The persistence of the male assumption across 130 years of scholarship is not simply a story about bias, though bias was part of it. It is also a story about evidence, about interpretation, and about how frameworks shape what questions get asked.
The skeletal evidence that could have challenged the assumption was partial and inconclusive. When Vilkans raised the female possibility in the 1970s, she was working without the skull bones that provide the clearest morphological sex markers. Her assessment was tentative enough, and the warrior-male framework was entrenched enough, that the museum record was not revised.
The theoretical tools for questioning the association between weapons and male occupants existed in the archaeological literature but had not been applied with the same consistency to high-status weapon burials as to other grave types. Anne-Sofie Gräslund, whose 1980 work on Birka’s Viking Age graves argued that weapons in burials might signal elite status rather than active warrior service, had offered a framework that could complicate the simple equation of weapons with male fighters. But complicating that equation, when applied to Bj 581 specifically, would have required the field to engage with a possibility that the interpretive tradition had rendered nearly invisible.
This is not to say that individual scholars were unaware that women could hold power in Viking Age society. The literary and historical record contains accounts of women with significant authority, property, and social standing. The mythological and legendary traditions included female figures of martial reputation. The scholarly question was whether these traditions corresponded to archaeological reality, and on that question, the weapon-burial = male warrior equation had become entrenched enough to shape evidence interpretation rather than simply follow from it.