Hello and welcome to the History Extra podcast from BBC History magazine,

Britain's best-selling history magazine. I'm Ellic Hawthorne. In today's podcast we have a lecture from our

2019 history weekend Event in Chester.

The speaker was the University of Chester Archaeologist Professor Howard Williams,

who specialises in mortuary archaeology.

That's the excavation of burial sites.

Howard spoke to our audience about some of the ethical dilemmas that archaeologists face when dealing with human remains,

and also gave his thoughts on one of the biggest archaeological debates of recent years.

Whether a Viking burial unearthed in Berka in modern day Sweden

is evidence of the fact that Viking women could be warriors. And this will become clear, but just in

case you're wondering, the zombie TV show that Howard is speaking about is The Walking Dead.

Thank you and good morning. Okay, so let's get on with some death.

You've got a hint that I specialised in mortary archaeology,

which in one level is a sub-field of archaeology.

Another, in another sense, it touches on everything about being human past and present

about understanding our relationships with the dead our loved ones but also the remains

of ancient people that we sometimes treat simply as subject matter and

material for display cases in museums, but also have a long lasting and profound effect on our understandings of history and our

understandings of what comes next for all of us so to speak, whatever that we

may imagine that might be.

And as a case study of that, I want to focus on Viking Warrior Women

as a specific topic to get our teeth into, to illustrate some of the broader challenges.

...