Howard Williams On The Ethics Of Excavation | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
aka "Viking warrior women & the ethics of excavating the dead"
"[On the supposed female Viking warrior] ‘Though some Viking women buried with weapons are known, female, the female warrior of this importance has never been determined. And Viking scholars have been reluctant to acknowledge the agency of women with weapons.’
There's a lockpick packed into this article. It's a very short, punchy article. And what it's saying here is that, as I said, scholars have been reluctant to accept the association of women with weapons. And that we've, this is the first one we've got such a range of compliments of female grave goods, male, traditionally male gendered grave goods associated with a female skeleton, and they make it a female warrior within the sentence.
‘Similar associations of women buried with weapons have been dismissed, arguing that the armaments could have been heirlooms, carriers of symbolic meaning or grave goods reflecting the status and role of the family rather than the individual (Gardeła, 2013)’.
That's not actually what Gardeła says. But we'll come back. That was a terrible straw manning in the article of actually a junior career researcher who never said that. He actually is setting up a range of options, including those, but also
suggesting they could be warrior women.
But anyway, that aside, what I'm making the point here is they put a very simple stark interpretation out there, which leaves very little room for anyone to disagree, unless you have some inherent prejudice against the very conception of a woman being able to wield a weapon or two in a past society...
I then looked at how academics have actually responded. What's really interesting here is a lot of academics went yeah, that's great, that's new, that's exciting. We'll go with that. And a few killjoys, me included and other experts, such as Professor Judy Jesch, at Nottingham University went, hang on. This isn't that simple.
How, how come, we've suddenly jettisoned all these problems, and we're saying we've got Viking warrior women based on one grave.
And that led to all manner of storm amongst the academic community, with people taking sides, and almost sort of setting up little battlegrounds of their own fighting it out. Mainly women against women, actually, but also some male scholars involved in that discussion. And then I decided to wade in on the actual interpretation presented.
And I made the point that most mortuary archaeologists know that weapon burials don't equate to warrior graves. That no one's been saying for years, actually, unless you've been reading very popular accounts, or very poor accounts.
No one's been saying that if you put a weapon in a grave, that meant that that dead person was a warrior. And so there was a bit of rhetoric at work at the article suggesting that we'd always said that. And now it's a woman's skeleton, that it must be a female warrior.
Well, that kind of unravels rapidly if no one's actually been saying that males with weapons are warriors. And we haven't been, we've been saying that weapons in different societies from the Bronze Age onwards, are deployed as symbols of status, perhaps articulating kin group relations, perhaps ideals of martial identity, sometimes by individuals who may have used those weapons in life, sometimes by individuals who may have actually never grown up long enough or lived long enough to use those weapons.
So in Anglo Saxon graves, we have 12 year olds and even eight year olds, sometimes buried with weapons. So no one's ever said that it's that simple, that people treat the dead like the living.
And yet, the article was doing, being a bit cheeky. And suggesting that we've only ever said that war, weapon burials equal warrior graves so we can treat this as a female warrior. They also make an argument of the burial location being a very violent place because it's near the hill fort at Birka, therefore, it must be a warrior.
And I queried that. I also queried whether the grave was actually complete, because chamber graves, we know a lot of archaeological evidence, they were robbed, because they are chambers, there's some semi subterranean houses, that you could then reenter, and some of them do seem to be robbed. So we don't even know if this was a complete single act of burial, or actually the result of many stages of putting bodies in, removing objects over a longer period of time.
There's also the question there sir [sp?] all the grave goods are male. And actually, a lot of the items found with this warrior woman are high status items you find in male and female gender graves. Horses, are they trying to argue that horses were only used in battle in the 10th century AD? And that horses are only used by men in battle normally? No.
Horses are high status transportation items. Put frost nails on their feet, you can ride them over ice in winter, winter landscapes. In the summer landscape, they're the principal land transport means for long distance travel. We know that we're looking at equestrian elites from the Roman period onwards. So a woman buried with two animals, a stallion and a mare doesn't necessarily tell you they're her battle beasts, to go riding into combat. And indeed, the use of horses as war horses is something very, very problematically interpretey.
In the 10th century, we're only really starting to see the use of horses as cavalry on the continent. And it's really disputable whether they're using them in Scandinavia in that landscape in that way. But that's another whole area of discussion.
My point is, gaming pieces are not aspects of strategy so that you can work as a military commander, they’re entertainment for the elite. They are status items, and they would have been items that we know from the literature would have been used by men and women. So those aren't male only items.
Was there only ever one body and some archaeologists have suggested there could have been other bodies that were removed later? Was it a robbed grave? And could, and the assumption of the article is that the only option of a female sexed body with male gendered objects is that this is a warrior women, woman, when of course people do raise quickly, the range of scholars raised the possibility that actually, we know very little about gendered identities in the Viking Age, we know it was a gender divided society of men and women. But there were also a range of sources hence suggest that there may be a third gender in Viking society.
And if you want to discount all of that research, because it doesn't suit your tastes, you still got the issue of potentially was she actually seen as a woman at all? Could this have been a person who lived their life as a man and just doesn't happen to fit our biological sexing criteria. So there's lots of other options I won't go into here, but I raised those issues.
