Female grave in Denmark with a Baltic axe - was she a Slavic warrior?

[Duncan Head]

http://scienceinpoland.pap.pl/en/news/news,77881,polish-researcher-identified-possible-grave-slavic-warrior-woman-denmark.html

Or did she just like her south-Baltic axe?

[Patrick Waterson]

Any idea how a favoured thrall would be buried?  Just wondering if she had been acquired - with or without the sheep - when the Danes burned the houses of her south Baltic place of birth, or at least previous residence.

[Erpingham]

It's a bit short on details but I note a lack of isotope analysis to confirm this is Slav at all.  In what is described as a "melting-pot" of Slav and Norse influence, the axe and owner don't need to have the same origin.  The grave type, if really diagnostically Slavic, suggests she was buried by a Slav, rather than a Dane.  Not really enough in the report to assess this one, I think.

[Patrick Waterson]

Would that make her a Christian, given that pagan Slavs tended to cremate their dead?

[Andreas Johansson]

"Pagan Slav" covers a lot of time and space, so I'd be almost surprised if there wasn't substantial variation in burial practices. That said, Google is being distinctly unhelpful wrt Wendish burial habits.

(I do find a WP page which says that early medieval Pommeranian burial practices show Scandinavian influences.)

An oddity that struck me reading this version of the story:

According to the researcher, both the form of the burial - a chamber grave with an additional coffin - and the discovered weapon suggest that the deceased woman could originate from the territory of present-day Poland, therefore she could be a Slav.

So she's (maybe) a Slav because she (maybe) came from the territory of modern Poland? But much of what's now northern Poland was almost certainly Old Prussian rather than Slavic in the tenth century.

[Patrick Waterson]

So she's (maybe) a Slav because she (maybe) came from the territory of modern Poland? But much of what's now northern Poland was almost certainly Old Prussian rather than Slavic in the tenth century.

And the form of the axe makes me think of Old Prussians - pre-Teutonic rather than geriatric.