To assume uncritically that men alone are warriors leads to a cascade of other assumptions about human behaviors that renders our attempt to understand those behaviors somewhat moot. A warrior, like warfare itself, is a cultural construct, practices and professions created by human societies to fulfill specific desires. do not equivocate in their statements that, for over a century, this individual was mis-identified as male because archaeologists, acculturated in a western society with strictly defined gender roles, view men alone as warriors, or soldiers, or wielders of violence. While the popular story has been about a female warrior, the real story that underlies this study are the assumptions the researchers just blew out of the water. Taken together, these variables add to the already complex picture of a cosmopolitan Birka, the 8th-10th-century Viking town in which Bj 581 was interred. Hedenstierna-Jonson and her team scienced the hell out of two DNA samples taken from the skeleton, sequencing the genome, testing the mtDNA, and conducting strontium isotope analysis to not only pin down the biological sex of the skeleton, but also to identify geographic origins or “biological affinities” (the populations she most resembles- including the British Isles, the North Atlantic Islands, Scandinavia, and a dash of the Eastern Balkans) and the potential mobility of the individual in life. This past month the American Journal of Physical Anthropology published a short study that laid the case to rest once and for all. But the grave goods! Forget the physical characteristics of the skeleton itself, the occupant had to be male.
Physical anthropologists have long been able to identify characteristics such as sex and age from osteological analysis, and such investigations in the 1970s raised the prospect that this individual was, in fact, female.
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