9. The ALF sequencer is a sequencing machine that detects target DNA fragments, because they carry a fluorescent label with them. In the case discussed here, these labels were added for the processing and copying of DNA in the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) machine.
10. Matthias Krings et al., “Neandertal DNA Sequences and the Origins of Modern Humans,” Cell 90, no. 1 (1997): 19–30.
11. See Amade M’charek, “Race, Time and Folded Objects: The HeLa Error,” Theory, Culture & Society 31, no. 6 (2014): 29–56. In this paper, I show how race is folded into the sequence and obscures its multiple origins. The original sequence was based on DNA from an unknown UK placenta, HeLa cells, as well as bovine DNA. The resequencing of the reference in 1991, however, has led to the exclusion of HeLa DNA, which originally stemmed from the African American woman Henrietta Lacks.
12. Rebecca L. Cann, Mark Stoneking, and Allan C. Wilson, “Mitochondrial DNA and Human Evolution,” Nature 325, no. 6099 (1987): 31–36.
13. It should be noted that the authors of the study did not have access to the DNA of African populations, and that samples were actually taken from African American individuals, who thus represented African populations.
14. Irony in the sense of Donna Haraway: “Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humor and serious play.” See Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late 20th Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, ed. Haraway (London: Free Association, 1991), 149–183. On the intricacies of Mitochondrial Eve, see Venla Oikkonen, “Mitochondrial Eve and the Affective Politics of Human Ancestry,” Signs 40, no. 3 (2015): 747–772.
15. See Jane Gitschier, “All about Mitochondrial Eve: An Interview with Rebecca Cann,” PloS Genetics 6, no. 5 (2010): 1–4.
16. For a helpful review, see Saioa López, Lucy van Dorp, and Garrett Hellenthal, “Human Dispersal Out of Africa: A Lasting Debate,” Evolutionary Bioinformatics 11 (2015): 57–68. On the conversation among geneticists and paleontologists, see Svante Pääbo, Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes (New York: Basic Books, 2014).
17. According to Pääbo, this is a paraphrase of a famous statement of the anthropologist Vincent Sarich, who worked in Allan Wilson’s lab in Berkeley in the 1980s. It seems that Mark Stoneking might have borrowed it and used it in the interview with me in 1996. See Pääbo, Neanderthal Man, 95.
18. Krings et al., “Neandertal DNA Sequences,” 27.
19. Richard Ed Green et al., “A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome,” Science 328, no. 5979 (2010): 710–722.
20. It is slowly becoming clear that the genetic material that modern humans received from the Neanderthals has played a crucial role in building resistance to viruses and bacteria. Perhaps this made human survival possible in Europe at the time. The presence of Neanderthal genes has also helped explain why some Covid patients have a very tough disease process, and why genes in turn protect people better against this virus. See Hugo Zeberg and Svante Pääbo, “The Major Genetic Risk Factor for Severe COVID-19 is Inherited from Neanderthals,” Nature 587, no. 7835 (2020): 610–612.
21. Green et al., “Draft Sequence,” 29.
22. John Hawks, “Accurate Depiction of Uncertainty in Ancient DNA Research: The Case of Neanderthal Ancestry in Africa,” Journal of Social Archaeology 21, no. 2 (2021): 179–196.
23. David Reich quoted in Hawks, “Accurate Depiction of Uncertainty,” 179.
24. For a discussion about the troubled history of genetics, see Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). For the recent scholarship on race and genomics, see, for instance, Nadia Abu El-Haj, “The Genetic Reinscription of Race,” Annual Review of Anthropology 36 (2007): 283–300; Duana Fullwiley, “The Molecularization of Race: Institutionalizing Racial Difference in Pharmacogenetics Practice,” Science as Culture 16, no. 1 (2007): 1–30; Ian Whitmarsh and David S. Jones, eds., What’s the Use of Race? Modern Governance and the Biology of Difference (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); Alan H. Goodman, Yolanda T. Moses, and Joseph L. Jones, Race: Are We So Different? (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); Jonathan Kahn, Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in the Genomic Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Troy Duster, “A Post-Genomic Surprise: The Molecular Re-Inscription of Race in Science, Law, and Medicine,” British Journal of Sociology 66, no. 1 (2015): 1–27; Daniel Strand, “0.01%: Genetics, Race and the Methodology of Differentiation,” Eurozine, January 4, 2021, https://www.eurozine.com/0-01.
