For more than a century, the grave had been interpreted without question.
When archaeologist Hjalmar Stolpe opened burial Bj 581 on the island of Björkö in 1878, he found what appeared to be the textbook remains of a Viking Age warrior: a sword, an axe, two spears, two shields, armor-piercing arrows, a strategic gaming set, and the bones of two horses. Stolpe documented it as a warrior’s grave. The field assumed a male occupant. The case appeared to be closed.
It stayed closed for nearly a century and a half — through multiple generations of archaeological scholarship, through repeated examination of the bones, through the development of modern osteological methods that would eventually suggest the assumption was wrong. It took a genomic study published in 2017 to make the case undeniable: the individual in grave Bj 581 had two X chromosomes and no Y chromosome. The warrior in the most elaborately appointed martial burial ever excavated at Birka was biologically female.
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## Birka: The Town That No Longer Exists
To understand grave Bj 581, you first need to understand where it came from.
Birka was, in its time, one of the most important places in Scandinavia. It sat on Björkö — “Birch Island” — in Lake Mälaren, approximately thirty kilometers west of where Stockholm would eventually be built. For roughly two centuries, from around AD 750 to approximately AD 975, it functioned as the region’s dominant trading hub: a place where Scandinavian furs and iron goods and reindeer antler combs moved alongside glass from the Rhineland, pottery from the Continent, silk from China, and above all silver dirhams from the Islamic world.