As a scientific study, the article âA Female Viking Warrior Confirmed by Genomicsâ presents the results from aDNA and strontium isotope analyses of the human remains from grave Bj 581 at the Viking Age site Birka, located on an island in Lake Mälaren in central Sweden. An important Viking Age site for trade and commerce, Birka has been investigated by archaeologists since the nineteenth century. Originally excavated in 1878, the grave featured in the study includes not only the human skeleton but also assorted weapons and the remains of two horses. In the article, the authors identify this set of grave goods as âthe complete equipment of a professional warrior,â and hence describe Bj 581 as the epitome of a warrior grave.8 The location of the grave in a prominent place near the garrison is taken as indicative of the social standing of the buried person. Furthermore, a full set of gaming pieces is understood as a sign of âknowledge of tactics and strategy, stressing the individualâs role as a high-ranking officer.â9 Once the identity of the individual as a warriorâor even a high-ranking officerâhas been put forward with traditional archaeological arguments, the actual scientific analysis, and the bulk of the scientific paper, revolve around the DNA and isotope analyses.
The genomic analysis is featured prominently, already in the title of the article, where its literal function is to confirm the âfemale Viking warrior.â On closer inspection, however, it plays only a marginal role in the actual scientific analysis. Biological sex can be determined with a basic genetic analysisâby establishing the absence of a Y-chromosomeâand does not require a full genome analysis. A genome-wide analysis, on the other hand, covers the entire nuclear and mitochondrial DNA of an organism. In aDNA studies of prehistoric individuals, such analyses are used to estimate ethnic or family relations and to find out if the individual had any genetically defined characteristics or rare medical conditions.
A genome-wide analysis was indeed performed on two samples from the human remains in Bj 581. First and foremost, it showed that the sampled bones belonged to the same individual. This is a significant result, since the grave had been excavated in 1878 and the human remains (which are now incomplete and lack the skull) were stored among other human remains at an institution that has since been reorganized and relocated. The genomic analysis, moreover, indicated a population affinity with present-day inhabitants of northern Europe. Within Sweden, it showed a stronger affinity with modern inhabitants of the southern and south-central parts than with those of the northern parts of the country. The strontium isotope analysis, which can indicate mobility between geographical regions throughout an individualâs lifetime, was not conclusive but suggested that the individual buried in Bj 581 was born elsewhere and had moved to Birka.
However, none of these findings gained traction in the communication of the results that followed the publication of the article. And the article itself makes clear where the significance of the study lies. After accounting for the complicated scientific methodology and broader results of the DNA and strontium analyses, the authors conclude: âHence the individual in grave Bj 581 is the first confirmed female high-ranking Viking warrior.â10 Moreover, this is said to âsuggest that women, indeed, were able to be full members of male dominated spheres.â11
Two curious claims are made in these statements. First, they set forth that the study could âconfirmâ that the buried individual had an in-life identity as a high-ranking warrior, although the genomic study established only biological sex and affinity to present-day populations. Second, they suggest that the studyâalthough it included only a single individualâcould say something in general about the position of women in Viking Age society.
Of course, neither of these claims is valid. More importantly, however, they point back to what seems to be the core objective of the study, which has little, if anything, to do with genomics and the analysis of aDNA. Rather, it seems that both the objective and principal results of this study had taken shape long before the publication of the scientific article, and long before the human remains were even sampled for aDNA. As indicated already in the Real Vikings scene, aired almost a year before the article was published, the objective was to demonstrate the real existence of a social and professional category of female warriors in the Viking Age, with recourse to legendary shieldmaidens. The analysis of aDNA brought nothing qualitative to this argument, since previous osteological assessments had already established the biological sex. Genetics acted solely as an agent of absolute confirmationânot only of the biological sex of the human remains but of the existence of professional female warriors in the Viking Age and of the high-ranking status of the individual buried in Bj 581. Like a magic wand, the word âgenomicsâ seemed to have brought legendary shieldmaidens to real life.