25. Siep Stuurman, The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).
26. See Bhabha, Location of Culture; Charles W. Mills, “The Chronopolitics of Racial Time,” Time & Society 29, no. 2 (2020): 297–317; Katharina Hunfeld, “The Coloniality of Time in the Global Justice Debate: De-centring Western Linear Temporality,” Journal of Global Ethics 18, no.1 (2022): 100–117.
27. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
28. Lowenhaupt Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World, 22.
29. Serres and Latour, Conversations on Science, 58.
30. On the folding of time in objects and how that helps to produce race, see M’charek, “Race, Time and Folded Objects.”
31. On the legacy and problems of race in physical and forensic anthropology, see Elizabeth A. DiGangi and Jonathan D. Bethard, “Uncloaking a Lost Cause: Decolonizing Ancestry Estimation in the United States,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 175, no. 2 (2021): 422–436. On how this legacy plays out in genetic practice, see Roos Hopman and Amade M’charek, “Facing the Unknown Suspect: Forensic DNA Phenotyping and the Oscillation Between the Individual and the Collective,” BioSocieties 15, no. 3 (2020): 1–25.
32. See Katerina Harvati and Terry Harrison, eds., Neanderthals Revisited: New Approaches and Perspectives (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006).
33. For an overview of this research, see the insightful Deutsche Welle documentary Who Were the Neanderthals? from 2021, produced by Rob Hope and Pascal Cruissot, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8p8tFcIQ8K4.
34. Nicolas Brown, dir., Europe First Peoples, PBS Nova, February 13, 2017, YouTube video, 54:42, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1587lxOA6sI.
35. On how the Neanderthal changed from initially more similar to a modern human to humanity’s apish other in the early twentieth century, see Sommer, “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall.”
36. My argument is akin to and inspired by Donna Haraway’s important essay “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1936,” in Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (London: Verso, 1989), 26–59. In this intriguing and powerful essay, Haraway analyzes how “nature,” and the way it is displayed in the so-called African Hall at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, does not so much represent nature, as it can be found in Africa—“an immediate vision,” as Carl Akeley would have it (in Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy,” 36)—but rather reflects and reifies dominant ideas of class, race, and gender in the United States of the 1930s. To be sure, in contrast to my reading of the postcard, Haraway presents a thorough analysis of the museum, exhibitions, and key figures (such as Carl Akeley), as well as the method of collecting and preserving (such as photography or taxidermy). Yet, both our analyses deal with the issue of time. “The African Hall was meant to be a time machine,” Haraway suggests, but a linear one. By contrast, in my analysis of the postcard in the Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann, I zoom in on the multiplicity of time; not simply linearity, but also the folding and crumpling of time, in which distant moments in history and the present are superimposed in the “now.”
37. M’charek, “Race, Time and Folded Objects.”
38. The Turkana boy is the name given to an early hominid, a young boy of probably twelve years old, who lived some 1.6 million years ago. The finding of this skeleton in 1984 was a sensation, not only because it appeared to stem from such an archaic hominid, but also because his skeleton was complete. See Frank Brown et al., “Early Homo Erectus Skeleton from West Lake Turkana, Kenya,” Nature 316, no. 6031 (1985): 788–792.
39. Susan Leigh Star, “Introduction: The Sociology of Science and Technology,” Social Problems 35, no. 3 (1988): 197–205.
40. Paul Gilroy, “Race Ends Here,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no. 5 (1998): 838.
41. This theme is widely analyzed in critical race studies and cultural studies. See, for instance, Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 1952); Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage, 1997).
42. See also Deleuze and Guattari’s argument on race and sameness, and how it leads to the bestialization of the nonsame. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
43. Amade M’charek, Victor Toom, and Lisette Jong, “The Trouble with Race in Forensic Identification,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 45, no. 5 (2020): 804–828.
44. Joyce C. Havstad, “Sensational Science, Archaic Hominin Genetics, and Amplified Inductive Risk,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52, no. 3 (2022): 295. See also Elizabeth Jones’s discussion of a field that is data-driven, but also celebrity-driven, with problematic consequences for how the field of aDNA has acquired its shape; Elizabeth D. Jones, “Ancient Genetics to Ancient Genomics: Celebrity and Credibility in Data-Driven Practice,” Biology and Philosophy 34, no. 2 (2019): 1–35.
45. On the relation between affect and race, see Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2004).
46. Anna Källén et al., “Introduction: Transcending the aDNA Revolution,” Journal of Social Archaeology 21, no. 2 (2021): 151.
47. Hawks, “Accurate Depiction of Uncertainty”; Lu Chen et al., “Identifying and Interpreting Apparent Neanderthal Ancestry in African Individuals,” Cell, 180, no. 4 (2020): 677–687.
