Hidden Secrets Unearthed: Viking Warrior Woman’s Mysterious Grave with Battle Axe Challenges History
However, upon closer inspection, Gardeła found that the buried woman was likely not a Viking at all, but instead a Slavic warrior.
His hypothesis stemmed from his discovery of the type of axe that the woman had been buried with. Instead of being a typical Viking weapon, Gardeła realized that it was actually a Slavic-style axe.
“So far, no one has paid any attention to the fact that the axe in the grave comes from the area of the southern Baltic, possibly today’s Poland,” Gardeła told Science in Poland, a Polish publication funded by the country’s science ministry.
The ancient woman’s Slavic weaponry and the design of her 1,000-year-old burial place — a chambered construction that was common among cemetery structures from the southern Baltic region which is now modern Poland — suggest that the body found inside was indeed that of a Slavic warrior.
But how did a Slavic warrior end up being buried in a Danish cemetery? Well, according to Gardeła, it’s actually not that surprising.
Wikimedia CommonsA depiction of the death of a Viking warrior woman a.k.a. shieldmaiden.
During the Middle Ages, the Danish territory was a “melting pot” of Slavic and Scandinavian people living side-by-side, and Gardeła’s study on the Slavic-Danish burial suggests that there may have been a larger presence of Slavic warriors in the area than was previously thought.
Gardeła’s discovery is part of the researcher’s larger study of ninth- and 10th-century warrior women, titled Amazons of the North, which focuses on burials located in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. So far, there have been 30 such graves found in the region, including the grave of the warrior in question now.
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