The commonly perceived easiest approach to archaeological problems is to look in the ground, so here is the first way in which to attack warfare.



Graves are obvious evidence of warfare, especially warrior graves, meaning

that a burial contains evidence that the body was a soldier. This evidence

could be grave goods in the form of weapons or tools possibly used as

weapons (an interpretative step that must be handled carefully), or grave

goods specifically implicative or directly descriptive of warfare. Indeed

in a different way injuries remaining on the skeleton, skeletal trauma, if

identified as wounds inflicted by humans, can often be taken as indicators

of warfare, and even more interestingly, structures of the numbers of such

injuries within a single cemetery (given that it is a fair social

cross-section and not, for example, a mass grave after a battle) can

provide useful information on a society's relationships with its immediate

neighbours, or even whether it had differing immediate neighbours.

Anglo-Saxon burials are most reliable in terms of surviving and respecting

their warriors into the afterlife, by placing their weapons in the grave

with them, indicative also of the warrior's high status in society.

Anglo-Saxon cemeteries have provided a useful line of broader

investigation, including the cemetery at Sedgeford in North Norfolk with

well-preserved warrior burials. One must be careful however not to draw

immediate connections between grave goods and a person's position in life,

a problem highlighted by the new movements of gender archaeology.

Following on from this, the battlefield itself provides, when it survives,

possibly the best evidence for warfare. Not only may the later

battlefields preserve the memory of fighting men, such as the Thermopylae

mound memorial (although archaeologists are not allowed to excavate this

heritage site), but solid evidence of a battle may be present in small

finds littered around the site, or in mass graves for the deceased. It

must be noted that mass graves are not always created by warfare, ritual or

disease being two other possible causes, although usually these are easy to

distinguish in the skeletal examination. One theory for a collection of

skeletons at Maiden Castle Hill Fort is a mass grave after a battle, whilst

there is an undisputed later one from the 14th century Battle of Towton, or

from Napoleon's great Russian retreats via Vilnius. These sites are very

interesting from a number of angles. First, Maiden Castle yielded a

skeleton with a Roman scorpio bolt lodged in his spine, now in Dorchester

Museum, a fine example of skeletal trauma where the offending implement was

still in position.

At Towton, forensic pathology could do a great deal to

reveal the nature and technology of warfare and medicine at the time, with

the skull-shattering head wounds alluding to close-quartered fighting or

the upper body deformations showing certain skeletons to belong to

long-bowmen, Forensic anthropology also revealed the type of people within

a society fought in battle. Also at Towton the archaeological evidence

complemented the textual evidence, in that for example the wounds tied up

with the knowledge that the Lancastrians were slaughtered when fleeing at

the end of the war. Distribution mapping from extensive fieldwalking and

metal-detecting has also supported the evidence for the exact location of

the battle with the discovery many personal finds lost in battle. However,

from the archaeological record even at somewhere as extensively researched

as Towton, it would be very hard to ascertain the number of people involved

in the battle, information which has broader implications also, and the

figure of 28,000 dead is only known from the textual record, or even as a

rumour passed down through generations of historians or local residents.

Textual evidence is a very useful archaeological tool, but as ever comes

with a few notable qualifiers. Primarily, an automatic bias towards

'social advancement' can appear in the archaeologist's mind when comparing

a literate society against an illiterate one, even in the context of

battle, but mainly because the archaeologist is lulled into a sense of

security that evidence is more 'substantial' for the textually-based

society. Equally, textual evidence may be heavily biased, especially

concerning warfare, as the victor will glorify any victory whilst the

losing side will seek to cover it up, evident for instance in the textual

descriptions of the Battle of Kadesh, which was glorified as a resounding

victory on the walls of Abu Simbel Temple by its constructor Rameses II,

but which there is little evidence for in the Hittite records.

The earlier the textual evidence, often the less distinguishable it is

from art and iconography, as with the Egyptian hieroglyphs intermingled

with glorious single-handed chariot-fighting Pharaohs, which bears its own

limitations as an archaeological tool to discover warfare, but which is

also nonetheless useful. Iconography often bears symbolism that relates

battles to a religious context and the symbolism is often therefore locked

as a product of the culture that created it, which only further deeper

understanding of the society in a broader area than just warfare can

reveal. One striking counter-example to this however is the famous Chinese

terracotta army at Xian of the Qin dynasty (from around 2500 years ago),

which, whilst being deeply religiously and socially symbolic as associated

with the burial of a ruler, actually provided a very accurate account of

the nature of the Chinese army at the time, more so than the Egyptian

shabti figures for the same purpose. The Bayeaux Tapestry in France,

Trajan's Column in Rome, the Bonam Pak murals in South Mexico, Caesar's

accounts of the equivalent of Iron Age Ireland, and the Codex Mendoza

tribute book of Teotihuac'n have all been invaluable to archaeologists in

understanding warfare in their respective periods and societies, but not

without first taking into account their limitations as textual and

iconographic sources.