The DNA Tests That Are Rewriting Women’s Archaeology

ajordanfreelance

7 days ago

6 min read

You know when you innocently look something up and, three hours later, you are sitting in a historical rabbit hole wondering how you got there? Well, hello again.

This particular rabbit hole began when I was looking into the warrior women of Celtic and Norse mythology. As so often happens when I go looking for mythical women, I stumbled across a real one.

The Birka Viking Warrior

Meet the woman now known as the Birka Viking Warrior.

When her grave was excavated at Birka in Sweden in 1878, the occupant was assumed to be a man.

For the time, the excavators made a logical leap. She had been buried with an extraordinary collection of weapons: a sword, axe, fighting knife, lances, shields and armour-piercing arrows. There were also two horses.

The grave was interpreted as that of a high-status warrior — and for more than a century, that interpretation stood. Then DNA had its say.

In 2017, genomic analysis confirmed that the warrior was biologically female. Suddenly, the grave looked rather different.

The evidence for her status as a warrior doesn't disappear when they discovered she was a woman. The weapons were still there. The horses were still there. The military setting was still there. What changed was the assumption attached to them.

The researchers behind the later study argue that the burial is consistent with a woman who lived as a professional warrior and was buried as a person of rank.

There is another wonderfully intriguing detail. She was buried with a complete gaming set, including a board and playing pieces associated with hnefatafl, the Viking strategy game.

Could this have been a clue to military strategy or command?

We can't know for certain. Archaeology rarely hands us a little label saying "I was extremely good at tactics, by the way." But gaming sets are particularly associated with military leaders in some Viking burials, and the researchers suggest that the deliberate placement of the gaming equipment may indicate a command role.

Then there are her clothes. A leading textile specialist who studied the burial argued that the quality and nature of the clothing suggested an individual of exceptionally high status — potentially a cavalry commander under the authority of a royal war leader. Birka itself was a major Viking Age trading centre, and the grave was positioned outside the northern gate of the hillfort, beside the road leading from the fortress into the settlement. It was also originally marked by a large boulder, making it visible from the settlement and the water below.

A woman. A warrior. A person of rank. And someone thought important enough to mark her grave with a stone that said, in effect, she was here.

Perhaps it was a mark of respect. Perhaps it was something else.

I like to imagine the people who buried her knew exactly what they were doing.

And then there was the DNA...

The Birka discovery is fascinating not simply because DNA told us the occupant was female. It is fascinating because it makes us ask why we were so certain she was male in the first place.

Archaeologists were interpreting a collection of objects and behaviours through the assumptions of their own time. Weapons? Male. Military status? Male. High-ranking warrior? Obviously male.

Except... Not obviously.

This is where ancient DNA gets really interesting for those of us fascinated by women's history. Because it can sometimes challenge the story we have constructed around a skeleton before we've even had a chance to question it.

Breaking news!

Well... only two months late anyway. Which, for a historical fiction author, is practically live reporting.

My latest research rabbit warren has somehow become surprisingly up to date. The Upton Lovell Shaman, found near Stonehenge, has recently been identified through ancient DNA as a woman.

And this one is particularly interesting because she has spent more than two centuries being imagined as a man.

The burial was excavated in 1801 in Wiltshire. The excavator, William Cunnington, decided from the size of the bones that the individual appeared to be a "stout man". For the next couple of hundred years, that was more or less the story.

Except the grave goods were extraordinary. The individual had been buried wearing a ceremonial cloak decorated with pierced animal bones, which would have made quite an impression when she moved. She also had a pouch decorated with boar's tusks and a toolkit associated with working gold.

Among the objects were tools, for smoothing and burnishing gold, and a touchstone — a dark stone that could have been used to assess metal. There were also stones bearing traces of gold.

In other words, we aren't simply looking at somebody who happened to be buried beside a few shiny objects. The evidence suggests a highly skilled metalworker.

The burial also contained a magnificent dark dolerite battle axe, made from stone originating in Northumberland, adding another intriguing dimension to the story. Could she have been a traveller?

So after centuries, the story has changed. The same metal worker, the same influential figure, the same gold, the same cloak, and yet, that power belongs to a woman in this society.

That, to me, is the really exciting bit.

The women hiding in the grave goods

The Upton Lovell woman isn't the only example.

Ancient DNA has been doing something rather wonderful to archaeology: it has been catching us out again and again.

A particularly striking example is a Scythian warrior burial from Siberia, dating to around 2,600 years ago.

The individual was initially thought to be male because the grave contained the sorts of objects archaeologists had traditionally associated with men — including an axe, bow and arrows. DNA revealed that the warrior was actually a girl, probably around thirteen years old.

Suddenly those weapons had a different story to tell.

Then there is the Bad Dürrenberg Shaman, a Mesolithic woman buried in what is now Germany around 9,000 years ago.

Her unusual seated burial and extraordinary collection of objects had already led archaeologists to interpret her as a shaman. More recent genetic research has helped reveal a much more complicated family story: the infant buried with her was not, as had long been assumed, her baby.

Again, DNA didn't simply give us a sex. It gave us a reason to question the story we thought we knew.

Even ancient Egyptian burials have produced surprises. DNA analysis has overturned sex identifications that had been based on names, inscriptions and the appearance of burial masks.

The bones, the objects and the written evidence can all tell us something, but sometimes they can also lead us down a particular path because of the assumptions we bring with us. DNA can occasionally come along and say: "This is not the story you thought it was."

What does this mean for women's history?

For me, this is where things become really exciting.

Women's history has always had a problem. The surviving written record is patchy. Women were less likely to leave official records, less likely to have their achievements recorded, and very often their lives were documented through the men around them.

Archaeology gives us another kind of evidence. The objects people used, what they carried, their clothes, and how they were buried. Now, increasingly, they offer up their DNA.

None of these things gives us the whole story.

DNA cannot tell us whether someone identified as a woman in the way we would understand that word today. It cannot tell us what someone thought about their own identity, what they believed, or how they understood their place in their society.

Grave goods are not instruction manuals. Therefore, a sword does not automatically make someone a warrior. A toolkit does not automatically tell us what somebody's job was. A gaming board does not come with a little note saying "excellent strategist." Yet together, these pieces of evidence can challenge assumptions that have been remarkably persistent.

And that matters.

Because perhaps there are many more women hiding in our archaeological record than we have previously realised.

And that is my favourite part of the rabbit hole

I don't think the lesson is that every warrior burial was secretly a woman. Nor that archaeology has somehow been getting everything wrong.

The lesson is that we should be prepared to question the assumptions we use to interpret the past. Because the past was full of people who didn't necessarily behave according to the categories we have inherited.

The Birka woman didn't stop being a warrior because the DNA told us she was female. The Upton Lovell woman didn't suddenly become a skilled metalworker because we discovered she was female.

Perhaps that is what ancient DNA is giving women's history: not a completely new past, but a new window onto the one that was already there.

A window that occasionally opens with a rather satisfying big gust of wind and blows a few centuries of assumptions straight off the desk.

I am here for it.

Because somewhere out there, buried beneath the earth, are thousands upon thousands of untold stories of women we are yet to meet.

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