an material as a whole? – even though Vestfold and the coastal districts of Østfold, just across the Oslo fjord, have a higher proportion of female graves than the rest of the country throughout the Viking Age? Where are the women? Secondly, why is it that the number of female graves relative to male graves decreases from the 9th century to the 10th? And, finally, why are there relatively more female graves at Kaupang than in the rest of Vestfold?
The gender distributions from Kaupang and Vestfold are at odds with results from other areas of Scandinavia. Starting with Birka, Gräslund (1980:82) finds that 58 % of the inhumations are female, against 61% of the cremations, although she suggests that the real distribution might be closer to 50-50. Of 113 10th and 11th century graves at Barshalder in Gotland, 37 % were female, 49 % male and 14 % gender neutral (Rundkvist 2003:79). A study of a sample of 76 sexed skeletons from Hedeby concluded that 62 % were male (Sellevold et al. 1984:214). Other South Scandinavian cemeteries also show a predominance of men: Stengade II (53 %), Kaagaarden (63 %) and Bogøvej (61 %), while there are relatively more women at Lejre (61 %) and Hesselbjerg (58 %) (Sellevold et al. 1984:214-215; Bennike 1994:169). With the exception of Birka and Barshalder, these studies are based on skeletal material – what we have here, is sexed burials, not gendered ones. Not only Kaupang and the rest of the material from Vestfold, but the Norwegian material as such – based as it is on the presence of gender specific artefacts in the graves – is biased relative to the South Scandinavian one, and the two cannot really be compared on equal terms. It is a telling fact that Per Holck’s anthropological analysis of Late Iron Age cremations in Southeast Norway, although only 42 burials from the period could be ascribed to either sex, concluded that 62 % of the cremation burials actually were female (Holck 1986, catalogue).
At Kaupang, the gendered burials account for only a part of the dated burials, while, more importantly, the dated burials themselves only account for a minor part of the total number of burials. Thus, the gendered graves belong to a rather exclusive category, and one must be careful when assuming that gendered graves equal sexed graves. Herein lies the answer to our first as well as to our third question. In principle, one would expect a more or less equal distribution of male and female sexed graves. The reason why we do not find an equal distribution in Vestfold, probably has to do with the difference betwen sexed and gendered graves, i.e. more males than females were buried with gender-specific artefacts, or, more likely, more males than females were buried with gender-specific artefacts that are preserved and can be recovered by archaeologists. There is a clear correlation between areas with a substantial number of professionally excavated graves and those with a relatively high proportion of female burials. This is evident in those parts of Vestfold where only few professional excavations have taken place, and the proportion of male graves is very high: After all, a corroded sword is easier to notice when ploughing than the remains of an oval bronze brooch or a few beads.
So, when we do find that 58 % (9th century) and 24 % (10th century) respectively of the dated graves at Kaupang are female, these high figures are due mainly to the substantial number of graves being archaeologically investigated at Kaupang. As for the relative decrease in the gendered female graves in the 10th century, it would be tempting to attribute this to an influx of males at Kaupang in the late period. However, the decrease can be traced also in Vestfold as a whole, as in most of Norway (Dommasnes 1982:81-83). A more likely explanation would seem to be either a real decrease in gendered female burials compared to male, or a change in the way female graves were gendered; the latter could be caused for instance by the partial and gradual abandonment of oval brooches as part of the female dress in the 10th century, under i