Another Ancient Warrior Turns Out to Be a Woman

2000 years ago a warrior on the Isles of Scilly was buried with a mirror as well as a sword. Usually only found in graves belonging to women, the inclusion of the mirror in the burial puzzled scientists until they tested the body’s tooth enamel and discovered that yet another ancient warrior was likely also a woman as well.

Reactions online have treated the discovery as if it’s some sort of rarity, and while it is groundbreaking in what it means for our understanding of Iron Age Britain and the smaller, surrounding islands, it’s nowhere near as unusual as people seem to think it is. For that, we can thank early archaeology, its projection of Victorian-era understandings of gender and gender roles onto the past, and the lasting impact of that legacy on the field. It turns out that a surprisingly large number of warrior burials actually belonged to women, or at least to people with XX chromosomes, and it was only the preconceived ideas of archaeologists and historians about gender that led to them being misidentified as cis men.

Determining either the gender or the assigned sex (because many cultures, both ancient and modern, recognize that the two don’t necessarily correlate) of skeletal remains unearthed during an archaeological excavation is a notoriously difficult process—no matter what TERFs will try and tell you about the ease and certainty with which future archaeologists will misgender you based on your bones. While early anthropologists believed there were vast, obvious, and consistent differences between male and female skeletons, with absolutely zero overlap between them, more recent studies have shown that this is demonstrably false.

A long history of historical misgendering

Skeletal indicators of sex are based on population norms, and there are and always have been people, both perisex and intersex, whose physical features fall outside of these norms. Even pelvic shape, considered by transphobes to be some immutable gold standard, actually exists on a spectrum and is only accurate for identifying the assigned sex of people whose pelvis’ conform to one end of the scale or the other. There’s a wide range of people whose pelvis’ are an indeterminate shape (something like 5% to 12% of the population depending on the method used) by archaeological standards, even when features associated with childbirth have been taken into account. There are cases of chromosomally male skeletons having been previously, likely erroneously, identified as a post-partum woman and vice versa. (I say likely because at least two women who have successfully conceived, carried a pregnancy, and given birth have since been found to have XY chromosomes. The world is far more vast and varied than transphobes can begin to imagine).

Much of the time archaeologists rely on grave goods and other material factors relating to the burial to determine the gender of a body—something that’s much more reliable than chromosomes when it comes to understanding a person’s gender and how they were perceived by society. The problem there is that those preconceived, rigid ideas about gender often shape how grave goods are interpreted, even when dealing with cultures where the presence of women warriors and others who defied these gender norms was well attested to in the primary sources. If those records were produced by neighboring peoples, as in the case of the Scythians who left no written sources we can interpret, they tended to be written off as fantasy or deliberate Othering—an attempt to define themselves against an enemy that inverted all the patriarchal values of the author’s society. (Not that there was never an element of that mixed in there with the truth.)

For sources produced by the culture itself, like the Norse sagas dealing with women warriors and female ring bearers, the assumption was that these women were fictional creations or euhemerized divinities who weren’t bound by the same rules as human women. Graves that defied binary categories were treated as strange mysteries, even when they could easily be explained through recourse to those sources, with explanations ranging from objects being included for unknown “ritual” purposes to the idea that there must originally have been a missing, second body included interred there, put forward ahead of the idea that a person who existed outside of the 19th-20th century Western understanding of the gender binary was recognized and affirmed by their society.

As we’ve moved forward, and various forms of genetic testing have been developed, we’ve been confronted with increasing evidence that this universal gender binary just wasn’t universal at all. Bioarchaeological testing methods have determined 37% of Scythian warriors buried in just one region were likely women; some of them had even given birth, with their children buried beside them. The pattern of injuries, both healed and apparently fatal, on their bones confirming that these people really had been warriors in life, and that they weren’t just buried with their husband’s weapons for mysterious ritual purposes. Many of these graves included traditionally female grave goods like spindles and mirrors as well as jewelry, indicating that they were unlikely to have been trans men—but for those graves with AFAB bodies and only male grave goods present, that’s not outside of the realm of possibility either.

Moving on to another culture, a “puzzling” Norse grave, belonging to a woman dressed in expensive clothing, accompanied by both weapons and an array of grave goods that were traditionally buried with women, was recently discovered to have been an intersex person who, due to the nature of the condition, was likely assigned male at birth. Whether this person was a woman, or, as some historians have suggested, occupied a non-binary cultural space, their grave shows that their identity was accepted by both their family and society, and did not prevent them from achieving considerable wealth and a respected position within it. The inhabitants of multiple Norse warrior graves have been determined to have been AFAB through similar testing methods, their specific gender identity unclear but a clear violation of this externally imposed binary.

Imposing our assumptions about gender on the past

Even outside of the warrior question, our assumptions about gender and sexuality have led to numerous bodies being misidentified simply because of who they happened to be found or buried with. Several incidences of paired burials, where features of the grave have indicated a romantic or sexual relationship between those interred there, have led to the larger or more delicate looking of the two being wrongly sexed based on the presumption of cis-heterosexuality. Then there’s the “Two Maidens” of Pompeii, people who curled into each other as they died a horrific death during a natural disaster and were presumed to be women because of this. After genetic testing indicated they were likely both AMAB instead they were immediately renamed the Two Lovers—revealing a whole lot of assumptions about gender, sexuality, and gendered lens placed on expressions of physical affection. Despite advances in the understanding of sexuality and gender as both culturally specific and fluid over time, contemporary cultural biases are still impacting the interpretation of discoveries even now.

In the case of the warrior from the Isles of Scilly, the archaeologists and scientists studying her seem to have been mindful of these biases and largely avoided them. Unlike the Scythian and Norse examples this warrior’s grave isn’t part of a wider pattern, no other Iron Age burial from Western Europe contains both a sword and a mirror, which makes it more difficult and complex to interpret her identity and how it was received within her culture. We do know she wasn’t a cis man, and the presence of traditional women’s items in her grave indicates that her identity was feminine at least in part, but it is also possible that she held what we would now consider a non-binary identity unique to her culture and time. The lack of similar burials indicates people like her were uncommon, but whether she was wholly unique, able to take on the role and identity that she held due to a specific combination of circumstances is similarly hard to say, simply because Iron Age warrior burials were extremely rare. Only 15 have been discovered in the UK so far, and while we don’t know the exact criteria that led to a warrior being afforded one (though wealth and social status, followed by military prowess, are the most likely explanations), they obviously represent only a tiny fraction of the Iron Age people who took on a warrior’s role. Absence of evidence is never evidence of absence but especially so in cases like this, where sample sizes are so low they can’t possibly accurately reflect the population. What she is evidence of is possibility, with Dr. Sarah Stark saying:

“Our findings offer an exciting opportunity to re-interpret this important burial. They provide evidence of a leading role for a woman in warfare on Iron Age Scilly.

Although we can never know completely about the symbolism of objects found in graves, the combination of a sword and a mirror suggests this woman had high status within her community and may have played a commanding role in local warfare, organising or leading raids on rival groups.

This could suggest that female involvement in raiding and other types of violence was more common in Iron Age society than we’ve previously thought, and it could have laid the foundations from which leaders like Boudicca would later emerge.”

Dr. Stark also said it would be interesting to re-examine other, similarly deteriorated bodies from warrior burials, now that we have the technology to determine chromosomes via tooth enamel, and to see if our assumptions that those warriors were all cis men are correct. Whatever the results, the warrior from the Isles of Scilly is yet another reminder to stop imposing our assumptions about gender on the past—and that we really have to stop being surprised every time we discover a new historic figure who didn’t fit them.

(featured image: The Print Collector via Getty Images)