‘Half the Population of Viking Age Sigtuna Were Immigrants’. On a Saturday morning in August 2018, a scientific report made newspaper headlines all over Sweden. A team of archaeologists and geneticists at Stockholm University had found proof, it said; proof in the form of ancient DNA that half the population of the Viking Age town of Sigtuna were immigrants (see e.g. Spross 2018; see also Källén et  al. 2019: Figure 2). In interviews, the Lead Investigator described Sigtuna as the Shanghai or London of Viking Age Scandinavia and said he was excited to have been able to identify sec-ond-generation immigrants among the sampled individuals (see e.g. Spross 2018). Like a nova, the Sigtuna feature shone bright in Swedish media for twenty-four hours before it collapsed. From that moment on, no one wanted to talk about the Sigtuna immigrants.

In this article, we analyze how genetic genealogy reshapes popular notions of historical identity, as it facilitates a genetically informed understanding of ethnicity and ancestry. Drawing on interviews with Swedish, British and American individuals who have employed genetic ancestry tests (GATs) to prove ancestral connections to Vikings, we explore how the desire to “be a Viking” is articulated through a convergence of pre-existing discourses around Vikings and DNA. By combining signs from genetic science and popular depictions of Vikings, our interviewees create a new discourse of geneticized Viking identity. In this new discourse, socio-historically constructed ideas about Vikings are naturalized as the innate qualities of individuals who possess a certain genetic composition. Images of “the Viking” once created for political, cultural or commercial purposes are revived in new embodied forms and can start to circulate in new social contexts, where they, by association, appear to be confirmed by genetical science.

Over the past decade, technological developments known as “next-generation sequencing” have enabled genome-wide analyses of ancient DNA (aDNA) to take place more quickly and cheaply than before. These developments have had important consequences for archaeological knowledge and practice, most notably in the rapidly growing field of archaeogenomics (also referred to as archaeogenetics or paleogenomics).

Olov Janse was an archaeologist with a remarkable life. From his birth in Sweden in 1892 to his death in the United States in 1985, he travelled several times across the world and was present at some of the most important episodes of twentieth-century world history. His works and networks connected museums and political institutions in Sweden, France, Vietnam and the United States: from the Swedish History Museum, the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, the French Musée des antiquités nationales, the Cernuchi Museum, and the French research institute EFEO in Hanoi, to UNESCO, the Harvard Peabody Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, and the US Department of State. He left behind artefacts and documents in museum collections and archives across the world. But his name is largely unknown, and his most important contributions – the connection of people and ideas between continents and contexts – have remained invisible in historical accounts of all these institutions. The Archaeologist In-Between follows in the footsteps of Olov Janse and his wife Renée, as they move between continents and contexts, connecting key actors and institutions in social and professional networks across the world. It tells the formidable story of an archaeologist navigating through world politics, from a late nineteenth-century industrial town in Sweden, to early twentieth-century Parisian museums, to French Indochina and the Philippines in the 1930s, to the formation of UNESCO in 1946, and ending with public diplomacy for the US Department of State on the verge of the Vietnam War.  

A middle-aged white man raises his sword to the skies and roars to the gods. The results of his genetic ancestry test have just arrived in his suburban mailbox. His eyes fill with tears as he learns that he is “0.012% Viking”. These are the scenes from a video advertisement for the TV-series Vikings.

This man is certainly not the only one yearning for a genetic test to confirm his Viking ancestry. A plethora of companies around the world market DNA-tests that promise to provide scientific facts about your identity. These companies often claim to provide a complete view of your ancestry, even though they in reality only compare your DNA with other customers in their database.

According to recent estimates, over 26 million people from across the world have purchased a genetic ancestry test. In the wake of this hype, researchers have begun to investigate how the tests affect our perceptions of ourselves. How do people make sense of a test result stating that they are, for instance, “35% Ashkenazi Jewish”, “27% British” or “4% western Asian”?

Some researchers have concluded that such tests make customers believe that humanity can be divided into biological races, and that customers see the tests as a way of discovering their “true” identities. Other researchers have argued that people use their test results selectively, “picking and choosing” the genetic data they find compatible with their personal desires and aspirations. From this perspective, taking a genetic ancestry test involves some level of creative interpretation.