La "Señora del Marfil" del Mega-Sitio de la Edad del Cobre de Valencina

May 25, 2023 - Lecture by Marta Cintas Peña and Leonardo García Sanjuán, University of Seville. Given the absence of written records, the main source of information available for analyzing gender inequalities in early complex societies is the human body itself. And yet, for decades, archaeologists have struggled with identifying the sex of poorly preserved human remains. Here we present an exceptional case study that shows how innovative new scientific methods can address this problem. Through the recovery of fragments of the sexually dimorphic protein amelogenin from dental enamel using nanoflow liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry, we establish that the most socially prominent individual of the Iberian Copper Age (c. 3200-2300 cal BC) was not a man, as previously thought, but a woman. The meticulous anthropological, contextual, and comparative analysis of a woman discovered in 2008 in Valencina, Spain, nicknamed “The Ivory Merchant” for her association with remarkable ivory objects, reveals that she was a prominent social figure and that no man at that time achieved a remotely comparable social position. The wealth and splendor invested in her burial, which displays all the traits attributed to “Great Men” in anthropological literature, is matched only by the burials in the neighboring tholos tomb of Montelirio, located a mere 100 meters away, which also included mostly women. Our results invite a reconsideration of established interpretations of women’s political role in the dawn of early social complexity, while also challenging traditionally held views of the past. Furthermore, the study anticipates the profound changes that new scientific methods will bring to prehistoric archaeology and the study of human social evolution.