Turning to the Earlier Bronze Age, after 2000 BC, it is important to note the differences between Britain and continental Europe. Daggers remain the domi- nant form in burial (Gerloff 1975). Although hal- berds and spearheads do appear, they are quite rare, except for halberds in Ireland (Waddell 2000: 129- 31). Although halberds are undoubtedly an unwieldy looking weapon, frequent use damage to the back of the hafting plate suggests that they may have been used in a similar way to medieval pole arms, that is mostly using the wooden staff and only strik- ing with the metal head to deliver a coup de grace (O’Flaherty et al. 2002). Where reliable skeletal reports exist, daggers are associated with males, and have thus long been seen as warrior equipment, fol- lowing Beaker traditions. As with the Later Neolithic copper daggers, however, there are few traces of combat on the daggers themselves (Wall 1987), except for some examples from the River Thames
(York 2002). Some daggers also seem inappropriate as weapons, as they are too small, have highly pol- ished and unworn blades, have very wide blades, or rounded tips (Gerloff 1975: 46 and 55). Swords or rapiers are rare.
Moreover, we also have a considerable skeletal record from the period, and this is relatively silent when it comes to the victims of conflict. In terms of individual episodes of combat these seem to be rela- tively few, as other surveys of the evidence have sug- gested (Osgood 1998: 19).
A similar case of death through arrowhead injury to those noted from the Later Neolithic may occur at Ballymacaldrack, Co. Antrim (Tomb and Davies 1938). Here the cremation of an adult, possibly female, in an Early Bronze Age Collared Urn was accompanied by a rough barbed-and-tanged arrow- head with a broken tip.
In western England, the Court Hill round barrow covered the primary burial of a young adult male with his left upper arm chopped through, probably the cause of death (Grinsell 1971: 120; Bristow 1998: Vol. II, 72). The barrow at Withington, north- west England (Wilson 1981), contained as a primary burial a cremated young adult female (radiocarbon dated to c. 1700 BC) who had a head injury in the process of healing. At Cnip, Isle of Lewis, Scotland (Dunwell et al. 1995), an older adult male (also dated to c. 1700 BC) buried with an undecorated pot had extensive but healed facial trauma.
A prehistoric bog burial which probably dates to the Earlier Bronze Age was found at Pilling in north- west England in 1864. A decapitated female skull was discovered wrapped in cloth, together with two strings of jet beads, one with a large amber bead at the centre (Edwards 1969). A probable dryland decapitation burial directly dated by radiocarbon to the beginning of the Earlier Bronze Age has been discovered at the foot of the Gog Magog Hills just outside Cambridge in eastern England (Hinman 2001). Following a possible decapitation, the remain- der of an adult male was buried in a pit which was later reopened to remove further portions of the body. In neither of these cases, however, is there any particular reason to suggest that the decapitation took place as an act of war. We may instead be look- ing at the result of the execution of socially defined outcasts such as witches and their subsequent vio- lent treatment to prevent their return. Certainly, the large sample of Earlier Bronze Age bog bodies from
the Wissey Embayment area of eastern England contains no cases of traumatic injury (Healy 1996), except for a possible case of an older adult (probably male) missing some teeth.
A skeleton of an adult male dating to the Earlier Bronze Age (accompanied by a food vessel and a battle-axe) from Callis Wold 23 barrow in Yorkshire (Mortimer 1905: 153-56) had received an extensive wound to the left wrist, causing the hand bones to fuse with those of the arm (Brothwell 1959-60). Another possible case is that of an older adult male from the Tallington round barrow in eastern England (Simpson 1976) with a possibly injured upper arm. From the very limited evidence available, two round barrows in Amesbury near Stonehenge have pro- duced cases of Earlier Bronze Age victims of conflict (Thomas 1956; Ashbee 1960: 79). Under one round barrow was an unaccompanied skeleton with the skull and mandible removed, the right arm missing and the left severed by a cut through the forearm. A burial below a nearby disc barrow ‘also showed signs of such treatment’, although whether this is dismemberment or violence is not made clear. The dangers of relying on old and incompletely pub- lished accounts of traumatic injuries are clear from the case of Stillorgan in Ireland, where a 1955 exca- vation uncovered a female skeleton in a stone cist with an oyster shell and a flint flake; a blow to the head was stated to be the cause of death (noted by Waddell 1990: 86). However, a recent re-examination of the skeleton suggests that this is post-mortem damage (B. Molloy pers. comm.). The recently redis- covered and extensively injured Sonna Demesne man (Sikora and Buckley 2003) was also not, as believed, a Bronze Age victim but a medieval one as revealed by radiocarbon dating (B. Molloy pers. comm.).
The disputed Sutton Veny bell barrow ‘warrior’ (Johnston 1980; Osgood 1999) from Wessex may also belong here. The barrow covered a central burial in a wooden coffin with Earlier Bronze Age pottery and a bronze dagger. On the edge of the mound, apparently below the surviving remnants of the mound, was a grave containing the burial of an adult aged twenty-four to twenty-eight years, accompa- nied only by a shark tooth, ‘the victim of a particu- larly violent head-wound, probably from a sword’ (Johnston 1980: 38). Because of this interpretation of the traumatic injury, the burial was assumed to date to the Later Bronze Age, when swords were in use, and thus the burial had to be a subsequent burial
(after the mound was constructed) in a grave which was then carefully backfilled and packed down with chalk. Recently, Osgood (1999) has suggested that the absence of Later Bronze Age burial in Britain makes this more likely to be an Anglo-Saxon sec- ondary burial – a well established type. However, the illustrations of the wounds (unfortunately the skull itself has been mislaid) are also consistent with an interpretation of blunt force trauma (S. Leach pers. comm.), especially as the fracture does not cross sutures, so this could indeed be an Earlier Bronze Age violent death.
Although the relative paucity of the artefactual and skeletal record for conflict in the Earlier Bronze Age is clear, one indirect piece of evidence does point in the direction of warfare. The Irish wooden shield mould from Kilmahamogue used for making V- notched leather shields dates (from direct radiocarbon dating – Hedges et al. 1991) to around 1900-1600 BC. This is the earliest known so far of the group, but few of the others have been directly dated. As Osgood notes (1998: 10), this would preclude any idea of dagger combat. Perhaps the concentration of swords noted by Harding in Ireland (2000: 279) may have a beginning in the Early Bronze Age, although shields do not automatically imply the presence of swords. Although the beauty of the male warrior (Treherne 1995) seems to be present in the Earlier Bronze Age of Britain, we can see few archaeological traces of their actions. Settlements in general are difficult to locate, so we may be dealing with a fairly mobile population, therefore static defences such as enclo- sures may have been inappropriate, and they are indeed entirely absent.
Overall, the Later Neolithic and Earlier Bronze Age record of conflict is remarkably thin. This raises the question of how long the ‘warrior aristocracy’ commonly proposed for Late Neolithic-Early Bronze Age Britain could have sustained itself without war- ring. Interestingly, Robb (1997) has noted a similar pattern for Italy, in which the frequency of cranial trauma is highest in the Early and Middle Neolithic but declines in the Late Neolithic even though weapons made of imported metal appear and weaponry becomes a central theme in rock art. Perhaps the pan-European prestige good networks (the most obvious of which are the movement of metal and amber) acted to suppress warfare, although this appears not to be the case elsewhere, e.g. in Norway (Fyllingen this volume).