Search results
Feb 20, 2019 · After several years of controversy and debate, researchers in Sweden are more convinced than ever that female Viking warriors once existed. Re-examining a contentious discovery from 2017, the researchers have again determined that the ancient Birka skeleton, found in a 10th-century Viking warrior tomb, did, in fact, belong to a biological female.
Sep 14, 2017 · The grave was long believed to belong to a male warrior. But new DNA evidence suggests the skeleton was female. This drawing is a reconstruction of how the grave with the woman may have looked ...
- Overview
- Assumed Male
- Viking Life
New evidence forces reconsideration of a well-known gravesite—and may shed light on Viking gender roles.
More than a millennium ago in what’s now southeastern Sweden, a wealthy Viking warrior was laid to rest, in a resplendent grave filled with swords, arrowheads, and two sacrificed horses. The site reflected the ideal of Viking male warrior life, or so many archaeologists had thought.
New DNA analyses of the bones, however, confirm a revelatory find: the grave belonged to a woman.
The study, published recently in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, sends ripples of surprise through archaeologists’ understanding of the Vikings, medieval seafarers who traded and raided across Europe for centuries. (Explore how Vikings really lived in National Geographic magazine.)
3:59
“It was held up before as kind of the ‘ideal’ Viking male warrior grave,” says Baylor University archaeologist Davide Zori, who wasn’t involved with the research. “[The new study] goes to the heart of archaeological interpretation: that we’ve always mapped on our idea of what gender roles were.”
Since the late 1880s, archaeologists had viewed the “Birka warrior” through this lens; textbooks had listed the grave as belonging to a man, but not because the bones themselves said so. Since the remains were found alongside swords, arrowheads, a spear, and two sacrificed horses, archaeologists had considered it a warrior’s grave—and, thus, a man’s.
As National Geographic magazine reported in its March 2017 cover story on Vikings, that all changed when Stockholm University bioarchaeologist Anna Kjellström closely examined the warrior’s pelvic bones and mandible for the first time. Their dimensions appeared to match those typical of a woman.
Kjellström’s analysis, presented at a conference in 2014 and published in 2016, didn’t make much of a public splash, and some archaeologists pushed back. Since excavation of the gravesite had occurred more than a century ago, perhaps the bones had been mislabeled, a problem with other nearby graves? Maybe the skeleton had been jumbled up with other people’s bones?
In response, a team led by Uppsala University archaeologist Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson doubled back to the bones and extracted two types of DNA. The person’s mitochondrial DNA, passed down from mother to child, would determine whether the bones represented one or multiple people. Fragments of the warrior’s nuclear DNA would reveal biological sex.
The results were clear: The team didn’t detect any Y chromosomes in the bones, and the mitochondrial DNA from the various bones all matched. The remains represented one person—and that person was a woman.
Hedenstierna-Jonson and her colleagues say that the woman was likely a warrior—and a respected tactician, at that. “On her lap she had gaming pieces,” said Hedenstierna-Jonson in a previous interview. “This suggests that she was the one planning the tactics and that she was a leader.”
Zori, for one, remains fascinated by what the discovery says about Birka, the Viking-age trading settlement where the woman was buried. Home to one of the largest, best-known Viking burial grounds, the site was also a thriving trading hub, flush with Byzantine and Arab silver from the sale of furs and slaves sent down the Dnieper and Volga rivers.
Perhaps as a result of the flow of goods and peoples, Birka’s gravesites bear a distinctly international flair, says Zori. Burial practices at Birka run the gamut, from burning the corpses to seating them in chairs.
"[Birka] tied the Viking world together—it’s about trade, about exchange, about people moving around not just to kill each other,” he adds. “Depicting [the grave’s] kind of martial ethos in a trading site is also important: it’s tying two important parts of the Viking world together.”
Zori notes that it’s possible, albeit unlikely, that the woman's relatives buried her with a warrior’s equipment without that having been her role in life. Given available evidence, though, Zori says he’s fairly confident in the study’s results.
Feb 20, 2019 · Wikimedia Commons Two female Viking warriors of royal descent fighting in a sea battle, (1555). In 1878, archaeologists discovered an intriguing tomb on the Swedish island of Björkö wherein they found a skeleton of what appeared to be a Viking warrior. The warrior was buried with a cache of weapons, exquisite clothing, and two horses and was ...
Jan 9, 2019 · Freydis Eiríksdóttir (c. 970-c. 1004 CE) was either a great woman warrior or an evil, conniving murderess depending on which of the two stories about her one reads. She appears in Erik the Red's Saga (where she is the heroine) and The Saga of the Greenlanders (a villainess). In Erik the Red's Saga, Freydis, daughter of Erik the Red ...
- Joshua J. Mark
Feb 19, 2019 · The female warrior grave Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson and her colleagues studied dates to the 10th century, and was buried in the Birka Viking settlement on the Swedish island of Björkö. Out of ...
People also ask
Will Viking archaeologists find more female warriors?
Did Viking warriors once exist?
Are all Viking warriors men?
Is a Viking skeleton female?
Sep 14, 2017 · Share Scientists Discover First DNA Evidence of Female Viking Warriors on Facebook ... has long been a treasure trove for scholars and archaeologists. Buried here are more than 3,000 Viking graves ...
