The Archaeological Evidence

The Archaeological Evidence for Warfare
By Sharon White

Warfare can be considered a useful, but very flexible, indicator of a society's state of development and scale.

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.