Social and ritual violence and death

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.