General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Shield maidens were not a myth! [View all]Thor_MN
(11,843 posts)They knew they were soldiers but by ignoring what is fairly easy to tell from the skeleton, they assumed they were males. A well preserved skeleton can tell much more about the person than artifacts. Artifacts will not tell you how the person died, what diseases they had, how old they were, how well fed they were, how much physical labor they had done.
Artifacts are inanimate things that a person possibly owned at the point in time where they died. Never know, maybe a rich person liked them and dressed them up for their burial. Maybe the person was rich, but was robbed and killed. One can't know with certainty that the artifacts actually belonged to the person throughout their life. Imprecise info.
A skeleton is record of the person's life. A life of hard labor is written into the bones as is a life of leisure. Starvation leaves signs as does gluttony. If you want to know who the person was, read the bones. If you want to know what the people around the person decided to leave with them, focus only on the artifacts. Better yet, study all the info available.