Mass grave may belong to Viking Great Army | Hacker News Reader

Mass grave may belong to Viking Great Army

cnn.com

69 pointscurtis18 comments

Better source

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-02/uob-rdr02011...

with link to the paper

https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2017.196

> "Where sex could be determined, around 20% were women, and this is in contrast to previous assumptions that the Viking raiders were solely male. Of course, we can't know if these women (or men, for that matter) were 'warriors' but it demonstrates that the group was made up of both genders.

Well, from Wikipedia:

> When Leif Erikson's pregnant half-sister Freydís Eiríksdóttir was in Vinland, she is reported to have taken up a sword, and, bare-breasted, scared away the attacking Skrælings. The fight is recounted in the Greenland saga, though Freydís is not explicitly referred to as a shieldmaiden in the text.[0]

I love the shieldmaidens in Mongoliad and D.O.D.O. by Stephenson et alia.

0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shield-maiden

Germanic and Celtic tribes often took the whole family with them when raiding or fighting. Quoting wikipedia "Armies also often consisted of more than 50 percent noncombatants."

This could result in worse defeats - the fighting men could get pinned in between the wagons behind and the enemy in front. As happend a few times when fighting the Romans.

In fact, in the late middle ages, during the pre-Protestant religious wars, a German ancestor of mine left his castle with an armored wagon, a cannon, and his family. They lost the battle and never returned to castle. The family fled and changed their name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_wagon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagon_fort

The presence of women and children with a northern European army is not very conclusive evidence that they were there as warriors

Wasn't a retinue of camp followers normal all the way up until Napoleonic times?

Noncombatants don't typically wield swords bare-breasted, however.

A single instance of a remarkable individual highlights how odd that one person was, however.

There are other examples, including physical evidence (grave of a female warrior)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shield-maiden

The thing that strikes me about these discussions it that if female viking fighters were at all common, discovery of possible evidence of such would hardly be news. The vikings are not some mythical or extremely ancient entity. They thrived in the 8th-11th centuries and came into contact with numerous other cultures and these cultures had extensive writing and records that survive to this day.

Female fighters is something that certainly would have been widely recorded by nearly all of the cultures that the vikings came into contact with, yet there's no real record there. Things like the Byzantine Empire's Varangian guard were even heavily composed of Scandinavians where surely such tales and discussion would have received much attention. Yet again, no.

This seems to be a decidedly modern invention that, though certainly better intentioned, feels akin to things like phrenology in that people spin together hamstrung and disparate bits of data to try to create a view with a facade of 'science' behind it, when it's really just about trying to confirm biases.

There are both historical accounts of battles and physical evidence referenced in this Wikipedia article

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shield-maiden

First one quick aside, Wikipedia tends to fare very poorly when we get into contemporary issues or issues involving social matters. And that is certainly in play here. The "Historical Accounts" features such amazing information as the story of a pregnant woman grabbing a sword and scaring away an attacking force, while topless of course. The "Historical Existence" section is literally nothing but stating that there are two scholars that argued they existed, and one scholar that argued that they did not exist.

The main point is again that we have hundreds of years of activity from a civilization that heavily interacted with numerous other civilizations. And the written word had long since been developed and spread. If female fighters played any meaningful role whatsoever, you would not be here trying to debate it using obscure bits of low quality evidence - it would be as self evident as vikings being male. They would have regularly participated in battles, been regularly observed (and noted) by other cultures and so on. But instead you're left to cite tales of a pregnant woman scaring off an attacking force bare breasted, or reference "physical evidence" like 'there was a female skeleton inside a grave that had weapons!'

To be clear, why do you think vikings were men? I needn't provide you with some obscure tale of a man buried in a grave or whatever. These battles were regularly recounted, vikings were regularly interacted with, and the entire civilization is reasonably well recorded. And there's no real ambiguity. Any ambiguity is in us taking isolated incidents and trying to extrapolate them upwards while ignoring the other 99.99999% of evidence.

> Female fighters is something that certainly would have been widely recorded by nearly all of the cultures that the vikings came into contact with

My understanding is that plenty was written about them, but these records have generally been dismissed by historians as mythological rather than factual in nature.

There’s also this re-analysis of warrior bones from just last year:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.23308/full

Yes, that was posted here late last year, as I recall.

You don't find this to be bias confirmation? What we have is a female skeleton buried with a couple of horses, some weaponry, and some games. That's it. They use this to declare the individual a warrior. It's possible, but it's also complete speculation. Most peculiar, to me, is that that paper and the wiki entry [1] make no mention of the outfit that the skeleton was wearing. It was surrounded by weapons, not equipped with such. Speculating in another direction, did Vikings hold funery rights for those whose corpses could not be recovered? That would likely be a semi-regular event be it from falling on campaign, in battle, or even just being lost at sea. For individuals of high rank, which this grave obviously indicates, human sacrifice was on occasion part of funery rights.

So for instance one of the first things I'd be curious about is the skeleton's diet. This sounds incredible, but there's actually precedent for this [2]. In that study they were able to relatively compare diets noting similarities between the common class, contrasted against the elite class. If I'm going to go against Occam's Razor (and the lack of any meaningful evidence for female viking warriors makes this paper's assumption very much this) I'm going to try to disprove my hypothesis in every practical way. Why was none of this done to at least ensure the person was not a beloved slave/lover/wife of some sort? It seems the only examining the authors of that paper took out was to determine if there was indication of trauma or damage of the skeleton, as might be evidence of battle. They found that the skeleton had not been damaged in battle.

Finally, let me conclude with a little quote from that paper: "Do weapons necessarily determine a warrior? The interpretation of grave goods is not straight forward, but it must be stressed that the interpretation should be made in a similar manner regardless of the biological sex of the interred individual." I think this is illogical. The entire goal of science is to formulate the most probable hypothesis with consideration to all evidence available. The fact that this corpse is a female radically changes the probabilities. If you find the corpse you somehow know to be a well nourished Nazi inside a holocaust mass grave, would you assume he was there for different reasons than the other corpses around him? Obviously. Your interpretation can and should change with every bit of data you discover.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birka_female_Viking_warrior

[2] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030544031...

I'm interested in how this affects dating for any species with a diet of fish

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