A number of people have drawn my attention to an article recently published in The American Journal of Physical Anthropology. I think I’ve seen it linked at least twenty times of Facebook: A Female Viking Warrior Confirmed by Genomics.

Several people asked my opinion of it. My initial responses were brief. I had a pretty good idea that there was more smoke than fire here, and that the article was going to get some pushback.

And I was right. This article is by none other than Judith Jesch, author of Women in the Viking Age, a standard work on its subject. I’ve never read the book, allergic as I am to feminist historians, but I think I’ll get it now. Because Ms. Jesch has articulated exactly my concerns. (Plus a lot more, because she’s you know, smarter than me.)

(4) The authors also note that there were ‘No pathological or traumatic injuries’ observed on the skeleton. They point out that ‘weapon related wounds … are not common in the inhumation burials at Birka’ and elsewhere, so apparently the ‘warriors’ of these graves were either so good that they were never injured, or perhaps they weren’t really ‘warriors’ at all. According to the authors ‘our results caution against sweeping interpretations based on archaeological contexts and preconceptions’ – they do not seem to recognise that if they take this principle to its logical conclusion, the interpretation of this and many other graves as ‘warrior’ graves is thereby called into question. They can’t have their cake and eat it too. They also say nothing about whether there was any indication on the bones of the kinds of activities one might expect a warrior to have engaged in, as strenuous physical activity might be expected to have left some traces, particularly if they were good enough to avoid injury to themselves.

In my humble perception (having only a master’s degree, after all), I see a lot of contemporary science as agenda-driven. This is bad for everybody.

Stop it, all of you.