A Spectacular Media Career
The publication of the article in the AJPA in September 2017 marked the beginning of a spectacular media career, which would turn the buried individual in Bj 581 into a global celebrity showcased in exhibitions, exploited in pornography, printed on t-shirts, and dramatized in documentaries, theater plays, and novels.12 Presented as the âViking High Ranking Birka Shield-Maiden,â the individualâor rather the individualâs genetic markers in combination with the mediatized celebrity imageâwas also used as a beacon for genetic ancestry tests on the website My True Ancestry. Highlighted as a âDNA Spotlight,â the individual was promoted as an ancient ancestor with whom root-seeking consumers could connect and match their DNA.13
Only hours after its publication, the academic article had attracted massive media interest across the world.14 The initial news headlines commonly combined the element of DNA as proof with the feminist implications of a female Viking warrior: âGender Reveal: Ancient Viking Warrior Was a Woman, DNA Analysis Shows,â âFamous Viking Warrior Was a Woman, DNA Reveals,â and âNew Science Shows High-Ranked Viking Warrior Was a Fierce Lady.â15
According to the Altmetric attention score, which measures public spread and visibility of academic research, some 149 news outlets have to date reported on the AJPA article. It has been mentioned on a great number of blogs, Wikipedia and Facebook pages, and in thousands of tweets.16 Of course, the overall popular appreciation of Vikings, fueled by books, films, and television series provided a fertile soil for the âfemale Viking warriorâ to capture the public imagination. The results from a Google search of the title of the article abound with images of beautiful young women in various historical costumes. Many illustrations include helmets and armor, and words like âfierceâ and âfearsomeâ are recurring. Frequent references are also made to Hollywood sheroes such as Xena Warrior Princess, Wonder Woman, and Daenerys Targaryen (from Game of Thrones).
Most common of all, however, are the allusions in text and imagery to Lagertha. As noted by archaeologist Howard Williams, Lagertha and the individual in grave Bj 581 became ârecursively related as part of a wider cultural conversation that is set to run and run.â17 Not unlike the ways in which the small-bodied hominin Homo floresiensis, or the âFlores Hobbit,â was imagined and made sense of when it was discovered in 2004 (relating in particular to Peter Jacksonâs recent film adaptation of Lord of the Rings), the âfemale Viking warriorâ was configured within the scaffold of popular, fictional creationsâan approach that was initiated and endorsed by the researchers themselves.18
In the media coverage, there were also abundant references to DNA as proof. These were often made in rhetorical combinations that are difficult to sustain from a scientific point of view, as in Science Magazineâs headline âDNA Proves Fearsome Viking Warrior Was a Woman.â19 While fearsomeness, or indeed a warrior occupation, is of course not inscribed in any strings of DNA, it is here, so to speak, evident by association. This should not, however, be regarded as a downstream invention by ignorant journalists. We see similar slippages to bolder claims in the academic article itself, and we see it expressed again by some of the authors reporting on their website that their research team has âuncovered a fearsome Viking warrior to be in fact a woman.â20 The leap to bolder claims seems to be characteristic for the recourse to DNA as evidence, by everyone involved in the communication around the individual from Bj 581.
Judging by the media response, the story appealed both to feminist aspirations of finding powerful women in history and to male heterosexual fantasies.21 More precisely, the story about the individual buried in Bj 581 gained purchase in two distinct directions. On the one hand, it inspired applause in feminist media outlets and mainstream media reporting with feminist undertones. On the other, it spurred misogynist exclamations and hardcore pornography.
