a sword, an axe, a spear, armour-piercing arrows, a battle knife, two shields, and two horses, one mare and one stallion; thus, the complete equipment of a professional warrior. Furthermore, a full set of gaming pieces indicates knowledge of tactics and strategy...Thus, the grave has always been interpreted as a warrior grave, though some researchers in the 1970s suggested that the bones of the buried warrior demonstrated female characteristics. This new study applies both osteology and DNA sequencing and argues that the results show that the grave was that of a tall woman who had died in her thirties.
It's fun to Google this topic. Many of the headlines one finds that way state that "a Viking warrior was a woman" or that "new research that women were Viking warriors" or that the "debate about whether women were Viking warriors" has been ignited. Some criticisms of the study argue that no such conclusion can be drawn from the findings.
And of course we can't draw such conclusions about the possible gender roles of the Viking era from one single grave, and neither can we draw any such conclusions about the ancient world, in general, even though several other recent findings argue that women have been buried with weapons and stereotypically male tools in other parts of Europe and Asia, too. As if they had been warriors, that is.
Let's take a step back and ask the following question: Suppose that you find an ancient grave, the bones in it are female, and the grave goods consist of pots and pans and weaving tools. What would your conclusions about that ancient person's role be?
Most of us very readily accept that she cooked and wove fabric, that her grave goods described her job during her life. Very very few would bother wondering if we really can make such a conclusion.
So why is it so much harder to apply the same logic to the Birka warrior grave?
The answer is an easy one. The example I made up agrees with our prior expectations, our understanding of history and our biases, if you will, whereas the Birka example does not. Yet we don't know, exactly, how men and women in the Viking-age Sweden divided chores between them. Some women (how many we can't tell) may indeed have been warriors, and a few women may have been the kind of military leaders Elizabeth I of England was, which could have been reflected in how they were buried.
We cannot be certain, of course. At the same time, it's long been customary* to sex ancient burials by the included grave goods, so that if cooking and weaving implements (or jewelry) were found to be in the majority, the grave was assumed to belong to a woman, while weapons and the kinds of tools which code male today were used as the basis for designating a particular burial male.
These rules used the gender roles that prevailed in the archeologists' own cultures, or had recently prevailed in them, but even after knowing that it can be difficult to see that in-built bias they contain.
All that is worth keeping in mind when reading this criticism of the study, too:
Writing on her blog, University of Nottingham professor of Viking studies Judith Jesch says, "I have always thought (and to some extent still do) that the fascination with women warriors, both in popular culture and in academic discourse, is heavily, probably too heavily, influenced by 20th- and 21st-century desires." Today, many of us are eager to find examples of woman leaders in the past who are just as badass as our woman leaders today. And that might lead to misunderstanding history.That's a bias worth keeping in mind. But so is the opposite bias I discuss above.
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** Especially when no bones etc. survived.