Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• A new study analyzes the contents and remains found in 57 Bronze Age underground tombs, known as hypogea, in modern-day Portugal.
• Surprisingly, women were adorned with more grave goods than men, and they were also buried with weapons.
• This find adds to growing evidence that women warriors existed in many times and places in different cultures.

One of the best ways to understand an ancient culture—especially one that left behind no written records for us to read—is to examine that culture’s funerary practices. This technique has unveiled invaluable treasures from ancient populations around the world, but the ways humans are laid to rest can also hold lessons about the values that their long-lost cultures held dear.

In a new study published in the journal Quaternary, a team of scientists from Portugal analyzed 57 underground tombs from the first half of the Middle Bronze Age (around 1850 to 1500 B.C.E.) in the interior of Baixo Alentejo, a province in southern Portugal. Previous studies have examined various Bronze age funerary arrangements in the area, including cist burials (a stone coffin buried under a mound) and pit burials. But only one similar underground tomb—also known as a hypogeum, originating from the Greek hupógeion, meaning underground or subterranean—has been uncovered in the same area. It wasn’t until the damming of the Guadiana River in the early 2000s that these underground hypogea were uncovered and recognized as a widespread funerary practice in the region.

Hypogeum funerary complexes were common during the Neolithic and Bronze ages, with one of the most famous and well-preserved examples being Hal Saflieni Hypogeum on the island of Malta. In the current study, the 57 hypogea examined across seven archaeological sites revealed a wide array of interesting information about this Bronze Age culture. Among the dead, most were adults (at 82 percent out of 95 individuals examined), 34 percent were women, 21 percent were men, and in 45 percent of the cases, it was impossible to determine a sex. Among the grave goods was your typical ancient world detritus (including ceramic vessels and metal awls), but such objects were present in greater numbers among burials of women and, interestingly, women were also buried with weapons. This is a relative rarity among ancient burial sites, but it’s a practice that’s steadily being discovered more frequently throughout archaeological sites in Europe.

“Taken together, these results contribute to a more nuanced understanding of Middle Bronze Age societies in southwestern Iberia,” the authors wrote. “The evidence suggests communities in which funerary practices appear to have been structured by age, biological sex, and possible social differentiation and in which funerary architecture may have functioned as arenas for social memory, identity negotiation, and potentially symbolic expression.”

In early 2025, the discovery of a medieval Hungarian woman buried with a weapon made headlines (though scholars are unsure if she was truly a warrior), and in 2017, archaeologists detailed the remains of a Viking female warrior buried with swords. Similarly, excavations of a Bronze age necropolis in Azerbaijan found women buried with weapons (including arrowheads, daggers, and maces), and even led some experts to give credence to the Greek myth of the Amazons.

In Bronze Age Portugal, burial with weapons appears to be associated with elevated social status in both sexes, and while the distribution of weapons slightly preferred males (21 percent to 18 percent, respectively), the difference was not considered statistically significant.

Tombs of the past continue to reveal the truth that warrior women have powerfully shaped the course of human history for millennia—whether in medieval Scandinavia or the Bronze Age Mediterranean.