The feminist connection, which was present in the AJPA article as well as the episode of Real Vikings, was amplified in the subsequent media communication, where the âfemale Viking warriorâ soon became a cudgel in polemic feminist debates. The Guardian called for a revision of male-centered Viking historiography, and Huffington Post deplored âsexism in research methods.â22 Less established media outlets made even bolder claims. A video from the producer Vocativ, for instance, presented the âfemale Viking warriorâ within a medley of pop-cultural images of fighting women accompanied by bombastic music and subtitles claiming that âwomen kick assâ and have been âmulti-tasking since at least the 8th century.â23
Since Vikings, as historian Katherine Lewis notes, have commonly been presented as âthe epitome of an unbridled form of hypermasculinity predicated on physical strength ⌠and callous brutality,â the idea of female Viking warriors, in fiction and research, comes as a significant and, to some, highly anticipated opportunity for discursive change.24 In this context, the identification of a female individual in what has been described by one of the researchers behind the study as âthe worldâs ultimate warrior Viking grave,â was loaded with symbolic weight.25 Eventually, the article even came to be associated with the global uprising against the abuse of women that ensued only a few weeks after its publication.26 For instance, a Canadian playwright who later brought the âfemale Viking warriorâ to Broadway claimed that the researchers had ârolled feminism, activism, Vikings and #MeToo up in one tasty, spicy, mind-blowing, intellectual taco.â27 This connection was quite possibly spurred by a promotional video for Vikings in which Winnick/Lagertha delivered a #TimesUp speech from her throne in Kattegat, encouraging women to be warriors and queens.28
In the misogynistic direction, by contrast, the Norwegian Nazi apologist and neo-pagan Varg Vikernes questioned the results of the study on his YouTube channel by arguing that âit would not be logical to train women to become warriorsâ since women âare [physically] inferiorâ to men.29 And on the Swedish online forum Flashback, self-styled historians suggested that the person buried in Bj 581 was in fact the soldiersâ favorite prostitute, honored with a warrior burial.30 On a similar note, a dedicated porn site (which displays a DOI link to the AJPA article) features female actors personifying the âfemale Viking warriorâ being subdued in a number of variations on sexual violence.31
The double vision of the âfemale Viking warriorâ represented hereâas fierce and powerful, on the one hand, and subordinate to the male gaze and sexual desire, on the otherâis in some sense reflected in the academic attempt to frame the individual in Bj 581 and the figure of the shieldmaiden in a language of feminism, while the very origin of the fantasy of warrior women rests on male desires and anxieties.32 Even the figure of Lagertha could be said to accommodate these obviously contradictory visions about the female Viking warrior. While Lagertha in Vikings has forcefully been put forth as an empowering character and a feminist role model, the original Lathgertha, according to Viking studies scholar Judith Jesch, was rather a product of Saxo Grammaticusâs âmisogynist fantasy about warrior women.â33 Either way, both versions are undeniably products of male imagination.
The Prehistory of the âFemale Viking Warriorâ
Contrary to what the AJPA article from 2017 suggested and what news media subsequently reported, the âfemale Viking warriorâ did not emerge as a result of genomics. The inflated narrative and composite identity embedded in the label âfemale Viking warriorâ had already been articulated several years earlier, and in popular rather than academic contexts. While the DNA component of the study merely confirmed what several osteological assessments had indicated since the 1970sâthat the biological sex of the individual in Bj 581 was femaleânone of these previous assessments had come with any explicit interpretation regarding the social identity of the individual. In scholarly settings, the individualâs sex combined with the material context of the grave had merely been discussed as an âinteresting and thought-provoking exampleâ or âan interesting (and possibly controversial) find.â34 The full-blown âfemale Viking warriorâ storyâincluding assumptions about the individualâs social gender, class, character, professional identity, and affinity to the shieldmaidens of Old Norse literatureâwas first presented in nonscientific contexts committed to the promotion of the popular TV series Vikings.
