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.