The Lovers
In 2009, workers on a construction site in a residential area of Moderna came across human remains. A team of archaeologists soon arrived and discovered that the construction workers had unearthed a 5th or 6th Century cemetery containing 11 graves. This is nothing unusual, of course. It’s Italy. There are Roman and late Roman burials all over the place and Italy’s long-running archaeological problem is finding enough resources to deal with the staggering amount of its cultural past lying about the place. But what was unusual about this site was grave number 16, because this burial contained not one skeleton, but two. And they were holding hands.
One had their head turned to face the other, although this might have happened when the bodies decomposed and the bones became disarticulated, but they were very definitely holding hands.
“Here’s the demonstration of how love between a man and a woman can really be eternal,” declared Gazetta di Modena of the remains. They were instantly dubbed ‘The Lovers’. It’s a wonderful narrative and one everyone seems very quick to accept. There’s something Romeo and Juliet about these two young lovers (they were both under 30 years old), locked together in an eternal embrace. Some outlets reported other findings from the research; that all the bodies appeared to be of low status individuals that had been engaged in some form of hard labor that saw them moving around in a crouched position for long periods, for example. But nobody really cared that the sex of the two was recorded on the analysis as ‘indeterminate’.1
DNA analysis was tried on the pair, but the samples taken were too degraded and the results unusable.
For 10 years, the assumptions about the sex of The Lovers went completely unchecked, even though there was no definite evidence to suggest that either these people were lovers, related, knew each other or were even man and woman. But in 2019, Federico Lugli at the University of Bologna subjected the remains to a series of new tests aimed at determining sex of human remains from peptides in tooth enamel. What they discovered was that both of the individuals in grave 16 were male and if the ‘lovers’ narrative were true, then they had evidence of a fifth-century same-sex relationship.
What, of course, happened is that the narrative changed.
For a long time before the arrival of DNA, the only way to identify the sex of human remains in archaeology was via grave goods or osteology, both of which are at once accurate but present some problems. In the early 70s, research into 43 skeleton collections found that a disproportionate number of skeletons analyzed by pre-DNA identification means had been sexed as male. Nearly 59% of all the skeletons were identified as male, which is odd because 59% of people aren’t male. The research also noted that in cases where the remains were ambiguous, they had simply been identified as male based on thin criteria. Males tend to have more robust bones, but this alone isn’t evidence of sex and it also discounts the proportion of people that we now know are born intersex.
Identifying male and female remains visually can be very accurate. The bones of males and females differ significantly in some areas, particularly the pelvis and the skull, but these changes are hormone driven and the individuals have to have gone through puberty, so teens can be ambiguous. And if those clear identifiers are not present, and most skeletons are found incomplete, then osteology becomes a lot less reliable, even in adults. And yet it seems that cultural assumptions are made when identifying remains, where the evidence remains inconclusive. If the sex is not obvious, but the individual is ‘robust’, then it goes into the box marked ‘man’, and if they’re slight then they go into the box marked ‘female’. Nobody at all went into the box marked ‘intersex’.
The new techniques for sexing individuals have resulted in a string of skeletons having their assumed sex overturned. With that comes a challenge to our ideas about sex, gender and relationships in previous societies, especially given what we know historically about our ancestors. It comes as no surprise to anyone who has ever studied ancient history that the Greeks and the Romans, for example, engaged openly and happily in same sex relationships - the emperor Nero married at least two men - or that they knew of intersex individuals and the fluidity of gender roles. The new results should never have come as a surprise.
The debate about sex in archaeology really took off in 2017 with the publication of a report about a Viking warrior found in a grave full of goods in Birka, Sweden.
Birka grave Bj 581 was found in 1878 and they contained everything that a Viking warrior needed. There was a sword and an axe, a smaller fighting sword, two shields, 25 arrows, a small knife and whetstone and two spears. There was a chess like gaming set, a bronze vessel, an Arab coin and the warrior had been wearing a silk kaftan and silk hat. There was a broken mirror and the remains of two horses, a mare and a stallion. The mare was bridled, ready for riding.
The grave had always presumed to be that of a man, but it wasn’t until Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson from Uppsala University, Sweden and her team tested a DNA sample that anyone could be sure. In DNA analysis, scientists look for a gene linked to a sex chromosome, such as the AMELX gene on the X chromosome and its counterpart AMELY on the Y chromosome. As females usually have XX chromosomes and males usually XY, if there is significant AMELY present in the sample, it belongs to a male. Nowadays, however, the analysis takes into consideration much more of the genome, but the principle largely remains the same. And what they found was that the warrior was female.
