Weapons and People: Depositions in Natural Places

The interplay of symbolism and violence seen in the design and construction of Iron Age hill forts is mirrored in the weaponry of the period. One of the most distinctive components of material culture during the period is La Tene (or Celtic) art.

The design and elaboration of martial gear gives some insights into the ways in which the identities certain of Iron Age individuals (mostly men and mostly of elite status) were bound up with their actual or perceived ability to inflict lethal injury. The ultimate fate of many of these objects also informs us about the ways in which violence was celebrated and commemorated.^[891] Aside from those found in burial contexts, most Iron Age weapons have been recovered, singly or in groups, from votive contexts, often in watery environments such as rivers, bogs and lakes. This is especially the case in Britain, Ireland and northern Europe, but also applies further south, as at the classic type site of La Tene, at Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland.^[892] Such finds form part of a broader context of ritual practice in later prehistoric Europe, where natural places, such as rivers, lakes, bogs, caves and hilltops, formed a persistent focus for communications with the supernatural.

Some of the largest and most informative weapon finds come from Scandinavia where they appear to commemorate warfare on a considerable scale. At Hjortspring, Nydam and Ejsby, in Denmark, for example, large wooden boats were transported to peatlands, where they were deposited with substantial quantities of weaponry. The practice continued over many centuries, from Hjortspring in the fourth century bce to the final deposition at Nydam in the fourth century ce.^[893] In the Illerup Adal river valley, in Jutland, more than 15,000 deliberately broken weapons were deposited at various locations in a boggy, wetland environment between around 200-500 ce.^[894] At Alken Enge, in the lower part of the valley, the remains of several hundred males have been found, whose bodies had apparently been exposed after death. These appear to have been warriors, killed in a large military engagement. At broadly the same period, deposits including large quantities of iron weaponry, and the remains of around fifty men, women and children, were placed in wetlands at Skedemosse, in Sweden, suggestive of a massacre deposit.^[895] The artefactual composition of many of these deposits is quite diverse, suggesting that they represent war booty from defeated outsiders, apparently offered to the gods in the aftermath of violent encounters. These sorts of deposits may be reflected to a degree in some of the classical sources. Paulus Orosius, writing in the early fifth century ce, for example, describes the massacre of prisoners and captured horses, and the destruction of cap­tured weaponry, by Cimbric warriors during the late second century bce: the Cimbri were supposed, by ancient authors such as Strabo and Tacitus, to have originated in Jutland.^[896]

Outside Scandinavia, large quantities of fine Iron Age weaponry have also been recovered alongside human and animal remains at La Tene in Switzerland, seemingly cast into the waters from a timber platform from the third to first centuries bce. The human remains included numerous crania and decapitated skeletons.^[897] Similar lakeside timber structures asso­ciated with Iron Age weaponry can be found at sites like Fiskerton, in eastern England, Lisnacrogher, in Ireland, and Llyn Cerrig Bach, in Wales.^[898] Elaborate metalwork has also been recovered from rivers, with notable concentrations in the Thames, the Bann and the Meuse.^[899]