For instance, in a 2015 âVikings Specialâ production entitled Secrets of the Vikings, the renowned Viking Age expert Neil Price (who would later be one of the authors of the AJPA article) presented the individual in Bj 581 as âa woman, buried with this absolute massive collection of weaponsâ in a grave that ought to be interpreted as âa burial of a shieldmaiden.â35 In combination with newly found images and figurines of women with weapons, Price claimed that the individual in Bj 581 added up to âa pretty compelling picture of what these warrior women may actually have looked like.â Stressing that these findings were from the Viking Age itselfânot from the later literary corpus of the sagas but âthe Viking Age as it really wasââthe production illustrated these findings with artistic reconstruction drawings and Vikings series footage of Kathryn Winnick as Lagertha, charging forward on horseback, shouting âShield wall!â36 The same suggestive presentation of the archaeological findings from Bj 581 was repeated a year later in the episode of Real Vikings discussed in the beginning of this chapter.
The popular productions around the TV series Vikings apparently provided scholars with an attractive platform and a dramatic license that allowed for speculative interpretations to be spelled out and potently illustrated. The article in the AJPA did not add any qualitative detail to the preexisting narrative; it merely worked as a scientific authorization of the hyperbolic story about the identity and character of the individual buried in Bj 581, and, by association, of the existence of real Viking Age shieldmaidens.
As could be expected, the Vikings production team was pleased to see their take on the Viking Age legitimized and reinforced by science. Within days of the publication of the article in 2017, the director of Vikings commented: âItâs kind of wonderful to have the character of Lagertha validated in the show.â37 Later, both the director and Katheryn Winnick referred to the article as proof that the depiction of female warriors in Vikings was accurate and that shieldmaidens actually existed as a real social category in the Viking Age.38
Unpacking the Lagertha Complex
Its proponents have hailed archaeogenomics as a path to a more correct and scientific version of history, posing the âexquisite accuracyâ of genomics against elements of storytelling and guesswork in traditional archaeological research.39 In a particularly pregnant statement by archaeologist Kristian Kristiansen, aDNA is said to have opened âa new door to previously hidden absolute knowledgeâ that will âreduce the amount of qualified guessingâ and reveal new stories about human history âwithout having to resort to storytelling.â40
Considering what we know about the âfemale Viking warrior,â such claims could at best be understood as promotional discourse. Instead of reducing the amount of storytelling and guesswork, we have seen how aDNAâor rather what has been termed the âDNA mystiqueâ or the âsocial power of DNAââhas acted as leverage for inflated stories about social and professional roles and individual character in the Viking Age.41 We have seen how a simple reference to ancient DNA has validated and subsumed narratives and images that cannot otherwise be academically substantiated, under the truth-affirming banner of genomics. As Marianne Sommer has said, this is symptomatic of an unresolved tension in aDNA research between a (genomic) esthetics of numbers and an (archaeological) esthetics of narrativity. The union of history writing and DNA, Sommer suggests, generates a conflict between, on the one hand, genetic knowledge, which, through its epistemic object and quantitative and technological approach is presented as particularly accurate and authentic, and, on the other hand, the ways in which that knowledge, in order to become meaningful, âneeds to be rendered in a narrative, esthetically appealing way.â42
In the AJPA article and in numerous interviews and documentaries preceding and following its publication, the authors elaborate on the identity, professional competence and personal character of âthe female Viking warrior.â These elaborations go far beyond any empirical evidence coming out of Bj 581. It is significant that the article begins by referring to medieval ânarratives about fierce female Vikings fighting alongside men,â and suggests that other scholars have been too quick to dismiss the women featured in these stories as mythological phenomena.43 Correspondingly, it ends with an uncommented quotation from an Edda poem, written approximately two hundred years after the individual was buried at Birka:
Then the high-born lady saw them play the wounding game,
she resolved on a hard course and flung off her cloak;
she took a naked sword and fought for her kinsmenâs lives,
she was handy at fighting, wherever she aimed her blows.44
This certainly implies that genomics had confirmed the truthfulness of medieval narratives, and that the individual in Bj 581 was a real-life shieldmaiden.45
As noted by sociologists Dorothy Nelkin and Susan Lindee, it is commonplace that DNA is presented as a conclusive solution to âhistorical questions that were once dependent for their resolution on records and testimonies from those alive at the time.â46 Obviously, the âDNA mystiqueâ and the potential to frame unverifiable interpretations as conclusive facts may similarly tempt trained archaeologists to disregard well-established knowledge within the discipline concerning the perils of interpreting social roles from burial arrangements, and gender from chromosomal sex.47
While the individual in Bj 581 may have acted as a warrior in life, there is no scientific method by which we could ever find out, nor get to know exactly, what their social gender was, or what symbolic, personal, or functional significances were attributed to the grave goods at the time of burial. In fact, the compound âfemale-Viking-warriorâ is likely to be fraught with suppositions regarding the Viking Age implications of each of these three denominations. Ancient DNA can neither verify nor disprove this or any other interpretation regarding the individualâs in-life identity. The acceptability of the figure of the âfemale Viking warrior,â therefore, relied not on a scientific test but on the assertion and authority of genomics, as well as on the persuasive force of its presentation and cultural resonances.
