Professor Tom Moore

It is obviously a sword cut to the head buried in the ditch.

Yeah.

And just cut into the skull.

Yeah.

So, I mean, and then we have many examples of that.

I guess one of the interesting things is when we then take that to say about, is it a warrior society?

So when we talked about hill forts, you know, it's very hard to see a warrior elite living at hill forts.

In many ways, it's hard to see a warrior elite.

So we have some burials of what you might call warriors.

There's a wonderful one at Mill Hill in Kent, where you have an individual buried with shield, sword.

And so you can say this individual is a warrior, but most people are not treated like that to the Iron Age.

You know, so they're actually relatively unusual burials.

So, if it was a warrior society, wouldn't we find more of those?

You know, if we think of East Yorkshire, there are individuals who are buried with weapons, but not all of those people and not most of those people.

So, and when we look at the evidence of trauma to violence on bodies, you know, it's only about 8% of the remains from somewhere like Danebury have trauma on it.

Now, it's a question of what proportion you'd expect.

But what I mean by that is that violence is a part of those societies, but there's a big difference from being a warrior elite.

You know, I always love, there's a great quote by an Iron Age specialist who said it's, you know, farmers who fight.

You know, they are farmers most of the time who do fight.

As I said before, you know, if you think of, there are massacres.