Amazons

As you all undoubtedly know, the ancient Greeks loved to tell stories about the Amazons, a tribe of warrior women who lived somewhere north of the Black Sea. These unnatural creatures lorded it outrageously over their own men and every so often they had to be put back in their places by male Greeks.

Some of them, of course, liked being put in their places; above is the Amazon Queen Penthesilea, who is supposed to have fallen in love with Achilles the moment his spear entered her. Then she died.

Skeptics, of course, thought the Amazons were just products of the Greek imagination, but believers always wondered if there might be something behind the notion of warrior women on the Eurasian steppes. And in the 19th century, as Russian archaeologists began excavating the great burial mounds and cemeteries of Ukraine, they reported finding female skeletons buried with warrior regalia. Western archaeologists were not impressed with the Russians' methods, though, and most did not accept their findings.

Then in the 1990s a joint team of Russian and American archaeologists excavated 150 burials from the cemetery of Pokrovka in the Urals. This was a top-notch, highly scientific dig, well-funded and backed by top labs. All but a few of the graves contained elaborate grave goods, so this was an elite cemetery. Most of the men were buried with weapons. The 80 women fell into three groups:

1. "Hearth Tenders," 75% of the total, buried with kitchen utensils, mirrors, and jewelry;
2. Priestesses, 7%, buried with stone censers, idols, mirrors, and animal bones;
3. Warriors, 15% (that is, 12), buried with weapons. Most were armed with arrows and daggers, one with a long sword.
   

(I suppose they hit on "Hearth Tenders" after a long discussion about an inoffensive way to say "regular women;" a Hearth Tender assemblage is shown above.)

Here are the objects from a priestess grave.

And here are the weapons of a female warrior, the crucial missing evidence for some sort of reality behind the Amazons.

How to explain these gender reversals? There are still in the wilds of Europe (Albania, the Carpathians) places where women sometimes take on the male role in society. These women live legally and socially as men, all the time; they cannot have children so they live as perpetual virgins. The explanation sometimes given is that feuding is so violent in these places that all the men of an extended family may be killed. In a society with rigid, legally restricted sex roles, a family must have a man. So a woman steps into the role.

Perhaps this explains the appearance of female warriors on the steppes, surely a very violent place. Also, maybe female warriors were more effective as horse archers than they would have been standing in the battle line with a big ax. Whatever they represent, these finds open up another little window into the unending wonder that is the human past.