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https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-forgotten-female-soldiers-who-fought-long-ago-and-why-their-stories-matter-today-208455>
"On the Swedish island of Björkö lie the remains of Birka, a significant Viking
trading post. Birka is studded with burial chambers, stuffed with clues about
their occupants – amber, textiles, gold, silver and many other treasures. One
particular chamber caught the eye of 19th-century archaeologists, who labelled
the grave Bj.581. This grave contained weapons: a sword, an axe, a spear, a
battle knife, two shields and 25 arrows, and the remains of two horses.
Clearly, this was the grave of a warrior. No one really looked closely at the
skeleton in this grave to confirm it was male but for 100 years, the record
held that the warrior in Bj.581 was a man.
In the early 1970s, bone analysis suggested the skeleton was female. DNA
analysis published in 2018 confirmed the bones were those of a woman, with two
X chromosomes.
The team conducting the DNA analysis also examined the relationship between the
skeleton and the contents of the grave, drawing the same conclusion as all
previous investigations: “the person in Bj.581 was buried in a grave full of
functional weapons and war-gear […] outside the gate of a fortress”. If it
looks like a warrior, and is armed like a warrior, it must be a warrior.
Critics were unconvinced. Had the authors of the study got the wrong skeleton?
Had another skeleton been mixed up in the grave? (No, the evidence is firm on
both points.) In spite of these sceptics, the story of this skeleton took off
around the world, precisely because it challenged so many assumptions about
women, combat and the history of war.
Women have long fought in wars, but their contribution is often erased. The
military historian John Keegan famously wrote in 1993 that
warfare is […] the one human activity from which women, with the most
insignificant exceptions, have always and everywhere stood apart […] Women
[…] do not fight. They rarely fight among themselves and they never, in any
military sense, fight men. If warfare is as old as history and as universal
as mankind, we must now enter the supremely important limitation that it is
an entirely masculine activity.
But it turns out history is full of examples of women on the frontlines: women
who fought in their own right, women who dressed as men in order to fight, and
women who faced great danger supporting male troops in the teeth of battle.
Women have survived and even thrived as part of the machine of war – but are
rarely part of military history. Why have their stories been forgotten?"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
