Read an Excerpt

Bronze Age Warfare

The History Press

INTRODUCTION

There has been a recent rise in the popularity of archaeological studies of warfare, although most of these have focused on a particular regional area or on specific case studies. Much of this work has been undertaken on the Roman or medieval periods where we have good documentary evidence to aid the interpretation of warfare, warriors and weapons. Prehistoric warfare has generally been treated with greater caution and many believe the evidence is too unreliable, uneven and open to many different interpretations. There has also been a tendency, when referring to the prehistoric period, to use ethnographic analogies to 'fill in the gaps' where evidence is patchy or difficult to interpret. Although the use of ethnographic case studies makes an important contribution to the study of archaeology, this present study tries to avoid the use of cross-cultural analogies between the prehistoric data and information on warfare from more recent societies.

A few recent publications have been significant in raising the 'profile' of prehistoric warfare, including Ancient Warfare (John Carman & Anthony Harding, eds), Material Harm (John Carman, ed.), War before Civilization (Lawrence Keeley),Warfare in the Late Bronze Age of North Europe (Richard Osgood) and Troubled Times: Violence and Warfare in the Past (Debra Martin & David Frayer, eds). In addition, there have been a number of articles in journals, although these typically focus on particular regional areas or specific cultural groups, or on types of analysis, for example, use-wear studies on weapons, skeletal studies or interpretations of rock art.

So where does this book fit in? It is intended to provide a general approach to warfare in Europe, addressing many of the key issues within warfare studies on a broad scale. The various chapters are specific to particular regions, and are written by people with a keen research interest in those areas, and within each chapter a multi-disciplinary approach is adopted, discussing a range of different types of evidence to produce a more rounded picture of the nature and frequency of combat, the weapons and armour employed, and the role of warfare in society, seen through burials and artistic traditions. The aim is not to provide a complete review of all the evidence, interpretations and theories on the data, because each region would then require a book of its own, but rather to identify general patterns and trends in the evidence for warfare and cite specific examples where appropriate. Of course, the period defined (and dated) as the 'Bronze Age' differs from region to region, a matter that is raised and discussed in each chapter. None the less, a cogent argument as to the essence of conflict in the Bronze Age of Europe can be produced.

Each chapter begins with a brief look at the preceding Copper Age or Neolithic period as a way of introducing the evidence for the Bronze Age. This is followed by a study of the various strands of evidence for warfare: settlement patterns, fortifications, burial and skeletal evidence, weapons and body protection, art and iconography. In terms of settlement patterns and fortifications, we consider what types of site were being occupied and the evidence for natural and artificial defences, and look at how the fortified, hilltop and non-fortified sites relate to one another in terms of their location, inter-visibility, function and so on. We cite examples of fortified sites, describing the nature of their defences and their development through time, including phases of destruction, repair and elaboration. The question of whether the defences were purely functional, or whether they served other social or symbolic purposes, is assessed.

We then move from the settlement sites to the people that lived in them (or at least to their physical remains). The skeletons of Bronze Age people provide perhaps the most unequivocal evidence for violence in the shape of injuries, many of them fatal. However, it is often difficult to distinguish between injuries caused by accidents and those sustained during fighting, and only a small number of examples of injuries and deaths from the Bronze Age can be conclusively attributed to violent actions. Death in combat need not leave any trace of trauma on the bones for the palaeopathologist to examine. In addition, a skeleton bearing, say, clear cut-marks on the bones may actually represent the physical manifestation of the result of a judicial execution, a murder or perhaps even post-mortem ritual treatment, as opposed to combat. Bearing this in mind, inferences are drawn from those skeletons which do seem to be reliable indicators of injuries through violence. The inferences made from this evidence relate to the method of violence used, weapon types, the angle and intensity of the assault (tactics), the types of injuries sustained and the likelihood of survival. The skeletal evidence is also considered within the context of the burial record as a whole in order to isolate unusual burial practices which may be significant. The so-called 'warrior graves' of the Bronze Age, typically accompanied by a rich array of weapons and warrior paraphernalia, are also discussed.

