7 ms·

Why are adult daughters missing from ancient German cemeteries?

96 points by pella 7y ago

wahern 7y ago
> "What shocked me was that you have to give away all your daughters at some moment, How is this shocking? The Chinese, for example, practiced until recently strict exogamous marriage whereby women were always married off outside the clan and men always stayed home. Women were forbidden to have contact with their biological family after marriage; in a sense their entire identity, including their lineage, became that of the clan they married into. It's similar to adoption in that regard, in the sense that in traditional East Asian cultures you don't distinguish adopted children from "blood" relations. Such practices, while not universal, could be found around the world, AFAIU. It's a well known social pattern, which is why it's odd to hear it characterized as shocking.
- jascii 7y ago
  Do you have any sources for that? I have seen zero evidence of that in my travels through China nor online other then some references about Neolithic times (not exactly recent) and the Oroqen people (who believe that marrying within their own tribe is akin to incest). I was mostly led to believe that up to the cultural revolution people mostly stayed and married in their own village.
  - wahern 7y ago
    Not from any book in particular, mostly from hearing stories from older Chinese (60-80+ year-olds, mostly diaspora in Malaysia, Singapore, and U.S., though also one or two younger mainlanders[1]), and reading various articles on the internet, plus Wikipedia to help piece things together. I did take one or two Chinese culture classes in college, but that was long ago and it would be hard to untangle what I learned then from what I've learned since then. Here's an example I just Googled which I don't remember ever reading before but echos what I said almost exactly: > Like other Chinese, Hakka practice surname exogamy. Marriage traditionally was arranged, often village exogamous, and also patrilocal. Hakka marriage ceremonies suggest the transfer of women from one family to another and the incorporation of women into their husband's household and lineage rather than the establishment of bonds between two families. Wives are included in ancestral worship of their husband's lineage. Many Hakka claim that polygynous marriages were rare among the Hakka, yet until recently polygynous marriages were found among poor Hakka villagers in the New Territories of Hong Kong. -- https://www.everyculture.com/Russia-Eurasia-China/Hakka-Marriage-and-Family.html https://www.everyculture.com/Russia-Eurasia-China/Hakka-Marr... Hardly a reputable source (seems like it was pulled from an older Wikipedia article), but such agreement would seem like an unlikely coincidence. A bibliography is provided at https://www.everyculture.com/Russia-Eurasia-China/Hakka.html https://www.everyculture.com/Russia-Eurasia-China/Hakka.html [1] Some aspects of traditional Chinese culture are better preserved outside China, as the Cultural Revolution literally and figuratively killed off parts of the cultural memory. Nonetheless, the reverse is also true; some aspects of the culture are preserved in the mainland but not in the diaspora. Perhaps only the historians really have the full story, even for relatively modern (e.g. early 20th century) practices.
  - zdragnar 7y ago
    An ex whose family was from Taiwan (ethnically Chinese) were more or less this way. It wasn't a hard cutoff with punishments or anything like that, but when a woman from her parents' generation or before married, they more or less became part of the husband's family. The somewhat modern / western / American notion of two families joining was definitely foreign for them.
  - morningseagulls 7y ago
    >I have seen zero evidence of that in my travels through China The parent comment said: "The Chinese, for example, practiced until recently strict exogamous marriage [...]". This explains your experience. >Do you have any sources for that? Try searching "Chinese exogamy" in Google Scholar. Surname (i.e. "clan") exogamy is fairly well-known and still practiced. Here's a passage from Rubie S Watson's afterword to the 1991 book on Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society that she co-edited: >In China, most unions have involved the transfer of the bride to her husband's household, which, at least initially, has often been headed by her husband's father or a senior agnate. Although not all newly married couples have lived patrilocally, residence with the husband's family has remained both numerically and symbolically significant. This has been especially the case in rural areas where more than 80 percent of the population live and where village exogamy has remained the usual practice. If you're reacting to the statement that "[w]omen were forbidden to have contact with their biological family after marriage", this was not necessarily a strict prohibition. Because exogamy typically involves moving to a faraway village, it was usually a hassle for the bride to travel back to their biological family, and so if she actually did it, it could be interpreted as a breakdown in the marriage. Until recently, the practice of adopting a pre-adolescent girl to be the future bride of a pre-adolescent son (tongyangxi) was also a common form of arranged marriage in China.[1] The practice can also go in the other direction, and is known as zhaozhui, or "son-in-law adoption". [0] https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6p3007p1&chunk.id=d0e21944&toc.id=&brand=ucpress https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6p30... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongyangxi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongyangxi
