The difference in framing between the two papers — the declarative confidence of “A Female Viking Warrior Confirmed by Genomics” in 2017 and the interrogative caution of “Viking Warrior Women?” in 2019 — reflects the field’s engagement with the criticisms raised in the intervening period and the researchers’ own evolving consideration of what they could and could not claim.
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## The Question of What “Viking” Means Here
Judith Jesch, in her critique of the original paper, raised a point that touches on the cultural framing of the entire study: the grave contains textiles and silks associated with Eastern, specifically Caucasus-region, material culture, and the burial practice includes elements that connect it to Central Asian or Eastern European traditions. Calling the occupant a “Viking warrior” may flatten a cultural complexity that the assemblage itself reveals.
Birka was, after all, a trading town on a crossroads. Its graves contain Chinese silk, Middle Eastern silver, Frankish glass. The individuals buried there were not a culturally homogeneous group. The strontium isotope evidence suggests that the Bj 581 individual was not even from the immediate Birka region — she had moved there, possibly in early childhood.
The word “Viking” is itself contested in scholarship. It is often used as a catch-all term for early medieval Scandinavians, but in the period, it referred specifically to participants in raiding expeditions rather than to Scandinavians as an ethnic or cultural group. Applying it to every person buried in a Viking Age Swedish trading town imports a category that the period’s own people would not have applied universally to themselves.