The Vikings buried a woman among a full set of weapons, with a bag of gaming pieces in her lap

The excavators took the dead for a man from the start, going by the weapons and by the lack of jewellery or weaving tools. A first study in the 1970s called the skeleton female, but couldn't tie it securely to the grave. The mismatch surfaced in work by osteologist Anna Kjellström, reported at a conference in 2014. In 2017 Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson and her colleagues read DNA from a canine and an upper arm bone. No Y chromosome. She was over thirty, and she probably came to Birka from somewhere else, although the strontium in her teeth can't settle that.

The first fight was over the bones: were they the right ones, and was there a second body? The same team answered in Antiquity in 2019. The grave is intact, the sex is secure, she lay alone. Whether she fought, they write, depends on what you call a warrior. She could have been a farmer or a slave, laid among weapons that weren't hers. They don't buy it: working weapons and little else in the grave, more weapon graves beside it, a garrison hall nearby, a fortress gate. Their conclusion is that she lived as a professional warrior. Whether she was a woman in the gendered sense, they can't say.

And then there's the game. Single pieces aren't unusual in Viking graves, but a whole set with a board is rare and tends to go with military leaders. The authors read it, along with the quality of her clothes, as a hint that she may have held command. Whoever laid that bag in her lap knew who she was.