The evidence for weapons and body protection comes largely from burials, and thus not from the original context of use. Although some weapons may have been made purely for deposition in rich graves as votive offerings, or perhaps for ceremonial use, others were clearly damaged during combat and were repaired or recycled. Furthermore, it is clear that weapons were sometimes deliberately damaged in a more votive manner – for example, the ritual destruction or 'killing' of Late Bronze Age swords that were then deposited in water, or the deliberate stabbing of the shield from South Cadbury in Somerset. Though these blows were not received in combat, the votive damage may still have been connected to combat, perhaps being administered to destroy any items that symbolised the enemy.

A further problem with weapons is their multi-functionality. Whereas swords were clearly used for fighting (and ritual battles), knives, daggers, sticks, stones, arrows and spears could have been used for other purposes, such as for hunting or as tools. In addition, we must assume that only a relatively small percentage of the actual weapons used have been preserved in the archaeological record. We know from areas where good preservation occurs and also from the ethnographic record that weapons and armour were frequently made from perishable materials, such as leather and wood. Fortunately in some areas of Europe there is relatively good preservation of these perishable materials (see Chapter Two), while rock carvings and cave paintings indicate the types of evidence that might be missing from the archaeological record. Again, caution must be applied in always interpreting these as functional items, rather than as exaggerated symbols of power or status, or as objects used ritually rather than practically. For the prehistoric period there is much that we do not know, and in the absence of written records much that we will never know, such as the motives or causes of violence, attitudes to fighting, and its impact on society, the economy and political structure – these must be interpreted from the evidence available. For the Aegean we do have some written records, Linear B tablets, which aid our interpretation of warfare in that region, although they do not provide all the answers (see Chapter Six).

Throughout this work care has been taken not to assume that those involved in warfare had to be male. There are certainly documented examples from later periods of women taking an active part in combat, be it in the French Revolution, the Boudican revolt or the Vietnam conflict. Famously, the women of the Teutonic tribe, the Ambrones, fought not only the Roman General Marius in the second century BC, but also attacked their men-folk for retreating from the Romans. In addition, graves assumed to be of males simply because of the assemblages of weaponry they contain, may in fact be of females. This is the case with numerous examples from the Anglo-Saxon period and there are also examples from Iron Age Russia and possibly from Beaker burials in Britain. Women had an important role to play – either as active combatants, as victims or objects/causes of war, or in the pre- and post-war preparations and celebrations – and this should be borne in mind.

The archaeological evidence is inevitably very static and does not paint a very dynamic picture of warfare. Fortunately a range of paintings, engravings and carvings have been preserved, some of which depict scenes of war while others bring us face-to-face with Bronze Age warriors. Although these depictions are open to a range of different interpretations (as discussed in each chapter), they form an important category of evidence for the study of warfare. They help us to reconstruct different forms of fighting and to understand how weapons were used and what types of body protection were worn, and in some cases it even becomes possible to speculate on the identity of the combatants. At the end of each chapter we put forward an interpretation of what the evidence as a whole infers about motives and causes, defensive and offensive tactics, and attitudes to warfare and warriors (both living and in death), set within the context of Bronze Age communities as a whole.

By studying a specific period in time across a wide geographical area, we are able to make inter-regional comparisons and begin to suggest reasons for the existence of similarities and differences. This enables us to compare different interpretations and theories while continually reassessing our ideas and preconceptions of what we think warfare was like in the past. The evidence presented for each regional area is then summarised in the final chapter, with a review of general trends in warfare across Europe as a whole, touching on the types of fighting practised, the weapons used, the tactics and strategies employed (both defensive and offensive), the injuries sustained, and the role of warfare within society.

The overall aim of this book is to present a large body of evidence in an accessible and readable way, and to summarise information from different countries which is otherwise available only in native languages and in specialist or obscure publications. Further reading is suggested at the end of each chapter – we have tried to restrict this to literature which is both in English and easily available. A more detailed bibliography is provided at the end and a glossary of terms used in the book is also given. Obviously there are many problems surrounding the detection of evidence for warfare in the archaeological record, but when all the different strands of evidence are drawn together it is possible to weave a picture of the warfare that undoubtedly took place in Bronze Age Europe. As the following chapters demonstrate, there is much that we do not know about warfare in the Bronze Age, but clearly much can be gleaned from the archaeological record.

