal lineage back to a single woman, who would have lived centuries before. In contrast, relationships through the father’s line were almost absent.”

This means when a man was ready to marry, he would have left his community to go and join his wife’s, and that family land would have been passed from mother to daughter, Cassidy said.

“This is the first time this type of system has been documented in European prehistory and it predicts female social and political empowerment,” Cassidy said. “It’s relatively rare in modern societies, but this might not always have been the case.”

The site belonged to a group the Romans named the “Durotriges,” researchers said, and this ethnic group had other settlements, including a site near Dorset nicknamed “Duropolis” by the archaeologists who work there.

Burials of women at Duropolis were accompanied by high-quality grave goods, suggesting this matriarchal focus isn’t unique to ancient Dorset.

This led researchers to take a look at other genetic studies conducted on Iron Age remains in the region.

“Across Britain we saw cemeteries where most individuals were maternally descended from a small set of female ancestors,” study author Dan Bradley, a professor of population genetics at Trinity College, said in the release. “In Yorkshire, for example, one dominant matriline had been established before 400 B.C. To our surprise, this was a widespread phenomenon with deep roots on the island.”

Dorset is along the southern coast of England, about a 125-mile drive southwest from London.

The research team includes Cassidy, Bradley, Miles Russell, Martin Smith, Gabrielle Delbarre, Paul Cheetham, Harry Manley, Valeria Mattiangeli, Emily M. Breslin, Iseult Jackson, Maeve McCann, Harry Little, Ciarán G. O’Connor, Beth Heaslip, Daniel Lawson and Phillip Endicott.

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