The Upton Lovell Shaman, buried 4,000 years ago near Stonehenge with an elaborate toolkit of gold-working implements and ritual objects, has long been described in museum displays as “a stout man.” The original excavator, William Cunnington, wrote in 1801 that “from the largeness of the bones, it appeared to be a stout man.” A bearded male figure was the standard artistic reconstruction.
But the bones tell a different story. Ancient DNA analysis at the Francis Crick Institute’s Ancient Genomics Laboratory has definitively confirmed that the individual was female, XX chromosomes, independently verified from three separate skeletal samples: the skull, a tooth, and a toe bone.
“She was a woman, she was a metalworker, and she appears to have been a spiritual leader,” said David Dawson, director of the Wiltshire Museum in Devizes, which holds the remains. “This completely tears up previous assumptions.”
The toolkit of a Bronze Age elite
The shaman was buried in a cist grave on a hilltop near Stonehenge, a prominent location, with an assemblage of objects that marks her as both a high-status craftsperson and a ritual specialist. The grave goods include stone axes repurposed as gold-working hammers, copper-alloy metalworking implements that still bear traces of gold, a dark touchstone for testing metal purity, a scribe for marking workpieces, and four fossil sponges hollowed into cups for mixing adhesives. Pierced animal bones were likely sewn onto a ceremonial cloak.
“The ability to transform other objects by the delicate and skilled process of covering them with gold sheet may have been seen as a magical or ritual process,” said Susan Greaney of the University of Exeter. In Early Bronze Age Britain, metalworking was regarded as a transformative, almost supernatural craft. Dawson described it as “the space science of its day.”
The woman stood approximately 165 cm (5 ft 4 in), tall for a Bronze Age female, with a robust build. She died at about age 45 and had arthritis in her right wrist, consistent with lifelong use of metalworking tools.
A field-wide reckoning
The findings, announced in conjunction with the opening of the “We Go Way Back” exhibition at the Crick in London, the UK’s first dedicated ancient DNA exhibition, add to a growing body of evidence that Bronze Age gender roles were far more fluid than archaeologists long assumed. The original “stout man” assessment was based on the bones appearing large, but robusticity in females can overlap significantly with males. Without DNA analysis, the assumption of maleness went unchallenged for more than two centuries.
“Archaeologists have historically assigned sex based on assumptions about gender roles, swords equal male, necklaces equal female,” said Professor Mary Beard, the Cambridge classicist who served on the exhibition’s steering group. “This shows how much we were projecting our own expectations onto the past.”
The DNA analysis was conducted as part of a broader ancestry study using the Crick’s bank of approximately 1,000 ancient genomes from people who lived in Britain over the past 4,500 years. The sex determination was a secondary finding, the team originally intended the sequencing for ancestry tracing to understand the individual’s genetic background during Britain’s Bronze Age tin and copper boom.
The detailed research is expected to be published in a scientific journal shortly, the Crick stated. A prior 2022 analysis of the gold-working toolkit by University of Leicester researchers (Harris, Crellin, and Tsoraki) had already demonstrated that the tools were used for metalwork, but the practitioner’s sex remained unknown.
The broader pattern
The Upton Lovell burial is not an isolated case. Across Europe, ancient DNA studies are systematically overturning sex assignments made on the basis of grave goods alone. The Viking warrior thought to be male because she was buried with weapons. The “prince” of a Copper Age Iberian burial, identified on the basis of rich grave goods, confirmed genetically female.
“Every time we look, we find women in roles we assumed were exclusive to men,” said Pontus Skoglund, senior group leader of the Ancient Genomics Laboratory at the Crick. “The past was more complicated than we gave it credit for.”
The shaman who was not a man, but a woman, is now the face of that complication.
Sources
Devlin H. “Ancient DNA reveals Bronze Age shaman near Stonehenge was female.” The Guardian, July 14, 2026.
Wiltshire Museum press release. “Upton Lovell Shaman: DNA analysis reveals sex of Bronze Age gold-worker.” July 15, 2026.
Live Science. “Ancient DNA reveals shaman buried near Stonehenge was female, breaking stereotypes of Early Bronze Age women.” July 2026. https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/oops-ancient-bronze-age-shaman-long-assumed-to-be-a-man-was-actually-a-woman-dna-reveals