The notion of female Viking warriors that informed the realization of narratives and images of the individual in Bj 581âfrom Secrets of the Vikings to Real Vikings and the article in the AJPAâwas heavily indebted to the modern interpretation of the figure of the shieldmaiden as accounted for in medieval poetry and saga literature. The inference that the individual in Bj 581 was a âfemale Viking warriorâ thus imposed an identity that drew on stories that were put into writing hundreds of years later, primarily by Christian men imagining a pagan past.48 The combination of genomics and legend, science and fantasy, adheres to the conflicting esthetics identified by Sommer, and is also reminiscent of much earlier attempts to produce scientific knowledge about unknown prehistoric phenomena. A similar case is the convergence of myth and science in the nineteenth-century conceptualization of the dinosaur. As shown by film scholar John McGowan-Hartmann, the emergent science of paleontology coopted the ancient mythic figure of the dragonâas concept and imageâinto a scientific discourse that came to shape the understanding of dinosaurs and their nature. Paraphrasing McGowan-Hartmannâs outline of the paleontological resolution between dragon and dinosaur, the resolution between the shieldmaiden legend and the female individual buried with weapons would read: if there was such a thing as a shieldmaiden, it is here, and it is real. Not fantasy, but science. Not unknown, but known, and confirmed by the infallible science of genomics.49
The complex now surrounding the individual buried in Bj 581 can be further unpacked with help of archaeologist John Robbâs term âtechnologies of individuation.â Robb shows how the encounter with dead bodies in archaeology and bioanthropology âimposes a regime of depersonalization.â50 After being provided with numbers or other impersonal designations, human remains are described, stored, catalogued, and exhibited as things or objects. For some of these remains, this is followed by a process of ârepersonification,â whereby the human remains are clothed in a social persona. This âcalls into operation a range of specialized technologies of individuationâ that seek to recreate attributes commonly considered necessary for a social person, such as its sex, age, ethnicity, and individuating marks that reveal its unique history.51 Various scientific methods are used to support these technologies of individuation, such as facial reconstructions and DNA analysis. According to Robb, the ultimate goal of these archaeological technologies of individuation âis to assign a name, a history, a social persona.â52
Attempting to answer questions such as what the person ate, what they looked like, what activities they performed, and how they died, archaeologists and forensic scientists tend to assume that the physical body constitutes the principal source of a personâs individuation, commonly conflating biological sex with social gender and fitting chronological age into a normative biographical narrative. Processes of repersonification, therefore, call critical attention to how prehistoric figures are not simply vessels for ancient times but also constructions of modern imagination that are predicated on and tend to reinforce contemporary ideologies and notions about individuality, race, and gender.53 Moreover, repersonalizations and reconstructions produce compelling images and narratives that inform future thinking and that are difficult to dislodge or unthink for researchers as well as publics.54
Owing to deliberate acts of repersonification by the researchersâin the Vikings-related productions, the scientific article, and the subsequent media communicationââthe female Viking warrior,â whose remains were previously known only by their relation to the grave with the impersonal label Bj 581, has now been assigned name(s), a biography, and a social persona. In interviews and dramatized documentaries, the researchers provide generous insights into their own ideas about the individualâs life and personality. In the 2019 docudrama The Viking Warrioress, for example, Neil Price says that the âsenior, female, Viking commanderâ was âpresumably in charge of some pretty nasty things,â55 while the lead author of the AJPA article, Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, adds that she was âterrific in every sense of the word.â56 In The Viking Warrior Queen, a similar production from 2020, Hedenstierna-Jonson even speaks on behalf of the individual, suggesting that âshe would have loved for us to be standing here today, talking about her, and talking about her achievements more than a thousand years later.â57