This immediately threw into doubt all the previous assumptions about warrior graves found in the past. Before, graves found with swords belonged to men and those with jewelry to women and sometimes these were the only considerations given to sexing the remains of the individual within. It became so commonplace that simply the presence of a sword was enough to identify the individual was a ‘warrior man’ and no further testing was needed. Some people argued that if the Birka grave contained a woman, that threw all those previous identifications into doubt and the relationship between the individual and the grave goods would have to be re-evaluated. Which is an odd position to take, because nobody at all ever thought that this position needed to be rethought when the individual was a male. If the evidence of the grave goods points to this being a warrior, why should that conclusion change just because it’s a woman?
She could, of course, have been a warrior or she could not have been a warrior. It’s certainly true that the vast majority (some 90%) of similar ‘warrior’ graves contain biological males and there might be other reasons why a woman was buried with the trappings of a warrior, but it’s equally as possible that Occam’s Razor comes into play and what we have here is a female warrior. The only thing we could say for certain is that there’s nothing to suggest that Vikings didn’t have female warriors, and that they were uncommon, but it’s our own prejudices that are not letting us accept the obvious answer.
Either way, it’s safe to say that conventional views about ‘male’ and ‘female’ grave goods are a little old fashioned, particularly when they both appear in the same grave. A Viking burial (NHER 5668) was excavated near Santon Downham in Norfolk, England in 1867. In it was found a single skeleton and grave goods including a sword and two fine oval brooches of the type normally worn by women in the 10th Century. All the literature records the grave as a double burial with one of the skeletons not surviving. A double burial where one set of remains has completely decayed away is not unknown. But there’s no actual evidence that this was the case. There’s normally some trace of the other body, if only discoloration of the soil, but here there is only one body, now sadly lost, and the grave goods. That the grave goods were both male and female led the original excavators to reach the conclusion that it must have contained a man and a woman. Given what we know about the strict taboos against Viking men wearing anything that could be seen as ‘effeminate’ and that the brooches are only ever found elsewhere associated with female remains, it would then suggest that what we have is a sword wielding woman. Without the body, we can never be sure.
There are other cases in which similar assumptions are being overturned. In 2021, Ulla Moilanen from the University of Turku, Finland, led a re-evaluation of a proposed “double” burial from early medieval Finland, which contained a single skeleton in female dress, buried with swords. The results were remarkable. Analysis showed that the individual in the grave belonged to a person with XXY chromosomes, or Klinefelter syndrome, who probably looked no different from an XY male. Gonadal development in such individuals appears to be that of a male, although the testes can be small and its normal for them to grow up and be raised as men. In some cases, there can be observable symptoms although most people don’t find out about it until they try to conceive. This person, however, appears to have been dressed as a woman and wearing jewelry associated with a woman whilst also being buried with goods associated with a man. What their gender was is suddenly not such an easy question to answer.
In a similar fashion to how the Birka woman’s warrior credentials became controversial once her sex was identified, the relationship between The Lovers of Modena has come into question based purely on their sex. Immediately people began to suggest other narratives. They could have been brothers, which the decayed DNA samples cannot prove, or they might have been comrades-in-arms, something which the authors of the 2019 study proposed based on circumstantial historical evidence.
But the previous certainty over their relationship - as lovers - based purely on their assumed sex, changed to something either entirely more platonic or familial once their sex was confirmed. There was not only an assumption about their sex, but their sexuality, too.
Archaeologists can only try to reconstruct the past lives of human remains based on the available data, but obviously, as the bias in sexing human remains shows, something has become skewed, either by a lack of imagination or simply because people are too readily wedded to the categories that have been in place for a long time. There’s not enough room in the analysis of grave goods for the existence of intersex individuals who have always existed, presumably back into prehistory. That alone raises another question about the sexing of pre-modern hominid remains. Is the famous ‘Lucy’ not actually ‘Lewis’?
There’s a bit of archaeology that needs to catch up with how we see the landscape of human sex. And to be fair, as the tooth enamel peptide analysis shows, it is catching up. But it certainly means that we have to reassess museum collections, either where human remains are concerned, or grave goods are concerned. Sometimes these identifications were made a long while ago when the existence of same sex relationships was either frowned upon or simply dismissed as being so abnormal as to be unfeasible. People have known that the Roman world contained intersex people ever since they started translating ancient works in the early medieval period. It seems that we simply refused to accept it as part of modern thinking for far too long.
That prejudice is rather recent.
Every grave excavated tells a story and everyone recovered was once a human who had a unique life. People were as unique 1500 years ago as they are today. And we knew that all along. We just refused to expand our minds to accommodate that uniqueness.
It’s entirely possible that The Lovers of Modena were two brothers, just as it’s entirely possible that all the other ‘lover’ graves excavated around the world are brother and sister. But that’s not the narrative that is reached for when the sex doesn’t match our own prejudices.
What’s more likely is that the two men who are The Lovers of Modena are just that. Two men who were in love and died, not a long time apart, and were buried together by the people who loved them and accepted them for what they were. Lovers.
(PDF) The Late Antique Necropolis of Viale Ciro Menotti-Modena, preliminary anthropological analysis (researchgate.net)