ABSTRACT
The difficulties of discovering the women of early Britain are considerable. The logical place to start is with the written material: the classical sources, and the Irish myths and legends.
The main problem with the first is that they were written entirely by Greek or Roman men, and very often themselves from secondary sources; and it is a common failing amongst ancient writers that they are willing to repeat, embroider or invent tales of barbarism and debauchery, incest and cannibalism, in their efforts to portray the ‘otherness’ of a people with whom they had had no known contact. Even writers who did have contact with them are not necessarily reliable or without errors of fact. A notable case is Julius Caesar and his Gallic Wars (B.G.): he was, after all, first and foremost a general and politician, and his role as ethnographer and anthropologist came a very poor second. Any attempts to reconcile the contradictions in the Gallic Wars with regard to British women are generally unsuccessful. It would seem better to take the view that he was actually wrong on some aspects, as he was on other topics, and has been proved so by archaeological excavation. A further problem is that, in the main, the classical writers restrict their references to women of the upper classes of society – a situation which is familiar to any researcher on women in early civilisations. These sources must, therefore, be used with care.
