Bibliographic Essay

The most comprehensive overview of the archaeology of Iron Age Britain has been written by Sir Barry Cunliffe: Iron Age Communities in Britain: An Account of England, Scotland and Wales from the Seventh Century BC until the Roman Conquest (London: Routledge, 2009).

This volume has gone through several editions, reflecting the increase in archaeological evidence because of the expansion of contractor archaeology and the introduction of the Portable Antiquities Scheme. These developments have provided a wealth of data, and because scientific dating and other techniques are now routinely employed by contractors, our understanding of this period has fundamentally changed over the last decade, particularly with respect to funerary practices, population mobility and the distribution of material culture. For example, new data from Kent has revealed the first evidence for long-distance migrants in Iron Age Britain: see Jacqueline I. McKinley et al., Cliffs End Farm, Isle ofThanet, Kent. A Mortuary and Ritual Site of the Bronze Age, Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon Period with Evidence for Long-Distance Maritime Mobility (Salisbury: Wessex Archaeology, 2015). Within the literature there is also a recognition that the evidence should be placed within a wider European context, with the work by C. C. Haselgrove and R. E. Pope, The Earlier Iron Age in Britain and the Near Continent (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2007) and C. C. Haselgrove and T. Moore, The Later Iron Age in Britain and Beyond (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2007) exemplifying this.

Violence as a powerful force in Iron Age communities is a perspective that was for the most part eschewed until the early 2000s, despite Sharples's key 1991 paper (Niall Sharples, ‘Warfare in the Iron Age of Wessex', Scottish Archaeological Review 8 (1991), 79-89). Indeed, works dealing with martial equipment and warrior burials were sparse (John R.

Collis, ‘Burials with Weapons in Iron Age Britain', Germania 51 (1973), 121-33). Over the last fifteen years scholars have increasingly recognised the crucial role it played in how these societies interacted with one another, influenced social organisation, and the use of hill forts; this is illustrated by S. James, ‘A Bloodless Past: The Pacification of Early Iron Age Britain', in Haselgrove and Pope (eds.), Earlier Iron Age, pp. 160-73, and Ian Armit, ‘Hillforts at War: From Maiden Castle to Taniwaha Pa', Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 73 (2007), 25-38. Uniquely, Melanie Giles has also focused on the socio-cultural meanings of weapons in these communities, highlighting how they contribute to the creation and maintenance of warrior identities: ‘Seeing Red: The Aesthetics of Martial Objects in the British and Irish Iron Age', in D. Garrow, C. Gosden and J. D. Hill (eds.), Rethinking Celtic Art (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2008), pp. 78-99.

The period has been characterised as having a non-recoverable burial rite, but the new data sets, scientific dating and other techniques are challenging this concept, most recently by T. J. Booth and colleagues: ‘New Evidence for Diverse Secondary Burial Practices in Iron Age Britain: A Histological Case Study', Journal of Archaeological Science 67 (2016), 14-24. A new overview, Death and Burial in Iron Age Britain, by D. W. Harding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) reveals that complex social identities were expressed in the funerary treatment of humans and animals in this period.

In contrast, the Romano-British period has extensive and well-phased data sets that have been used to construct the life course, gender and status hierarchies and other aspects of identity, with Pearce's ‘Status and Burial' chapter in M. Millett, L. Revell and A. Moore (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Roman Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) providing an overview of these works. The military has been a focus of study since antiquarian times, particularly weaponry and equipment, an overview of which is found in Bishop's ‘Weapon and Military Equipment' chapter in L.

Allason-Jones (ed.), Artefacts in Roman Britain: Their Purpose and Use (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). However, only a minority of work has focused on the military use of violence against indigenous communities, with S. James exploring this theme extensively in his publications, for example in Rome and the Sword: How Warriors and Weapons Shaped Roman History (London: Thames & Hudson, 2011).

Greater acknowledgement that the military community was not solely composed of soldiers has been brought to the fore by Greene in her chapter ‘Female Networks in the Military Communities of the Roman West: A View from the Vindolanda Tablets' in E. A. Hemelrijk and G. Woolf (eds.), Women and Roman City in the Latin West (Leiden: Brill, 2013), which built on the earlier work of A. Goldsworthy and I. Haynes, The Roman Army as Community, Including Papers of a Conference Held at Birkbeck College, University of London on 11-12 January, 1997, Journal of Roman Archaeology, supplementary series 34 (1999).

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Source: Fagan Garrett G., Fibiger Linda, Hudson Mark, Trundle Matthew (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 1: The Prehistoric and Ancient Worlds. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 756 p.. 2020

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