How Violent Was Iron Age Europe?

At the outset it is worth posing the general question, how violent was this period for the inhabitants of Iron Age Europe? To read the accounts of outsiders - Greek and Roman commentators - one would think that, at least during the Late Iron Age, the peoples who inhabited the lands north of the Mediterranean shores were very violent indeed.

Weapons are abundant from Iron Age Europe, but it is no simple matter to move from an examination of them to the drawing of conclusions about violence. In earlier days of archaeological research, it was often assumed that weapons were a sign of violence, and much of European prehistory was interpreted in terms of raids and warfare. Today, as the database has grown and interpretive frameworks have become more sophisticated, many inves­tigators interpret the evidence largely in symbolic and ceremonial terms rather than in terms of actual combat.^[264] Some authors, such as Simon James, have criticised this approach, arguing that the trend has gone too far in representing the Iron Age as a peaceful period.^[265] Niall Sharples, on the other hand, has argued that warfare was common during the British Iron Age.^[266] For the greater Rhineland region on the Continent, Nico Roymans notes the reputation of the local tribes as particularly adept fighters whom the Roman military readily recruited as auxiliary troops after the conquest of Gaul.^[267] In his study of representations of warriors on Iron Age coins, Fraser Hunter suggests that warfare in this period was an activity mainly of elite groups, represented by their images on coins and by swords and occasionally helmets and other weapons in their burials.^[268] This approach would suggest that at least for part of the Iron Age, military activity was conducted by small bands of elite warriors, not by substantial armies.

The period of time known as the Iron Age was eight centuries long, from about 800 bce to the time of the Roman conquests, in around 50 bce.