Interesting with regard to repersonification are also the reconstruction drawings included in the AJPA article and in a follow-up paper published in the archaeological journal Antiquity in 2019.58 Three reconstruction drawings are presented in these publications, and they were also included in the media packages distributed on publication. The first is an etching by Evald Hansen, originally published in a popular magazine in 1889, featuring the Bj 581 skeleton from above surrounded by the grave inventory, as if just uncovered by the excavator.59 The second image is a commissioned artistic reconstruction drawing by illustrator ĂĂłrhallur ĂrĂĄinsson picturing the individual at the time of the burial and showing a slender young woman in seated position, with soft facial features and fair hair in a ponytail.60 The third image, included in the Antiquity article, is a page-size drawing by the artist Trancredi Valeri showing the individual âreconstructed as a female warrior of high status.â61 Pictured alive in a proud posture with arms crossed, surrounded by shields and weapons and the two horses, the âfemale Viking warriorâ bears recognizably feminine features, with a slightly marked jaw, and long, dark, unbridled hair. Together, the three images form a triptychâa composite portrait by which the individual in Bj 581 is successively reinvented and brought back to lifeâfrom an anonymous and incomplete skeleton to a relatable and humanized subject: a full-fledged and independent warrior woman.
Since the skeleton is incomplete and the skull went missing in 1889, there is little evidence to support these visualizations. Apart from the use of original artifacts from Bj 581 as props in the in-life reconstruction, the drawings do not portray the actual individual but a generalized idea and image of the shieldmaiden, superimposed by the iconography of nineteenth-century romantic art and the visual presence of Lagertha in Vikings. As imaginative attempts to envision the in-life appearance of the individual buried in Bj 581, these reconstruction drawings come off as particularly strange when combined with the esthetics of numbers associated with genomics. As noted by archaeologist Simon James, âThe only certain thing about any reconstruction drawing is that it is wrong.â62
The visualizations of the âfemale Viking warriorâ should not, however, be dismissed as mere illustrations or insignificant ornaments to the scientific facts. As noted by other scholars, reconstruction drawings constitute arguments in themselves and serve to reinforce particular interpretations.63 Images cannot express ambivalence, interpretative uncertainty, or chains of assumptions; instead, they minimize or even eliminate ambiguity and support the impression that the past is known in its entirety.64 In the case of the âfemale Viking warrior,â we see reconstruction drawings combined, to extraordinary effect, with the symbolic truth-value of genomics. Drawings and genomics work as two separate strategies for reducing complexity and conveying certitude. Archaeologist Joan Gero has called critical attention to how such rhetorical strategiesââmechanisms of closureââare used in archaeological research to conceal necessary and ethically important ambiguities in historical interpretation. The presentation of the results from the scientific study of the human remains from Bj 581, with images of complete living women and allusions to the absolute determining power of genomics, serves to create an aura of certainty around the findingsâor, as Gero puts it, âto produce a knowledge product that is unassailable and unambiguous.â65 By naming their preferred understanding of the individual in Bj 581 a âgenomic reinterpretation,â66 the researchers present the âfemale Viking warriorâ not as a result of various considerations, assumptions, and efforts to repersonalize the individual, but as an unambiguous and impersonal reading of machined dataâas if merely extracted from the bones and made available through full-genome sequencing.67
