But the island held something more than amber. As Stolpe walked its surface, he began to notice the grave mounds that covered the hillsides. He recognized them as significant. He obtained permission to excavate and began a project that would occupy him for the next two decades.
What Stolpe lacked in formal archaeological training, he compensated for with systematic discipline. He numbered his graves sequentially. He mapped their locations. He drew detailed plans of each excavation. He recorded the contents and their positions within the burial. He labeled individual recovered objects — and, crucially, individual bones — with the grave number in India ink. His documentation, though it would later be found incomplete in ways that reflected the limitations of his era, was meticulous enough to allow scholars a century later to trace individual skeletal elements back to specific burials.
His assumption that weapon-rich graves held male warriors was not a personal idiosyncrasy. It was the standard interpretive framework of his time, applied universally by European archaeologists working with similar material. Stolpe had no reason to question it. The osteological methods that would later raise doubts about the sex of the Bj 581 individual were not developed or applied at a level that would challenge the framework in his era.
He completed his major excavation work in the 1890s. His plans and records were published in 1889, with further publication in the early twentieth century. The records sat in museum collections for generations, consulted by specialists, never prompting fundamental reassessment of the grave’s sex — until the osteological work of the 1970s and the DNA work of the 2010s.