First of all, women fought. That’s just a fact.
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But not all people (of any gender) buried with weapons are warriors.
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Also that thing about chess? Maybe she just liked the game.
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Finding out if someone was a warrior isn’t just based on the grave goods, there are ways to check the stress on the bones. Injuries, bone density, etc.
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The actual article is more nuanced, thankfully. But there weren’t any indications of bone density to indicate types of activity so hopefully that will be done at a later stage.
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Interestingly, most burials at Birka do not show trauma, so we cannot use that to determine warrior status.
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They also make a great point that men buried with weapons are always unquestionably warriors whereas women buried with weapons are treated with intense skepticism.
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I just can’t get over the burial with a game board meant they were familiar with battle tactics.
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Archaeologists are often too quick to assume a deeper meaning to grave goods which means that objects that were just that, objects, get ignored for what they were.
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Toys, games, trinkets, heirlooms...often they are given ritual or military context when in reality people liked things just as we do now.
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Children had toys, people played games. They enjoyed the mundane as much as us.
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There wasn’t some fundamental mental shift in humanity in the last two hundred years on our attitude to these things.
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We tend to have more leisure time now, but there was always leisure time of a sort.
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Festivals and holidays, celebrations, and so on.
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End of conversation
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