The Allure of Closure and Attention
The central position awarded to DNA and genomics in the academic articles about the skeleton in Bj 581, as in the media coverage more generally, was not coincidental. We have seen how the researchers had invested in and committed to the shieldmaiden-inspired interpretation of the âfemale Viking warriorâ years before the genetic analysis was performed. Like the Real Vikings episode aspired to settle âonce and for allâ the question about the reality of shieldmaidens, the scientific study employed genomics in order to âsolve the issueââthat is, to ward off any disbelief and ambiguity regarding the âfemale Viking warriorâ interpretation.68 Science has indeed been recognized as âthe most potent instrument of persuasion in our culture,â69 but attention has also been called to the persuasive capability of images, narratives, and popularizations and their roles in the construction of scientific knowledge.70 While these resources were put to use in abundance in the making of the âfemale Viking warrior,â the work of the researchers has been framed as a purely scientific endeavor, removed from any instances of meaning-making and interpretationâas if the âfemale Viking warriorâ was merely found or discovered. This dovetails with what sociologists of science have noted about the factness of facts: that they, as Amade Mâcharek puts it, depend on âtheir ability to disconnect themselves from the practices that helped produce them.â71 By purposefully distancing the accomplishment of the âfemale Viking warriorâ from the sphere of popularization and the esthetics of narrativity it ultimately relied on, the knowledge claims could come off as more certain and authoritative.
This strategy is particularly apparent in the second academic article in Antiquity, where the researchers initially reflect on the public attention that was generated by the first article in the AJPA. Despite the already established connection to Lagertha, and the fact that the article comprised a catalog of components that could be expected to create headlinesâDNA, Vikings, an individual hero figure, legendary tales, female empowerment, violence, and weaponsâthe researchers imply that the âlevel of interestâ took them by surprise.72 Obviously turning a blind eye to their own efforts to bring the âfemale Viking warriorâ to life, they explicitly distance their research from pop-cultural renderings of Vikings, which are dismissed as a problematic legacy and a âtangle of history, myth and clichĂŠ.â73 Finally, in an attempt to further downplay the significance of their own interpretive work, outreach, and agency, it is implied that the massive global attention that was bestowed on their research was owing merely to the grave itself, or âthe genomic dataâ alone.74
Considering that this concerns one of the most successful research papers ever in terms of public outreach, these accounts do not come across as entirely sincere. One commentator has indeed suggested that the article in the AJPA had been âdesigned for maximum worldwide public impact.â75 In many ways, the case of the âfemale Viking warriorâ presents itself as something of a textbook example of what has been termed a âmediatization of scienceââinvolving, for example, the presentation of results in the media prior to peer review and scientific publication, and an increasing entwinement of scientific, political, and popular discourses.76
The field of aDNA research appears to have been particularly adaptive to the imperatives of visibility and public outreach in science. Studying the history of aDNA research, historian of science Elizabeth Jones has argued that this field can be considered a âcelebrity science,â since considerations of celebrity and public attention tend to shape the kind of research that gets funded and pursued. With its propensity for sensational knowledge claims, archaeogenetics thrives in the media limelight.77 This is particularly true of the kind of aDNA research to which the âfemale Viking warriorâ was subject. This line of research is characterized by its preoccupation with, and production of, celebrity in a more literal and traditional sense, through biographical inquiries into the lives and identities of prehistoric individuals.
