Conclusion

While abundant evidence attests to the hardware of conflict and warfare - weapons, hill forts, wounded bodies, pictorial representations and textual sources from the Greek and Roman worlds - it is difficult to assess just how much actual violence and war occurred.

Weapons, Ritual and Warfare: Violence in Iron Age Europe demonstrative and symbolic roles. Their meanings were much more com­plex than simple implements for combat.^[311] The fortifications built around hill forts also had important roles as expressions of status and power, as well as defences against invasion. The amount of effort that was devoted to decorat­ing weapons also points to their functions as ways of demonstrating power and status and communicating identity.

Thus it seems that much of the evidence that relates to the topic of violence and warfare was designed to intimidate potential enemies, to express military readiness and power, in ways that served to avoid war. It is also important that weapons played major symbolic roles in Iron Age Europe. While many, including the often abundant spears and swords, were frequently plain and seem to have been intended for purely functional purposes, others were highly ornate, decorated with bronze and even gold, in some cases with the addition of coral and ivory. The placement of weapons in burials and in what appear to be votive deposits further attests to their roles far beyond strictly military uses.

What, then, is the meaning of all of the archaeological evidence for weaponry, fortifications and battlefields, interpreted in the light of the Greek and Roman texts about the peoples of Europe? How violent was Iron Age Europe? The eight centuries of the Iron Age in Europe were not especially violent times. As in all human societies, there were times when competition over resources, including land and accumulated wealth, led to violence. But before the arrival of the Roman armies of conquest there is no evidence for large-scale military confrontations, nor is there evidence that communities were constantly at war with one another. Sites such as Hjortspring, Gournay, Ribemont, La Tene and Manching seem to reflect the defeat of organised bands of warriors, but such sites are few and far between, and the scale of warfare was small, involving a few hundred combatants at the very most. More common were even smaller-scale con­frontations, between small raiding parties and even individual persons, members of what we would call ‘elites', vying for control of their commu­nities or of particular resources. The scenes of sword-fighters on the back of the Hochdorf couch indicate such individualised combat, and the high degree of ornamentation on many weapons makes clear their association with a very small group of individuals of high social status.

This situation of relatively rare and small-scale violence changed with the arrival of the thousands of heavily armed troops of the Roman legions. With

Caesar's invasions of central and northern Gaul during the 50s bce, subse­quent conquests of lands south of the Danube from its headwaters to the Black Sea, and the later Roman invasion of Britain in 43 ce, Europe became a much more violent place. Not only did the peoples of the regions directly attacked by the Roman armies become highly militarised, but the effects of the Romans' large-scale violence permeated the lands north and east of the major battlefields. The many weapons deposits in the bogs of northern Germany, Denmark and southern Sweden attest to these far-flung effects. The militarisation of the peoples of temperate Europe just before and during the time of the Roman conquests had a major impact on social and political organisation of the communities. Before the Roman armies arrived, how­ever, the Iron Age peoples of Europe were not unusually violent. The Greek and Roman texts that describe them as warlike were based on very particular circumstances that were not typical of Iron Age Europe as a whole.