'If it was a man, we would say that's a warrior's grave': Weapon-filled burials are shaking up what we know about women's role in Viking society

An illustration of a woman lying down in a grave with weapons behind her.

In Birka, Sweden, there is a roughly 1,000-year-old Viking burial teeming with lethal weapons — a sword, an ax-head, spears, knives, shields and a quiver of arrows — as well as riding equipment and the skeletons of two warhorses. Nearly 150 years ago, when the grave was unearthed, archaeologists assumed they were looking at the burial of a male warrior. But a 2017 DNA analysis of the burial's skeletal remains revealed the individual was female.

Skeptics scrambled to explain away the evidence, said Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, an archaeologist at Uppsala University in Sweden and first author of the 2017 study.