Editing Birka (section)

=== Wearable accessories ===
10 small silver [[Christian cross|crosses]] were found in graves at Birka.<ref name=":3">{{Cite book|last=Geijer|first=Agnes|url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/5871922|title=A History of Textile Art|date=1979|publisher=Pasold Research Fund in association with Sotheby Parke Bernet|isbn=0-85667-055-3|location=London|pages=22|oclc=5871922}}</ref> Missionaries, brought by Rimbert and others, lead to some converts to Christianity.<ref name=":3" /> 27 graves contained small pendants of [[Mjölnir|Thor's hammer]] from around the 10th century. Both traditional Viking religious beliefs and Christianity were present at Birka.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Geijer|first=Agnes|url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/5871922|title=A history of textile art|date=1979|publisher=Pasold Research Fund in association with Sotheby Parke Bernet|isbn=0-85667-055-3|location=London|pages=24|oclc=5871922}}</ref>
[[File:Tortoise brooches from a grave in Birka.jpg|thumb|Tortoise brooches found at Birka]]
Many Birka grave excavations produced a number of funerary findings unique to the deceased and the region of the grave. In the excavation of grave Bj 463, a small copper alloy [[brooch]] with animal motifs was found alongside the skeletal remains of a young girl from Birka, and similar ones appeared in other excavations around Birka.<ref name=":4">{{Cite book|url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1079918049|title=VIKING WORLDS : things, spaces and movement.|date=2019|publisher=OXBOW Books|isbn=978-1-78925-210-1|location=[Place of publication not identified]|oclc=1079918049}}</ref>

The brooch is understood to be typically related to female burials and also female jewelry of the Viking period. The surrounding fragments of textiles attached to these brooches, scattered around various graves across Sweden, also give an understanding of what the typical womenswear of the Viking age may have been in the 9th and 10th centuries.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Jesch|first=Judith|url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/23769931|title=Women in the Viking age|date=1991|publisher=Boydell Press|isbn=0-85115-278-3|location=Woodbridge, Suffolk|oclc=23769931}}</ref>