"Corpses reidentified, 1/2 Vikings were women" Topic

Here:

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The article seems to be based on items of jewelry found at burial sites, "it has been noted that there are more Norse female dress items than those worn by men", concluding "Although the results presented here cannot be used to determine the number of female settlers, they do suggest that the ratio of females to males may have been somewhere between a third to roughly equal".

What the article doesn't seem to establish is if the women came over in the original raiding boats, or followed later once settlements had been established.

Equally the burial chambers may suggest that women who died were buried, whereas we have the archtypical image of the Viking warrior being sent on his way like this:

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If that was a true reflection of the way Viking warriors were despatched… you wouldn't find many men in the burial chambers on land (?)

Isn't that the normal ratio, more or less?

One site, fourteen burials. That's a pretty small sample for so sweeping a conclusion. (I'm in the camp that wants to see many women warriors . . . . well, just because, but I'm also cautious about generalizing.)

Not sure if it was the ratio that was surprising, or that the isotope tests indicated that they had come over on the boats rather than (as presumably considered to be the case) the males only had come over and established communities by taking local women.

Don't see what's news here. Some Scandinavians raided and went home, others formed invasions and stayed. Makes sense their families would follow later. Most were farmers looking for land from an easy prey after all. I would imagine there is a lot of Northern British DNA in Norway and Denmark given they mostly raided for slaves.

British and Danish DNA are indistinguishable, according to the BBC Blood of the Vikings programmes a few years ago.

This article from medievalists.net is worth reading in conjunction with the fuss around the USAToday article:
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It's quite interesting how the original article has been transformed into 'Viking women were warriors, waaaaaaarrrrggh!'

The original article is here although hidden behind a paywall and Mcleod has not posted it to his academia.edu page yet:
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The article was also written at the same time DC Comics decided to make Thor a woman….ummm….it's called social engineering.

Lot of that going on these days.

The article was also written at the same time DC Comics decided to make Thor a woman

Are you sure? The USAToday article is dated July 2011, shortly after Mcleod's article came out. I thought that the decision to make Thor a woman was made this year. Admittedly the article has suddenly gone viral with numerous articles spawned from it now, and these may have been inspired by the business with Thor, but I'm not sure about the original articles.

whereas we have the archtypical image of the Viking warrior being sent on his way like this:

Even in the Viking culture, ships were expensive items, and only a minority of the Viking warriors owned one (rest flocking around the ship-owners if they wanted to go riding).

Also, ship burial could not be conducted in all circumstances, eg. when on an expedition far away from the home, since that would leave the ships crew stranded. So the most likely circumstances for one to happen would be actually if the ship-owner died peacefully in his home fjord, and his heir would be capable of having a new ship constructed as a replacement.

USA Today article is a whole lot of hype and a whole less amount of scholarship. Read the original article upon which the USA Today article was based. What passes for journalism these days is soooo disappointing.

Not sure I can find it now – will try when I get home, but there is another recent article that takes the '50% of warriors were women' article apart.

Be interesting to see the original paper. I had read that the pelvis was a pretty good indicator of gender and would have thought that analyzing the skeletal remains (presuming they survived and the pelvis is usually one of the more durable bones) would have been basic archeology. Per this link pelvis is 95 percent accurate in determining gender (skull is 85-90 percent).

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Interesting that they seem to base their ID on jewelry after deciding to go back and reanalyze the finds.

Sensible discussion of stupid article based on sensible fieldwork :)

Except for the bit about Thor in a movie. What was that about?

Ah, here's what I was looking for.

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Glad to see that link Sundance.

So they went back and looked at the bones after having used grave goods in the initial analysis. Per my link that makes a lot of sense.

Although why they wouldn't look at the bones in the first analysis puzzles me…

Although why they wouldn't look at the bones in the first analysis puzzles me

Archaeologists often use artefacts as the default identifier. They will certainly have examined the bones, but may have discounted the evidence as unreliable at the time. Advances continue to be made in analysis so later work may have resources available to it that were not available during the first analysis. Obviously this is speculation about what went on, but it is worth considering.

While on the topic of warrior-women, I remembered this article by Leszek Gardela that is worth a read:
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And while I am linking to papers on this topic, here is an alternative view from Halsall:
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pelvis is 95 percent accurate in determining gender (skull is 85-90 percent)

Those stats are for relatively-recently-deposited bodies, with good preservation (and good reference samples from most of the living population in question). Forensic anthropology and archaeology are not quite the same fields (although there are plenty of human osteologists who can do both with distinction). In an archaeological assemblage preservation is usually worse, and the populations are more remote from modern reference collections. Best practice would be to look at both skull (with mandible) and pelvis together. A determination on sex based on skull alone would be pretty dubious in some cases, although the pelvis does usually give a good (although not always completely certain) indication. In the projects I've worked on, skeletal remains were not classified as simply either 'male' or 'female' but on a spectrum from 'definitely male' to 'definitely female', via 'probably male', 'indeterminate', and 'probably female', with a sixth category for those where the surviving remains were not in good enough condition (the skull and/or pelvis were not present or very badly damaged) to make an assessment. Sod's Law means that the pelvis gets badly damaged or goes missing more often than you'd like, of course.

The 14 burials referred to in McLeod's article are from a number of different sites, including Repton and Heath Wood; those sites have lots of other skeletons which were not included in his analysis. One of the Repton skeletons that is included was from a mass grave. Many of the other skeletons from that grave were too badly damaged to sex (and those that were not were not definitely those of immigrants on the basis of isotope analysis). The Heath Wood remains are from cremations; again, many of the skeletons from that site were very badly damaged. The point is that sexing these kinds of remains is difficult and requires specialist expertise: that in turn implies more inputs of time and money than are required by the identification of artefactual remains.

Interesting update EvilBen. While writing my comment I had thought of the caveat as to the condition of the remains. However the fact that they were re-examined and the gender determined led to my question. Hadn't been aware how specialized the fields were.

Your details on provenance of the remains puts a rather different perspective on the matter than that picked up by the 'news' articles. Pity the report is still paywalled.

The more accurate headline might have been – 'Of 14 sets of identifiable Viking remains from several burial sites 6 were female and one of indeterminate gender.'

Rather long and not particularly sensational…

Although the report is definitely of interest.