Archaeological Study of Warfare

War is, in archaeological vocabulary, a comparatively simple notion to determine in relation to the material record, and without a doubt from other sources. It is possibly this diversity of resource angles that makes it easier to comprehend, and actually it can be constructive in accumulating indication about further societal activities on a wider extent. Having said this, there are still an amount of restrictions and instructive procedures which should be understood before investigating warfare in feature.
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 neighbors, or even whether it had differing immediate neighbors.
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 Sedge ford 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.


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