- ralfd 7y ago
  That statement also surprised me. In Germanic inheritance customs the sons took precedence before daughters and it is obvious that this leads to the sons taking over the farm and land and to take care of daughters they had to be married off (instead of inheritance they got a dowry from their father). Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrilocal_residence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrilocal_residence
  - jacobush 7y ago
    I wonder how Sweden (also Germanic) turned out so differently. (AFAIK, with the old Viking/premedieval laws giving women inheritance rights etc.)
    - drak0n1c 7y ago
      Pagan Viking society entailed many sons going on trading and raiding expeditions, sometimes never to return. It was not uncommon for both father and son to leave on the same trip, and young men were often recruited or enslaved by passing ships. Given such an unpredictable environment, the best way to ensure stability and the continuation of the family estate was to grant inheritance rights to the women who stayed home. For those interested in a classic adventure novel set in that era, I recommend "The Long Ships" by Frans Bengtsson. The latest edition's foreword is written by Michael Chabon.
      - belorn 7y ago
        From the linked wikipedia article: "female contribution to subsistence does correlate significantly with matrilocal (as opposed to patrilocal) residence in general; however, this correlation is masked by a general polygyny factor" If you account for polygyny, the more women are involved in creating food the less likely they are to leave. A simple way to look at it is that parents invest time to teach one gender to support them at old age. If you invest time and energy to teach your sons the local methods to create food then you want them to stick around. If you invested same amount of time to teach local knowledge on both and one left then not only have you wasted half the time and effort but that local knowledge might not even be useful for the party that left. polygyny add an other layer on it as an increase in the female contribution to subsistence also increase the the probability for polygyny which in turn increase the probability for patrilocality. A bit of cynicism would explain this by saying that if women account for the majority of creating food then fewer men is needed, resulting in polygyny, which create an power imbalance as those men will be a blood relative to a significant larger number of children compared to any woman. To apply this then to vikings, if the men left to pillage then it must have been the women that worked the land and raised animals, which mean the they likely invested the time to teach their daughters to do the same and relied on them for support at old age.
- kbenson 7y ago
  Given that there are generally more women than men in a population, and that I don't see a reason why that trend would be lessened or reversed the farther back in history we go (I imagine it actually gets more pronounced), what happens to the women that can't be married off because there aren't enough males in a culture that doesn't support polygamy but is like you describe? I imagine some small amount would become concubines/courtesans, but could that actually account for all of the discrepancy?
  - klodolph 7y ago
    The gender ratio worldwide is currently somewhere around 101 female to 100 male (this is a bit hard to quantify, because in this group you’d also have ~3.4 intersex births). However, it is estimated that in the 17th century, somewhere around 1-1.5% of women giving birth died. So I would not take it for granted that the gender ratio was the same hundreds of years ago.
    - gshdg 7y ago
      But then you have to take into account more men dying in war and whatnot.
      - edoceo 7y ago
        Yep. In the old days women died in child birth, men died at war. And everyone that died was born. What comes out, by nature is nearly 50/50 - and what dies is the same ratio as born...by whatever means nature determine
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - lugg 7y ago
      You can basically assume the overall population gender ratio was 1:1, the birth ratio might have been different but that is expected. It's a self correcting phenomenon where the ratio self selects towards 1:1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle
- trianglem 7y ago
