Reddit reviews The Spindle and the Spear: A Critical Enquiry into the Construction and Meaning of Gender in the Early Anglo-Saxon Burial Rite (British Archaeological Reports (BAR) British)

I'm most familiar with data from the 6th and 7th centuries, so forgive me for answering a few centuries earlier than the Viking Age. But in these centuries, it definitely makes a difference whether we identify biological sex from the human remains, or from the cultural, gendered objects found with the body. Not so much in the first half of the 6th century - there, only about 1 in 50 of the people buried with weapons are biologically female. But in the late 6th / early 7th century, 1 in 6 weapon burials is female (working from a national dataset I've compiled for my PhD, of about 700 weapon graves / 70 sites). This change in the 7th century mirrors other social changes - the rise of new elites, the restriction of weapon burial (and all furnished inhumation) to a smaller and wealthier subsection of society, the foundation of monastic centres by wealthy women - which all point toward a greater participation of women in spheres of power closely associated with the display, ownership, and gifting of weapons. To my reading, this suggests that (some) women's fortune seems to be rising along with their male family members, and this is opening new avenues for these women to enter formerly male spheres of authority. But we don't get to talk about this if we ignore the osteology.

We have the osteological data, but disagreements between osteological sex and gendered grave goods are typically dismissed as errors in the osteology (as, for example, in this study). My survey is finding a greater number of cases, though, than can be easily written off. And even though the weapons == male association is generally robust enough that you could confidently put money on the sex of a skeleton buried with a spear, the outliers seem to be telling an important story.