Bibliographic Essay

A fascination with bronze weaponry was an important feature of the antiquarianism that laid the foundations of archaeology such as William Wilde's A Descriptive Catalogue of the Antiquities in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy (Dublin: Hodges, Smith, 1963).

further by exploring in detail some possibilities for its role at the end of the Bronze Age. General studies of the Bronze Age came to place less emphasis on war, warriors and weapons as forces of social power and change, a factor contributing to Lawrence Keeley's declaration in War before Civilisation: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) that archaeologists by intent or omission were pacifying the past by not integrating the study of war more systematically in our vision of past societies. John Carman and colleagues were exploring the same theme in Material Harm: Archaeological Studies of War and Violence (Glasgow: Cruithne Press, 1997), and Bridgford's chapter (‘Mightier than the Pen? An Edgewise Look at Irish Bronze Age Swords') in this volume places the material culture of war back on centre stage. Richard Osgood had also been researching this theme and Warfare in the Late Bronze Age of North Europe (Oxford: Archaeopress, 1998) collates and cross-references key data.

Alongside these specialist and social studies of warfare, the Prähistorische Bronzefunde series had since the 1960s been publishing detailed catalogues of many categories of bronze artefacts, including weaponry. The many volumes in this series provide a foundation for detailed regional studies of weapons and warfare. Peter Schauer's ‘Eine urnenfelderzeitliche Kampfweise', Archäologisches Korrespondenzblatt 9 (1979), 69-80, and K. Kristiansen's ‘Krieger und Häuptlinge in der Bronzezeit - ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des bronzezeitlichen Schwertes', Jahrbuch des Romisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums Mainz 31 (1984), 187-208, focus on the material culture of warfare, analysing the use-wear of swords and spears. Bridgford's use-wear work has been influenced by that of Kristiansen, and she has brought the analysis of use-wear after a long hiatus into the new millennium, with an increasing number of specialised studies in recent journal publications (e.g. A. Dolfini and R. Crellin ‘Metalwork wear analysis: The loss of innocence.' Journal of Archaeological Science 66 (2016), 78-87. Peatfield's contribution to Laffineur's Polemos book (‘The Paradox of Violence: Weaponry and Martial Art in Minoan Crete') has likewise considered the functional capacities of swords, which has complemented the use-wear approach. In the first decade of the twenty-first century the study of Bronze Age warfare was the subject of much new research. There was a strong material culture focus to this that employed experimental archaeology, and this led to a range of further studies, including the intentional linking of different analytical approaches to form a ‘Combat Archaeology' perspective: see for example Barry Molloy's ‘What's the Bloody Point: Bronze Age swordsmanship in Ireland and Britain', in B. Molloy (ed.), The Cutting Edge (Stroud: Tempus, 2007), pp. 90-111. The material focus was strongly in evidence at a European Association of Archaeologists session and workshop in Vienna, which was subsequently published by M. Modlinger and M. Uckelmann in Warfare in Bronze Age Europe: Manufacture and Use of Weaponry (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2011). Around the same time an interest in the performance of combat as a means to explore its social character can be seen in a number of studies, for example C. Horn's ‘Harm's way - An Approach to Change and Continuity in Prehistoric Combat', Current Swedish Archaeology 21 (2013), 93-116. The osteological study of violence has often been part of relatively specialist studies or part of wider projects, but the discovery of the Tollense battlefield site is placing it at the heart of some new research, for example Detlef Jantzen et al. (eds.), Tod im Tollensetal: Forschungen zu den Hinterlassenschafen eines bronzezeitlichen Gewaltkonfliktes in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (Schwerin: LKDMV, 2014).