Let's retire the patriarchy

Just today the Turtle posted a pretty good précis of Secher's article on Gurgy les Noisats dans l'Yonne. The Turtle slightly spoilt the effect by his title, Patriarchy in Europe.

The Parisian (perhaps, Lutetian) basin had monumental burials by 4700-4300 BC... at Passy. At Gurgy, au contraire, was a cemetary for the middle-classes, over a hundred bodies so-far exhumed. Luckily 94 of them had enough for DNA tests. The men mostly G2a2b2a1a2-Z38302 stayed put; the women were imported, and there weren't half-siblings.

I assume the word "bastard" if a Norman French word was not a Norman French invention; but what bastards existed in these preNorman centuries were interred elsewhere than at Gurgy. Possibly some were thrown out to the literal wolves. More-often, more-metaphorically so: foisted upon their mothers who then wandered elsewhere. The ideal of the community is monogamy and not even remarriage, at least not during a man's most-productive years.

This is patrilocalitas but I am loath to call this a patriarchía. A severe patriarch will have sons by other women: legitimate sons from second wives, or fitzes from the servants, or both. Gurgy was not The Handmaid's Tale.

We are reminded that Gurgy is the middle-class gravesite so without the polygyny we might see in, say, Neolithic Ireland; Passy might yield a more "alpha male" society.