The real life Lara Croft helping to change history
National Geographic explorer Ella Al-Shamahi didn’t expect to be making any discoveries of her own while hosting a documentary on Viking women, but she found something that could be a world first.
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Ella Al-Shamahi is a real life Lara Croft. The British-born scientist of Yemeni heritage searches through caves in some of the most inhospitable places on the planet in the hope of unlocking the mysteries of our early ancestors.
She’s also a television presenter, fronting shows that delve into some of the discoveries made by her peers.
The two hats she wears — she actually has a third as a stand-up comedian — are inextricably linked in their themes but separate in their methods. When she’s in front of the camera, she’s not typically making scientific breakthroughs.
That was until recently, while filming her new National Geographic show Viking Warrior Women, where she made a remarkable discovery — which we don’t want to give away — as the cameras rolled.
The show centres on the discovery of remains in Sweden of a female buried with artefacts that would suggest she was a high-ranking warrior.
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It also looks at a second gravesite and it is here the big discovery is made.
“It’s kind of mad with this show because usually when you do a TV show you’re not really discovering stuff,” Al-Shamahi tells Insider.
“You’re covering other people’s work, you might be going out because there’s a discovery. But this is one of those crazy scenarios where we went out and asked ‘how many female Viking warriors are there out there’ and it was the production that was pushing a lot of the discovery.”
Al-Shamahi was stunned that years of study on these remains by experts in the field failed to turn up the important discovery she did, possibly the first evidence of its kind ever unearthed.
“How did we do that in a TV show and academics who specialise in this not do it?” she asks. “That is only because of bias and only because people aren’t going back and looking at these women and asking ‘OK, what are we missing?’”
In fact Al-Shamahi believes there might be quite a bit “missing” and that it could be a illuminating exercise to look over many of the remains and artefacts that have been found over the centuries.
There has been a tendency in the past to assume that the remains of fighters, like the Viking women in Al-Shamahi’s show, have always been men, the dominant thinking being there was no way a woman would be involved in battle.
A not-so-subtle theme throughout Viking Warrior Women is that there have been many within the archaeological fraternity who have resisted the claims that women were fighters in that period, an image perpetuated by such popular television shows such as Vikings.
Al-Shamahi doesn’t think it should be such a surprise and says it has a lot to do with when the remains were first found.
“A certain kind of academic will say ‘oh, it’s because it’s such a large claim that it requires a large body of evidence to prove’ but actually why is it such a large claim?” she says. “At the end of the day everybody who looks at history is always influenced by their own lives and their own kind of realities and the truth is that when a lot of these Vikings were first found it was Victorian-era, very conservative attitudes towards women so it’s almost expected they would think that.”
Al-Shamahi says the work she does on TV gives her a kind of access that might not be available to others in her field, as in the UK it’s not a profession that gets the kind of funding to do the things you might see in the movies.
“Being Indiana Jones isn’t cheap,” she laughs.
* Viking Warrior Women, National Geographic, Tuesday, 7.30pm