Ancient European burials show ‘complex’ gender expression existed in past, study says

Digging into a prehistoric cemetery in Italy, archaeologists uncovered a skeleton buried with a bone comb, beads, hair spirals, a needle and dagger. Who was this person?

If archaeologists only looked at the skeleton, they might conclude this person was male. If they only looked at the burial, they might conclude the deceased was female.

Archaeologists often approach prehistoric European culture in this way, assuming sex and gender were “binary” categories, according to a release from the University of Göttingen in Germany. But was this the case?

To answer that question, researchers analyzed more than 1,250 burials from seven cemeteries in Germany, Austria and Italy, according to a study published May 24 in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal. The burials dated from the early Neolithic period to the late Bronze Age, or from about 5500 B.C. to 1200 B.C.

Researchers identified the sex of the deceased as male or female based on their skeletal remains. The gender of the deceased was identified as masculine or feminine based “based on the grave goods and burial practices,” the study said.

This approach led burials to be placed in one of four categories, the study said: burials where sex and gender matched; burials where sex and gender were “opposite;” burials with partial data of just sex or gender; and “indeterminate” burials with no sex or gender data.

What did they find about gender expression in prehistoric Europe?

“Our results suggest that the answer is complex,” researchers said. “The binary model” — that sex and gender expression always match — “accounts for most of the variability of the sample, but not all of it.”

But researchers also found evidence of a non-binary group, “a small but quantitatively relevant minority diverging from the binary model throughout the Neolithic and the Bronze Age.” This “small but significant” non-binary minority accounted for 10% of the burials where both sex and gender data were available, the study said.

Some of these non-binary burials included the male individual in Italy buried with feminine objects such as hair spirals and a comb. Another non-binary burial belonged to a female buried in Germany with masculine objects such as five stone blades, a wild boar tusk and a fishing hook, the study said.

Researchers noted several shortcomings in their results. They did not have full information for 70% of the prehistoric burials. Additionally, the margin of error in determining sex based on skeleton evidence “still leaves too much room for uncertainty,” the study said. They also found evidence of archaeological data biased toward the male-female binary.

Still, the researchers concluded that “some degree of gender variance was formally accepted in the burial rite of prehistoric Central European societies,” but the topic would benefit from further research.

Gender expression has varied across time and space, according to a 2019 article from the University of California. “Anthropologists have long documented cultures around the world that acknowledge more than two genders,” Ianna Urquhart reported.

These “multi-gendered” cultures include several native Pacific Island groups, the Incas, Indonesia and even Italy, the university reported. The evidence of non-binary burials in prehistoric Europe can be viewed within this context.

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