  To be honest, they're pretty universal. Not sure if this comment is appropriate. Please ask me to delete it if it is.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
TLDR: They were all sent away to other communities to marry. Sons stayed in the community, but daughters once they reached adulthood left the community for other communities.
- schappim 7y ago
  But why were they not found in the cemeteries of other communities?
  - Swizec 7y ago
    They weren’t daughters there. They were mothers.
  - garmaine 7y ago
    They were, next to their husbands and with eulogies written by their children.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - mumblemumble 7y ago
    They were. The article isn't saying that there aren't any adult women being found in cemeteries. It's saying that none of the adult women being found in the cemeteries seem to be the daughter of anyone else in the community.
- raldi 7y ago
  You're doing god's work
- usrusr 7y ago
  Sent away sounds quite harsh. Ran off with that dashing young noble who was passing through would be just as fine as an explanation. "Strontium levels from three men, in contrast, showed that although they had left the valley as teens, they returned as adults."
  - 7y ago
chimi 7y ago
I always try to explain these things with evolutionary biology. I look to the non-human animal kingdom to see if the pattern of behavior exists in other species too. This one does. In many species, members of clans and tribes go off to discover mating opportunities. I believe much of it has to do with limiting inbreeding. I remember a scene in Game of Thrones where the guy didn't want to be eaten by the dead things, so he said he was going to take his boats to an island, kill all the men, and take their wives. Such things happen often in war. It might be a reason war exists. In the case of the German daughters, if the males work the land, know the land, defend the land from invaders, then it would make sense the daughters leave to be protected by such men in another land.
- choeger 7y ago
  It does make sense. In hindsight. But why would the tribes send away all their daughters in the first place? I don't think that inbreeding was a concept back then. So what compelled a rich and powerful father to send away all his daughters. That seems rather odd to me.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    So, political marriages?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - Tsiklon 7y ago
    Assuming Male Primogeniture; A rich and powerful father arranging the marriages of his daughters to other powerful and wealthy families is how business relationships and alliances were formed, and how one could potentially move their own family up the social order. It's pretty much how royalty and landed gentry used to work in Europe.
    - choeger 7y ago
      Sure. But wouldn't you expect these marriages to also be arranged within the domain to at least some degree?
pan69 7y ago
I didn't fully understand this from the article but, with "adult daughters" they would mean, unmarried women? I mean, if "all" adult women were send away to be married elsewhere then they'd have to bring in "new" women to marry the local men, right? So, local men would also marry local women in that they did find graves of families (ie. with mothers and fathers)? But they don't say that. Maybe women were married at a very young age and men could marry at a much older age. Maybe men could marry multiple times, women would often die in child birth.
- klodolph 7y ago
  > I didn't fully understand this from the article but, with "adult daughters" they would mean, unmarried women? No. The article is saying that the adult women found in burial sites were originally born elsewhere, and their ancestors are not found in the same burial site. This is basically some variation of “patrilocal residence”.
pteredactyl 7y ago
Something shocking something Germans were always evil patriarchs. For all of time. The study is titled "Kinship-based social inequality in Bronze Age Europe." I question this study, which is behind a paywall. So the idea is women go off on their own to find mates? And they studied 104 bones(?) using "deep regional approach" to determine this. Seems a very small sample size to make this generalization about the past. How is it that academics always find in the past that which validates their present views? >"We apply a deep micro-regional approach and analyze genome wide data of 104 human individuals deriving from farmstead-related cemeteries from the Late Neolithic to the Middle Bronze Age in southern Germany."
solidsnack9000 7y ago
Many Native American folk tales there are suggest a similar form of exogamy, where daughters leave the tribe to find a partner and new community to be a part of. What effect would this kind of exogamy have? It might lead to a fair standardisation of the domestic arts, since women "from everywhere" came together in each tribe and could compare and adopt methods. Whereas, the arts of the hunt and the art of war might remain fairly distinct in each tribe.