48. This happens to the point where white supremacists use the contribution of Neanderthal DNA in their DNA profiles as a marker for Europeanness and their belonging to the stronger “race.” See Michael Cook, “I’m Glad I’m Part Neanderthal,” BioEdge, October 22, 2016, https://bioedge.org/uncategorized/im-glad-im-part-neanderthal; Amy Harmon, “Why White Supremacists Are Chugging Milk (and Why Geneticists Are Alarmed),” New York Times, October 17, 2018.
6 The Lagertha Complex: Archaeogenomics and the Viking Stage
Andreas Nyblom
Once you have seen Lagertha, it is hard to unsee her.
—Judith Jesch, 20191
On September 8, 2017, an article with the conspicuous title “A Female Viking Warrior Confirmed by Genomics” was published in the “Brief Communication” section of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (AJPA).2 It presented the results of a genetic sex determination of an individual buried with weapons in a chamber grave at the Viking Age site Birka in present-day Sweden. The article concluded that the individual, who had previously been assumed to have been male, was not only biologically female but the “first confirmed female high-ranking Viking warrior.”3 The article went viral almost within hours and remains one of the most talked about research papers ever according to alternative metrics.4 The article was published in close proximity to the airing of the fifth season of the popular History Channel series Vikings, and the individual, soon to be known worldwide as the “female Viking warrior,” came to be widely conflated with the lead female character of the show: the shieldmaiden Lagertha.5
Nine months earlier, on December 14, 2016, an episode of the docudrama Real Vikings had been released. It featured a meeting at the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm between Katheryn Winnick, the actor starring as Lagertha in Vikings, and three researchers in archaeology and osteology who were also authors of the scientific article later to be published in the AJPA. In front of the camera, Winnick and the researchers study the human remains and weaponry originally found in the chamber grave at Birka in 1878, subsequently stored at the museum. The production soon turns attention to the gender of the buried individual, and it is explained that it has previously been assumed to be male, owing to the traditional warrior equipment found in the grave. With the bones laid out on a table, the researchers explain confidently, while pointing to the remains of the pelvis, that they have evidence for it being female and that the person buried in the grave was “definitely a female warrior—someone who made her living on the battlefield.” In excitement, Winnick bursts out: “So, this chick was a badass!” Leaning over the original artifacts from the grave, she grasps the hilt of a corroded sword and exclaims: “This is my sword. Oh, yeah! This is Lagertha’s favorite weapon!” The scene ends with a sonorous voiceover which declares: “Finally, physical evidence verifies the legend of the shieldmaiden.”6
The scene in Real Vikings was no doubt orchestrated to establish an intriguing analogy between the fictional character Lagertha and the real life and identity of the individual buried at Birka some thousand years before. Epitomizing the pop-feminist ambitions of the Vikings series—to challenge the stereotype of the Viking male by providing space for “women who wield weapons and women who wield power”7—it served simultaneously to authenticate the depiction of female warriors in Vikings and to visualize and dramatize knowledge claims in the academic field of archaeology. In what seemed like a win-win collaboration between entertainment and research, where the expertise and authority provided by the archaeologists was grafted onto the visually compelling imagery of Lagertha, fearlessly wielding her sword and shield on the battlefield, the ancient bones at the museum were brought to life as the remains of a true action heroine, a genuine shieldmaiden—a real Lagertha.
While science and entertainment are frequently assumed to be poles apart, here they were openly intertwined. The blockbuster article and the docudrama episode featured the same human remains from Birka, involved the same people, and made the same kind of claims and arguments, not only about the identity of the buried individual but more generally about the existence and characteristics of female Viking warriors as a social category. In an argument based on, first, an osteological assessment, and second, a genetic determination of the individual’s biological sex, medieval legends about shieldmaidens and contemporary action heroines were somehow also confirmed as authentic representations of real-life individuals. In a most remarkable incarnation, the individual once buried in the Birka chamber grave came to converge with the figure of Lagertha, whose lineage extends from the twelfth-century imaginings of the Danish author Saxo Grammaticus to the popular Vikings series.
How are we to make sense of this complex taking shape around the figure of Lagertha, with its intimate intertwinement of science and entertainment, legend and genomics? What role did the researchers play in the realization of the “female Viking warrior” as a real Lagertha, and what role did the media play in the production of scientific knowledge? How, and to what effects, was aDNA brought into operation?
A Female Viking Warrior “Confirmed” by Genomics