While this branch of research has been dismissed as inferior and populistâas something of a âforensic version of tabloid historyâ rather than serious research78âa changing rationale for science communication that puts a high premium on media visibility and public attention has made celebrity-oriented research attractive for competitive academics.79 With mummies, Vikings, and famous individuals amounting to nearly 70 percent of the press coverage of bioarchaeological research, bioarchaeologists Christopher Stojanowski and William Duncan suggest that these insights should form the basis for a research agenda that would âdraw the public to our discipline.â80 Putting center stage what John Robb critically discusses as technologies of individuation, Stojanowski and Duncan propose that research should attempt to âestablish emotional connections to the pastâ by focusing on individuals.81 To tell the stories of these individuals, and to bring them to life as relational persons with names and faces, they argue, will âmaximize our potential in public arenas.â82
Conclusion
If anything, the case of the âfemale Viking warriorâ and the massive media attention it acquired attest to Stojanowski and Duncanâs observation. Being the most widely exposed output from the field of aDNA research, however, one may ask what it tells about the research field it has so amply brought awareness to. As we have seen, genomics and aDNA played only marginal roles as analytical tools and empirical evidence. Rather than an outcome of a genomic analysis of âempirically testable Viking Age reality,â83 as the researchers would have it, the âfemale Viking warriorâ was accomplished through stories told and images drawn of how this individualâwith recourse to supposedly comparable figures in Old Norse texts and contemporary popular cultureâlived out their existence. Like Ătzi the Iceman and other prehistoric media celebrities, the âfemale Viking warriorâ appears to have been approached from the very beginning, not as a research project but as a person with a story, provoking a research agenda whose core objective was to repersonalize and resocialize the previously dehumanized skeletal remains.84 In this respect, ancient DNA worked mainly as a resource for embedding these interpretations and imaginative realizations in a language of scientific authority and objectivity. While heavily dependent on an esthetics of narrativity, and in some respects even on what could be described as âreal person fan-fiction,â the âfemale Viking warriorâ was filtered through the esthetics of numbers associated with genomics.85 As scholar of science and technology Andreas Gunnarsson puts it, genomics here served as something of a narrative utility tool for âenhancing the credibility of the fantastical.â86
As made clear by the intense debate following the publication of âA Female Viking Warrior Confirmed by Genomics,â the confident conclusion that the individual in Bj 581 was âthe first confirmed female high-ranking Viking warriorâ was conceivable only if countless ambiguities, uncertainties, and alternative interpretations were removed from consideration.87 The very ambition, one may add, to scientifically âconfirmâ and âdetermineâ88 the complex social identity of a 1000-year-old set of human remains, could either appear to have been inspired by the selection criteria of the media or be seen as the effect of an âobjectionable hubris,â89 rather than any âtransdisciplinary wisdomâ90 gathered in aDNA research. Social identities, after all, cannot simply be deduced from biological data and objects left behind, nor pinned down as if operating on a continuum from the more to the less likely.91 Rather than being the âmost incontestableâ example of a female Viking warrior, as suggested by an enthusiastic archaeologist, it could well be argued that it is one of the most disputable, precisely on behalf of these pretentions at scientific closure.92
Apart from it being empirically and ethically questionable to attempt to impose a comprehensive identity on the individual in Bj 581âwho, for all we know, may still have identified as a Christian man with an inclination for amusement and games, as suggested by the original excavatorâthe desire for closure and determination does not sit well with the studyâs concurrent ambitions for female restoration and empowerment.93 If anything, feminist scholars have sought to resist a scientific discourse of finality in favor of the partly understood, paying tribute to âtechnologies of humilityâ rather than mechanisms of closure.94 The kind of feminism powered by ancient genomics that transformed the individual in Bj 581 into a real Lagertha appears to have been guided primarily by present-day concerns about representation and by aspirations to reinvigorate the image of the Viking Age. Not actually âconfirmed by genomics,â the âfemale Viking warriorâ was rather accomplished by something that it is tempting to designate as âbygonics.â Effectively blurring the lines between the empirical Viking Age and its contemporary representation in popular culture, the case of the âfemale Viking warriorâ presents itself as the ultimate confirmation, not of any historical reality, but of a prophesy made by one of the researchers in the Real Vikings episode: âWe are going to see female warriors taking their place on the Viking stage.â