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  • Christianization, Female Infanticide, and the Abundance of Female Burials at Viking Age Birka in Sweden
  • Nancy L. Wicker (bio)

The Swedish Viking Age trading site of Birka, located on the small island of Björkö in Lake Mälar, is considered an area of such outstanding archaeological importance that it has been added to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) list of World Heritage sites.1 This complex of archaeological monuments includes remains of an urban trading center located below a fortification on a rocky outcropping as well as several cemeteries surrounding the occupation area. Birka was one of a handful of such prototowns around the Baltic Sea where manufacturing of craft items, redistribution of raw materials such as furs and iron from the North, and long-distance trade took place. Exchange connected Birka to Continental Europe but also to Central Asia and the Middle East. Birka was also the site of one of the earliest documented Christian missions to Scandinavia by Ansgar (d. 865), a Frankish monk who went to Birka as a missionary in the 830s and again in the 850s.

One of the numerous ways in which Birka stands out is that women’s graves outnumber men’s graves discovered in the cemeteries there, in contrast to the dearth of female remains evident in many other areas of Scandinavia. The relatively large number of female graves unearthed at Birka may result from the early missionary activity on the island and the interdiction of infanticide that accompanied conversion to Christianity.2 I have previously proposed that selective female infanticide may be one explanation for a shortage of women’s mortuary remains generally in Viking Age Scandinavia, an argument that is supported by Old Icelandic family [End Page 245] saga references to the cultural practice of exposure of female infants.3 At Birka, however, more women’s burials than would be expected by natural sex ratios have been discovered.4 The evidence also strongly suggests that at Birka there were high-status women who controlled property and thus could sponsor chamber graves for themselves or their husbands and sons, raise runestones, or build churches and bridges to aid missionaries’ travel. High-status women’s graves that might reflect commercial activities by women are also found among the Viking merchants in Russia, where women’s graves outnumber men’s; at the coastal site of Karmøy in Norway, which might be a small-scale trading place; and at the prototown site of Kaupang, also in Norway, where the number of women’s graves, though still fewer than men’s, is higher than throughout most of Norway.5 I propose that the construction of elaborate mounds by pagan women may have been a conspicuous and contentious display of their power in response to the public donations of churches and bridges by Christian women.

The Site of Birka

Björn Ambrosiani considers Birka, which occupied an unrivaled position for control of trade routes between 750 and 950 CE, “one of the earliest true urban centers of the north.”6 Excavations at this site have informed much of the past century’s research on the early Viking Age in Sweden. Nonetheless, it is not representative for this area archaeologically due to its protourban nature and the internationalizing presence of foreigners and [End Page 246] Christians there. Since the Middle Ages the site has been identified with the Viking Age center called Birca in the Vita Anskarii (Life of Ansgar), written in the 870s.7 According to this saint’s life, the people of Birka sought refuge in times of trouble inside the 8-meter-high fortress on a rocky hill. Archaeological excavations of the settlement area of Birka known as the Black Earth, or Svarta Jordet, which is bounded by a 1.5- to 2-meter-high wall, were conducted as early as the seventeenth century, with investigations during the latter part of the nineteenth century by Hjalmar Stolpe—who could be considered the founder of modern field archaeology in Sweden—and again in the 1990s by Björn Ambrosiani.8

Although Birka is renowned for its settlement or “town” site, it is a multifaceted archaeological...

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