96 points by pella 7y ago

> "What shocked me was that you have to give away all your daughters at some moment, How is this shocking? The Chinese, for example, practiced until recently strict exogamous marriage whereby women were always married off outside the clan and men always stayed home. Women were forbidden to have contact with their biological family after marriage; in a sense their entire identity, including their lineage, became that of the clan they married into. It's similar to adoption in that regard, in the sense that in traditional East Asian cultures you don't distinguish adopted children from "blood" relations. Such practices, while not universal, could be found around the world, AFAIU. It's a well known social pattern, which is why it's odd to hear it characterized as shocking.

jascii 7y ago
Do you have any sources for that? I have seen zero evidence of that in my travels through China nor online other then some references about Neolithic times (not exactly recent) and the Oroqen people (who believe that marrying within their own tribe is akin to incest). I was mostly led to believe that up to the cultural revolution people mostly stayed and married in their own village.
- wahern 7y ago
  Not from any book in particular, mostly from hearing stories from older Chinese (60-80+ year-olds, mostly diaspora in Malaysia, Singapore, and U.S., though also one or two younger mainlanders[1]), and reading various articles on the internet, plus Wikipedia to help piece things together. I did take one or two Chinese culture classes in college, but that was long ago and it would be hard to untangle what I learned then from what I've learned since then. Here's an example I just Googled which I don't remember ever reading before but echos what I said almost exactly: > Like other Chinese, Hakka practice surname exogamy. Marriage traditionally was arranged, often village exogamous, and also patrilocal. Hakka marriage ceremonies suggest the transfer of women from one family to another and the incorporation of women into their husband's household and lineage rather than the establishment of bonds between two families. Wives are included in ancestral worship of their husband's lineage. Many Hakka claim that polygynous marriages were rare among the Hakka, yet until recently polygynous marriages were found among poor Hakka villagers in the New Territories of Hong Kong. -- https://www.everyculture.com/Russia-Eurasia-China/Hakka-Marriage-and-Family.html https://www.everyculture.com/Russia-Eurasia-China/Hakka-Marr... Hardly a reputable source (seems like it was pulled from an older Wikipedia article), but such agreement would seem like an unlikely coincidence. A bibliography is provided at https://www.everyculture.com/Russia-Eurasia-China/Hakka.html https://www.everyculture.com/Russia-Eurasia-China/Hakka.html [1] Some aspects of traditional Chinese culture are better preserved outside China, as the Cultural Revolution literally and figuratively killed off parts of the cultural memory. Nonetheless, the reverse is also true; some aspects of the culture are preserved in the mainland but not in the diaspora. Perhaps only the historians really have the full story, even for relatively modern (e.g. early 20th century) practices.
- zdragnar 7y ago
  An ex whose family was from Taiwan (ethnically Chinese) were more or less this way. It wasn't a hard cutoff with punishments or anything like that, but when a woman from her parents' generation or before married, they more or less became part of the husband's family. The somewhat modern / western / American notion of two families joining was definitely foreign for them.
- morningseagulls 7y ago
  >I have seen zero evidence of that in my travels through China The parent comment said: "The Chinese, for example, practiced until recently strict exogamous marriage [...]". This explains your experience. >Do you have any sources for that? Try searching "Chinese exogamy" in Google Scholar. Surname (i.e. "clan") exogamy is fairly well-known and still practiced. Here's a passage from Rubie S Watson's afterword to the 1991 book on Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society that she co-edited: >In China, most unions have involved the transfer of the bride to her husband's household, which, at least initially, has often been headed by her husband's father or a senior agnate. Although not all newly married couples have lived patrilocally, residence with the husband's family has remained both numerically and symbolically significant. This has been especially the case in rural areas where more than 80 percent of the population live and where village exogamy has remained the usual practice. If you're reacting to the statement that "[w]omen were forbidden to have contact with their biological family after marriage", this was not necessarily a strict prohibition. Because exogamy typically involves moving to a faraway village, it was usually a hassle for the bride to travel back to their biological family, and so if she actually did it, it could be interpreted as a breakdown in the marriage. Until recently, the practice of adopting a pre-adolescent girl to be the future bride of a pre-adolescent son (tongyangxi) was also a common form of arranged marriage in China.[1] The practice can also go in the other direction, and is known as zhaozhui, or "son-in-law adoption". [0] https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6p3007p1&chunk.id=d0e21944&toc.id=&brand=ucpress https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6p30... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongyangxi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongyangxi
