The Åby/Klinta grave in Sweden, for instance, contained a woman buried with weapons including a sword and an axe — the identification based on osteological assessment, not genomic analysis. Several burial sites in Norway have produced similar cases. A burial from Nordre Kjølen in Norway contained what osteological analysis identified as a female individual with weapons and horse equipment. These are not all cases of the same significance as Bj 581, and they have not all been subjected to the same level of analysis. But they suggest that weapon burials involving biologically female individuals, while not common, may not have been entirely exceptional in Viking Age Scandinavia.
A study published in *Current Biology* in 2019 — contemporaneous with the Price et al. reassessment paper — examined the skeletal remains from a number of Viking Age sites in England, Norway, and Sweden with ancient DNA analysis. Among the findings was that women made up a substantial proportion of Viking Age migrants — that the expansionary population movement often described in terms of male raiding and settlement included significant numbers of women who also traveled, settled, and in some cases occupied social roles that had been assumed to be male-dominated.
The cumulative effect of these studies is not to establish that Viking Age women routinely fought as warriors. It is to establish that the picture of Viking Age gender roles was more varied, more complex, and less rigidly binary than the traditional archaeological interpretation had assumed. Bj 581 is the most dramatic single data point in that revision. It is not the only one.