Sunday, January 17, 2010

Sex and the Apron Dress--Update

I took a quick look through Martin Rundqvist's work on Barshalder to ascertain whether it may include sufficient data about both jewelry finds and skeletal remains to allow the drawing of conclusions about apron dress wearing in the Viking Age population there.

There were indeed attempts to determine the sex of the skeletal remains found in various graves at Barshalder.  Unfortunately, I had forgotten that most of the identifiable human remains at Barshalder arose from cremations, not burials, and even the remains from burials are often too sparse to allow for even a reasonable guess as to sex. The Viking Age remains as to which sex typing could be done are more sparse still.

I will review the Barshalder material more closely when I have time, but it appears that there may be simply too little usable material there for my purposes. Perhaps the work at Birka will have more skeletal data. Does anyone know if any material analyzing skeletal remains at Birka has been published?

2 comments:

  1. There is a short article by Greta Arwidsson in Birka II:3, pp. 143-149.

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  2. Thanks. I'm not familiar with that article, but I can try to track it down. Do you remember what it says?

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