ralfd 7y ago
That statement also surprised me. In Germanic inheritance customs the sons took precedence before daughters and it is obvious that this leads to the sons taking over the farm and land and to take care of daughters they had to be married off (instead of inheritance they got a dowry from their father). Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrilocal_residence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrilocal_residence
- jacobush 7y ago
  I wonder how Sweden (also Germanic) turned out so differently. (AFAIK, with the old Viking/premedieval laws giving women inheritance rights etc.)
  - drak0n1c 7y ago
    Pagan Viking society entailed many sons going on trading and raiding expeditions, sometimes never to return. It was not uncommon for both father and son to leave on the same trip, and young men were often recruited or enslaved by passing ships. Given such an unpredictable environment, the best way to ensure stability and the continuation of the family estate was to grant inheritance rights to the women who stayed home. For those interested in a classic adventure novel set in that era, I recommend "The Long Ships" by Frans Bengtsson. The latest edition's foreword is written by Michael Chabon.
    - belorn 7y ago
      From the linked wikipedia article: "female contribution to subsistence does correlate significantly with matrilocal (as opposed to patrilocal) residence in general; however, this correlation is masked by a general polygyny factor" If you account for polygyny, the more women are involved in creating food the less likely they are to leave. A simple way to look at it is that parents invest time to teach one gender to support them at old age. If you invest time and energy to teach your sons the local methods to create food then you want them to stick around. If you invested same amount of time to teach local knowledge on both and one left then not only have you wasted half the time and effort but that local knowledge might not even be useful for the party that left. polygyny add an other layer on it as an increase in the female contribution to subsistence also increase the the probability for polygyny which in turn increase the probability for patrilocality. A bit of cynicism would explain this by saying that if women account for the majority of creating food then fewer men is needed, resulting in polygyny, which create an power imbalance as those men will be a blood relative to a significant larger number of children compared to any woman. To apply this then to vikings, if the men left to pillage then it must have been the women that worked the land and raised animals, which mean the they likely invested the time to teach their daughters to do the same and relied on them for support at old age.
kbenson 7y ago
Given that there are generally more women than men in a population, and that I don't see a reason why that trend would be lessened or reversed the farther back in history we go (I imagine it actually gets more pronounced), what happens to the women that can't be married off because there aren't enough males in a culture that doesn't support polygamy but is like you describe? I imagine some small amount would become concubines/courtesans, but could that actually account for all of the discrepancy?
- klodolph 7y ago
  The gender ratio worldwide is currently somewhere around 101 female to 100 male (this is a bit hard to quantify, because in this group you’d also have ~3.4 intersex births). However, it is estimated that in the 17th century, somewhere around 1-1.5% of women giving birth died. So I would not take it for granted that the gender ratio was the same hundreds of years ago.
  - gshdg 7y ago
    But then you have to take into account more men dying in war and whatnot.
    - edoceo 7y ago
      Yep. In the old days women died in child birth, men died at war. And everyone that died was born. What comes out, by nature is nearly 50/50 - and what dies is the same ratio as born...by whatever means nature determine
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - lugg 7y ago
    You can basically assume the overall population gender ratio was 1:1, the birth ratio might have been different but that is expected. It's a self correcting phenomenon where the ratio self selects towards 1:1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle
trianglem 7y ago
To be honest, they're pretty universal. Not sure if this comment is appropriate. Please ask me to delete it if it is.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

