***open to further development***

Dr. Maeve Thornton, an anthropologist, was granted access to study the newly discovered remains of a young boy from the 1st century BCE preserved in the peat bogs of Jutland. This is a huge opportunity for her, and her upcoming tenure review could depend on it. As Dr. Thornton runs more and more tests, the results are simply not forming a cohesive picture of this young boy.

Her colleague, Dr. Josh Fruges, an archaeobotanist, has already completed his studies of the boy’s stomach contents and he’s threatening to publish his work, before Dr. Thornton. But Dr. Thornton is reluctant. She suspects the Jutland Boy has a secret. Despite the body’s presumably male clothing, skeletal and genetic research seems to indicate the remains are in fact female. Dr. Thornton contends she must triple verify her research, so her conclusions are airtight before publishing to protect herself from the all too familiar misogynistic backlash from these types of revelations.

While Dr. Thornton is trying to unravel the discrepancies between the Jutland Boy’s social identifiers and bone structure, Dr. Fruges publishes anyway, stealing her opportunity to be the first to publish research on this body. With mounting pressure to publish before her tenure review, Dr. Thornton presents a preview of her work to her students, only to find that not even her own lecture hall is safe from hatred.

The play shifts back and forth between Dr. Thornton and the life of the Jutland Girl, Deirdre, tracing both their struggles of being women in their time. Deirdre is an Iron Age teenager with the fierce ambition of becoming an itinerant bard. As she travels through villages during the final decades of the Celtic world, she decides to disguise herself as a boy, as protection from the westward march of the Roman army.