A two-and-a-half-minute tribute on a bioarchaeologist whose isotope work has redrawn the demographic map of the Viking world, showing that women travelled with the armies the chroniclers wrote about as men.
Cat Jarman is a bioarchaeologist. She trained at the University of Bristol, where she remains an Honorary Senior Research Associate, and is currently Senior Adviser for Academic Content Development at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, working on the Museum of the Viking Age project. Her question, across more than a decade of fieldwork, has been a quietly disruptive one: who actually moved in the Viking Age, and how do we know?
Her excavations and isotope work at Repton, in the heart of the Great Heathen Army's English winter camp, brought to light the demographic diversity of the buried, including women, among warriors long assumed to have been exclusively male. Her book River Kings: A New History of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads (William Collins, 2021) traces the Viking world outward as far as the Silk Roads, anchored in material the chronicles never recorded. The Dan David Prize honored Jarman for her work in the archaeology of the Viking Age and public archaeology — using forensic bioarchaeology to surface overlooked lives, women, children, and the enslaved, in the Viking-Age narrative.
Jarman's finding is that the women lying in Viking graves were not local wives or captives. Their isotopic and DNA signatures matched the men beside them. They had come from the same origins. They had made the same journey. They were part of the movement of Viking society, not the receiving end of it.
The film's task was to make that visible. Where the record had left a silence, women who had travelled and lived and died in the army without ever entering the chronicle, the film had to place them back into the frame. Not as accessories to the men beside them, but at the same scale, in the same light, doing the same work. Girls at the same training as boys. Women at the same table as men. Bodies in the same grave, given the same weight. That was the argument the film had to carry, without ever stating it as a claim.
We chose an illustration style as realistic and detailed as we could make it, centred on the women of Viking society, whom earlier histories had passed over, as Jarman’s research shows. The ships are wooden models, so the film found a mixed language of its own: illustration and stop-motion together.
Each year the Foundation chooses, with the laureate, the subject of the film they are honoured for, and we turn it into script, image and motion. The laureate sees it for the first time on the evening of the prize — on the big screen, in a room full of people who have come to honour them. Afterwards the films go out on social media, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and more, and on the Foundation’s own site, beside the committee’s reasoning and the laureate’s interview, and some laureates carry them into their own classrooms, to show what it is they work on.