And then I followed the story as it grew, because inevitably there was going to be, I'll take it to a public talk, and I took it to to a public talk at the Grosvenor museum. I presented them with the evidence, and I made them do a poll for me about whether they thought it was a Viking warrior woman.
And despite me presenting them with all the cynicism and skepticism, they said, yeah, that sounds right. And then I followed the first TV documentary made about it the much castigated. Legends of the Lost with Megan Fox, which you can catch up with on YouTube, which was heavily derided because it has a pseudo archaeology fringe element to the TV show. And she goes into the Norwegian woods and has a spiritual commune with her grandmother spirit of, which you can take or leave. And I think that was a particularly relevant or necessary part of the TV program.
But there were other bits as she met with a range of Scandinavian experts, and presented a series of key archaeological sites and historical sources that hints towards the historical existence of Viking warrior women.
And I review that as a very positive thing, because even though I wasn't convinced by the narrative, I thought the TV show did a good job of showcasing Viking research. And so when I said that, I got castigated by my American colleagues, who obviously have nothing but tee- pseudo archaeology on their TV, ancient aliens and all that. And they hated Megan Fox doing this because it gave another avenue for crazy ideas about ancient civilizations and Graham Hancock rubbish to appear with historical legitimacy and I respect their view, but I still maintain the TV show did a good job when they talk to experts. So I thought the first TV program about this was actually quite interesting. I didn't buy the narrative, but I thought it did showcase Viking research.
And then it spiraled. Because the way they showed the Viking warrior women, as in the sort of backdrop of Legends of the Lost was taken straight from Vikings, the TV show and then even Doctor Who’s Christmas special took on the same iconic figure of a Viking warrior woman fighting a ninth century Dalek...
It is based on a biographical fallacy that is at the very heart of modern mortuary archaeology. That the dead don't bury themselves. That the objects placed with the dead do not directly reflect the identity of the person lived in life.
And James Whitley, in 2002 calls us out on this. This is over 15, 16 years ago. He calls us out on old fashioned archaeology, still in the 80s and 90s. Still banging on, and TV archaeology does this all the time, about oh, look, it's a it's a smith because he's got a hammer in his grave. It's a surgeon because he's got some medical tools. We do this again and again, but it's wrong, and it's problematic. And it's at the heart of the BJ581 story.
So here's a wealthy Viking grey from Gowzel [sp?] in Norway, and she's buried with the horse's head. Did she ride around with a horse's head, in life? No, it's a sacrificed horse. The rest is probably eaten at a funeral feast. And the head goes in the grave. It says something about her. It says something about her family. It may say something about her views of the afterlife. But it doesn't, it's not exactly something about her personal identity.
Likewise, she has dressed in this case with female jewelry, and a horn and other elaborate ceremonial objects. Does that make her a priestess or a queen? She's called the Queen of Gowzel in the popular literature. But does, you know, could she have had other roles? Could she simply have died at a time of crisis and her family and all the other people who held those roles gave her the artifacts to articulate their aspirations for the continuity of their family? You know, that a lot of death is about inheritance and crisis. And so we shouldn't think of the grave goods as the things necessarily owned and used by that person in death...
There are a range of sources for the Viking Age, that do tell us about the roles of women in society and the roles of women in using weapons and the roles of women in ceremonial uses of weapons. Most strikingly, this is my favorite ever academic book cover.
This is a cartoon of the ibn Fadlan, first hand witness of a Viking loose [sp?] funeral on the Volga River in the early 10th century. And here is the po-, this is just a cartoon version of the account we have of ibn Fadlan’s travel and that is our one of our few first hand accounts of a Viking funeral. And it involves all manner of other performances. 10 days or more of intoxication and feasting. The preparation of new clothes for the dead person. So they're not being buried in the stuff they're wearing, because they're being dressed in clothes. The temporary burial, that 10 day period before he's put on the ship, and it's burned in on land. And then a mound, a great mound, raised over the the cremation pyre and a pillar raised on the mound with the name of the dead person inscribed in it, on it, presumably, in runes.
Now women have two key roles in this funeral. The sacrificed slave girl is not simply a high status commodity. She is a performer to honor the dead man. And she calls her her ancestors and his ancestors. So she is absolutely central as a victim in the funeral. But also this shadowy figure of the angel of death. An old lady with her daughters, who seems to be a female ritual specialist who kills the slave girl and seems to have other key roles in the funeral. So we have at least two very important female actors in this funeral process.
And I think it's the angel of death that intrigues me more, and a range of work by other scholars including *something*, Neil Price himself, one of the authors of the Viking warrior women article have alerted us to the importance of women in Viking society as shamanesses or seers, as priestesses or a range of different roles, as intermediaries with the supernatural, and intermediaries with the dead...
Now for graves like these, and this one a male and a female together, but the female seems to have the spear. We may be looking at something slightly different than Viking warrior women, and *someone’s* research is suggesting that, and here's another one, a burial with an axe. These may not be warriors, some of them may be, but perhaps we're looking at women who have a particular cultic role and ceremonial role in life and in death ritual...
We don't simply have a responsibility to ourselves and our professionalism, we have a responsibility to her. And what her story was. To not just tell one story, but to keep the possibilities of other narratives open while they still are open’"