Defining Warfare

It would be sensible at this point to undertake a brief examination of what is meant by warfare and to define some elements of terminology – for example, how is warfare to be differentiated from skirmishes, raids, revenge killings and so forth?

War is viewed by historians as organised, strategically planned, militarily disciplined and expressing political policy. Clausewitz, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, saw it as the continuation of 'political intercourse', but presupposed that it could be strictly defined, taking a number of distinct forms, and that it had a beginning and an end – i.e. war was an event rather than a part of everyday life. His work On War is perhaps the most famous book on the subject, although his ideas were coloured by modern perceptions of war and first-hand experience, and he gave no consideration to pre- or non-state forms of warfare which involved no distinction between the lawful and unlawful bearing of arms, a feature that pervaded much of the prehistoric period.

Clausewitz's work typifies one of the main problems surrounding the study of early forms of warfare, namely that military history, and therefore the literate world, has been dominated by 'civilised' warfare. The lack of publications on prehistoric warfare, coupled with modern concepts of war, created two main schools of thought during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The first approach was expressed by Thomas Hobbes, a prominent English philosopher of the time, who regarded prehistoric people as primitive and violent, and their lives as 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short'. A second approach put forward the view that civilised humans have fallen from a 'peaceful golden age'. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a critic of Hobbes, was an early proponent of this theory. He argued that man was not naturally cruel and that violent behaviour among primitive societies, past and present, was inconsequential and rare (see Keeley 1996: 5–8; Monks 1997: 3–5). The problem with both these theories is that they interpret prehistoric warfare from an historical point of view, and both Hobbes and Rousseau based their theories on an eclectic range of ethnographic examples. Furthermore, the period of European expansion and the work of the early missionaries, which brought westerners into contact with more 'primitive' societies, seemed to confirm the picture painted by Hobbes, reaffirming the need for European pacification and the introduction of Christianity to bring order to these peoples.

In addition to the work of historians, anthropologists have also tried long and hard to find causes and explanations for different forms of warfare; this too has been problematic. Early accounts of primitive societies were heavily biased and often mis-recorded and ethnographers were often deprived of much information on many aspects of society, including the frequency of fighting and the different forms of warfare practised. This being said, it is now clear that, contrary to the views of Rousseau, very few societies were ever truly peaceful and warfare was a common phenomenon within the ethnographic record. It would seem that small, pre-state groups in particular found peace difficult to maintain and derived few benefits from it. In contrast, warfare, or the maintenance of a certain level of hostility, was seen as an important way of creating social relationships (whether peaceful or hostile), maintaining social dialogue between groups, and countering shortages and periods of risk. Therefore, it would appear that early man was not the peace-loving animal that Rousseau would have us believe.

Archaeologists have traditionally considered warfare to be a feature of complex societies and states, despite the notable absence of studies into early forms of warfare. 'The most widely used archaeological textbooks contain no references to warfare until the subject of urban civilizations is taken up' (Keeley 1996: 18), and therefore warfare is implied to be insignificant before this time. Where 'primitive' warfare is mentioned there is a great deal of eclecticism in the choice of ethnographic examples, many of which are inherently biased through the recording process. More often in archaeology, early forms of warfare are assumed or implied but rarely deemed worthy of detailed discussion. Conflict is all too often dismissed either as a natural human characteristic, requiring no explanation, or as the inevitable solution to some economic or environmental crisis or change (Monks 1997: 1). In response to the former, anthropologists turned to theories and arguments derived from biological and behavioural studies, focusing on the activities of non-human primates, and comparing and contrasting this with evidence derived from simple, pre-state societies, principally in the New World. However, the different forms of violence found within the majority of societies are too diverse and too complex to be explained simply in terms of natural aggression, or the need to kill. With regard to the second point, the inevitability of warfare among developing societies can by no means be taken for granted and the question of possible ecological/environmental/economic causes requires careful investigation.

---

Excerpted from Bronze Age Warfare by Richard Osgood, Sarah Monks, Judith Toms. Copyright © 2010 Richard Osgood, Sarah Monks and Judith Toms. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---