TLDR: They were all sent away to other communities to marry. Sons stayed in the community, but daughters once they reached adulthood left the community for other communities.

schappim 7y ago
But why were they not found in the cemeteries of other communities?
- Swizec 7y ago
  They weren’t daughters there. They were mothers.
- garmaine 7y ago
  They were, next to their husbands and with eulogies written by their children.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  They were. The article isn't saying that there aren't any adult women being found in cemeteries. It's saying that none of the adult women being found in the cemeteries seem to be the daughter of anyone else in the community.
raldi 7y ago
You're doing god's work
usrusr 7y ago
Sent away sounds quite harsh. Ran off with that dashing young noble who was passing through would be just as fine as an explanation. "Strontium levels from three men, in contrast, showed that although they had left the valley as teens, they returned as adults."
- 7y ago

chimi 7y ago

I always try to explain these things with evolutionary biology. I look to the non-human animal kingdom to see if the pattern of behavior exists in other species too. This one does. In many species, members of clans and tribes go off to discover mating opportunities. I believe much of it has to do with limiting inbreeding. I remember a scene in Game of Thrones where the guy didn't want to be eaten by the dead things, so he said he was going to take his boats to an island, kill all the men, and take their wives. Such things happen often in war. It might be a reason war exists. In the case of the German daughters, if the males work the land, know the land, defend the land from invaders, then it would make sense the daughters leave to be protected by such men in another land.

choeger 7y ago
It does make sense. In hindsight. But why would the tribes send away all their daughters in the first place? I don't think that inbreeding was a concept back then. So what compelled a rich and powerful father to send away all his daughters. That seems rather odd to me.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  So, political marriages?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Tsiklon 7y ago
  Assuming Male Primogeniture; A rich and powerful father arranging the marriages of his daughters to other powerful and wealthy families is how business relationships and alliances were formed, and how one could potentially move their own family up the social order. It's pretty much how royalty and landed gentry used to work in Europe.
  - choeger 7y ago
    Sure. But wouldn't you expect these marriages to also be arranged within the domain to at least some degree?

pan69 7y ago

I didn't fully understand this from the article but, with "adult daughters" they would mean, unmarried women? I mean, if "all" adult women were send away to be married elsewhere then they'd have to bring in "new" women to marry the local men, right? So, local men would also marry local women in that they did find graves of families (ie. with mothers and fathers)? But they don't say that. Maybe women were married at a very young age and men could marry at a much older age. Maybe men could marry multiple times, women would often die in child birth.

klodolph 7y ago
> I didn't fully understand this from the article but, with "adult daughters" they would mean, unmarried women? No. The article is saying that the adult women found in burial sites were originally born elsewhere, and their ancestors are not found in the same burial site. This is basically some variation of “patrilocal residence”.

pteredactyl 7y ago

Something shocking something Germans were always evil patriarchs. For all of time. The study is titled "Kinship-based social inequality in Bronze Age Europe." I question this study, which is behind a paywall. So the idea is women go off on their own to find mates? And they studied 104 bones(?) using "deep regional approach" to determine this. Seems a very small sample size to make this generalization about the past. How is it that academics always find in the past that which validates their present views? >"We apply a deep micro-regional approach and analyze genome wide data of 104 human individuals deriving from farmstead-related cemeteries from the Late Neolithic to the Middle Bronze Age in southern Germany."

solidsnack9000 7y ago

Many Native American folk tales there are suggest a similar form of exogamy, where daughters leave the tribe to find a partner and new community to be a part of. What effect would this kind of exogamy have? It might lead to a fair standardisation of the domestic arts, since women "from everywhere" came together in each tribe and could compare and adopt methods. Whereas, the arts of the hunt and the art of war might remain fairly distinct in each tribe.