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This chapter focuses on sword and scabbards. Swords were important visual objects, larger than most other objects in Bronze and Iron Age Europe, and their shape made them visually striking. Two parts of the sword were especially important in this regard. In the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, the hilt and pommel were often the vehicles for elaborate eye-catching ornament. When a sword was in its scabbard, whether worn at the side of the bearer, hanging on a wall, or placed in the burial chamber, the only parts of the weapon that were visible were the handle and its end. During the Middle and Late Iron Age, the scabbard became especially important as a vehicle for decorative elaboration. Bronze and Early Iron Age scabbards were mostly made of wood, and we do not, therefore have much information about how they were decorated. From the end of the Early La Tène period on, however, swords were long, and scabbards of bronze and iron offered extensive rectangular surfaces for decoration.

The universality of human mortality is the commonest of truisms, but the prospect of mortality evidently has weighed differently on different societies over the course of human history, from the oppressive burden of the later Middle Ages to the more relaxed live-for-the-present-ism of the current generation. The disposal of the dead is at basis a hygienic necessity that is recognized in all but the most socially disrupted circumstances, but the manner of disposal may reveal attitudes of society towards death and the concept of afterlife, or the role of the dead in the continuing life of the community. Even in our contemporary secular society, relatives of the victims of murder or abduction or of death in foreign parts crave the recovery of bodies for due burial, without which they apparently cannot ‘achieve closure’, a condition of grace that might have been considered essential to the dead, but which evidently matters equally to the bereaved. The discipline of archaeology is methodologically disposed to distort the reality of the past in that it seeks to recognize ordered patterns where in reality diversity and apparent irrationality must have been inherent. The keystone of Childe’s approach, the identification of archaeological cultures, was dependent upon recurrence of diagnostic types in association, which would permit the comparison of one cultural assemblage with another in time or space. Even in processual and post-processual approaches the essence is to reduce the ever-burgeoning data-base to some semblance of order, without which it is impossible for interpretation to proceed, other than intuitively, empathically, or experientially, that is, based upon imaginative reconstruction rather than being inferred, however inadequately, from archaeological data. The consequence of this process of classification has been to emphasize certain outstanding classes of data, like long barrows, stone circles, or hillforts, as typical of their period or region, at the expense of a subtler analysis of the many possible variations of settlement or burial sites that are detectable, even from the surviving archaeological record. In recent years there has been a significant shift in archaeological approaches to burial data.

The term ‘focal’ burial refers to burials that appear from spatial distribution within a cemetery to have acted as a focus for subsequent burials. They may be distinguished by their larger size or by the fact that they contain more lavish grave-goods. The term was used by Fitzpatrick (1997) to highlight certain larger or better-equipped graves at Westhampnett, though there was no unequivocal spatial relationship between the supposed ‘focal’ burials and others. At King Harry Lane, Verulamium (Fig. 3.18), Stead and Rigby (1989: 83) had identified several larger graves of phase 1 with more notable assemblages as central to ‘family’ clusters defined by their enclosure. The concept of family groups was challenged by Millett (1993), who nevertheless saw these ‘focal’ graves, whether enclosed or unenclosed, as potential ‘founders’ graves’ in socially allied units. There is no doubt that graves 241, 299, and 325 of phase 1, and possibly grave 148 of phase 2 and grave 41 of phase 3, stand out as candidates for founders’ graves within their compounds, whilst graves 272, 309, and possibly grave 93 could have been focal to unenclosed groups, or groups where the enclosure has not survived. It has to be acknowledged, however, that there are other larger or better-provided graves that stand in relative isolation and do not appear to have attracted subsequent satellite burials, though this hardly invalidates the concept in principle, especially in what must have been a period of social and political instability. The notion of a focal burial seems equally applicable to the late pre-Roman Iron Age cemetery at Owslebury (Fig. 5.1; Collis, 1968, 1994), where the burials were principally grouped within two adjacent enclosures. The central burial of the earlier of the two (grave 39) was the largest, and contained an extended inhumation with full warrior panoply of sword, spear, and shield, dating around the first half of the first century BC. The focal burial of the second enclosure (grave 10) was a cremation in an urn with lid and six accessory vessels.

In recent years the issue of violence in Iron Age society has become polarized between those who believe that it was endemic and those who believe that it has been exaggerated, particularly by conventional stereotypes of ‘warrior Celts’ based on classical and Irish literary sources. Currently, the ‘postprocessual consensus that dominates academic archaeology in the United Kingdom retains, as its default position, a more or less pacifist view of the prehistoric past’ (Armit, 2011: 503). The conventional interpretation of ‘war cemeteries’ and ‘massacre sites’ in hillforts especially may have been unduly simplistic, and it is these therefore that we shall consider first. The archetypal Iron Age war cemetery was that excavated by Wheeler (1943) in the eastern entrance at Maiden Castle, Dorset, where several skeletons bore traces of physical trauma compatible with the sack of the hillfort by Vespasian’s Second Augustan legion. An adult male in grave P7A had an iron arrow-head buried in his spine, and another adult male in grave P7 had a small, square perforation through the left temporal bone, consistent with a Roman ballista bolt. In some instances there were multiple injuries, notably skeleton P12 whose skull bore at least nine sword cuts, a measure of ‘overkill’ that reflected either the ferocity of the attack or systematic degradation after death. In reviewing the physical evidence for warfare in Iron Age Britain Knüsel (2005) divided instances of weapon trauma into three principal categories, those inflicted with a sharp-bladed weapon, such as a sword, those resulting from crushing from a blunt instrument, and wounds from a weapon or missile that penetrated the skeleton. The first two are essentially the same classification as those offered by Wheeler (1943: 351) for the Maiden Castle war cemetery. He too had raised the question whether the peri-mortem injuries apparent on some of the victims were the cause of death, or were inflicted after death.