society.

Anglo-Saxon cemeteries have provided a useful line of broader investigation, including the cemetery at Sedgeford in North Norfolk with well-preserved warrior burials. One must be careful however not to draw immediate connections between grave goods and a person's position in life, a problem highlighted by the new moveme

Warfare can be considered a useful, but very flexible, indicator of a society's state of development and scale.

The commonly perceived easiest approach to archaeological problems is to look in the ground, so here is the first way in which to attack warfare.

Graves are obvious evidence of warfare, especially warrior graves, meaning that a burial contains evidence that the body was a soldier. This evidence could be grave goods in the form of weapons or tools possibly used as weapons (an interpretative step that must be handled carefully), or grave goods specifically implicative or directly descriptive of warfare. Indeed in a different way injuries remaining on the skeleton, skeletal trauma, if identified as wounds inflicted by humans, can often be taken as indicators of warfare, and even more interestingly, structures of the numbers of such injuries within a single cemetery (given that it is a fair social cross-section and not, for example, a mass grave after a battle) can provide useful information on a society's relationships with its immediate neighbours, or even whether it had differing immediate neighbours.

Anglo-Saxon burials are most reliable in terms of surviving and respecting their warriors into the afterlife, by placing their weapons in the grave with them, indicative also of the warrior's high status in society.

Anglo-Saxon cemeteries have provided a useful line of broader investigation, including the cemetery at Sedgeford in North Norfolk with well-preserved warrior burials. One must be careful however not to draw immediate connections between grave goods and a person's position in life, a problem highlighted by the new movemen

ing that a burial contains evidence that the body was a soldier. This evidence could be grave goods in the form of weapons or tools possibly used as weapons (an interpretative step that must be handled carefully), or grave goods specifically implicative or directly descriptive of warfare. Indeed in a different way injuries remaining on the skeleton, skeletal trauma, if identified as wounds inflicted by humans, can often be taken as indicators of warfare, and even more interestingly, structures of the numbers of such injuries within a single cemetery (given that it is a fair social cross-section and not, for example, a mass grave after a battle) can provide useful information on a society's relationships with its immediate neighbours, or even whether it had differing immediate neighbours.

Anglo-Saxon burials are most reliable in terms of surviving and respecting their warriors into the afterlife, by placing their weapons in the grave with them, indicative also of the warrior's high status in society.

Anglo-Saxon cemeteries have provided a useful line of broader investigation, including the cemetery at Sedgeford in North Norfolk with well-preserved warrior burials. One must be careful however not to draw immediate connections between grave goods and a person's position in life, a problem highlighted by the new moveme

n the skeleton, skeletal trauma, if identified as wounds inflicted by humans, can often be taken as indicators of warfare, and even more interestingly, structures of the numbers of such injuries within a single cemetery (given that it is a fair social cross-section and not, for example, a mass grave after a battle) can provide useful information on a society's relationships with its immediate neighbours, or even whether it had differing immediate neighbours.

Anglo-Saxon burials are most reliable in terms of surviving and respecting their warriors into the afterlife, by placing their weapons in the grave with them, indicative also of the warrior's high status in society.

Anglo-Saxon cemeteries have provided a useful line of broader investigation, including the cemetery at Sedgeford in North Norfolk with well-preserved warrior burials. One must be careful however not to draw immediate connections between grave goods and a person's position in life, a problem highlighted by the new moveme

nformation on a society's relationships with its immediate neighbours, or even whether it had differing immediate neighbours.

Anglo-Saxon burials are most reliable in terms of surviving and respecting their warriors into the afterlife, by placing their weapons in the grave with them, indicative also of the warrior's high status in society.

Anglo-Saxon cemeteries have provided a useful line of broader investigation, including the cemetery at Sedgeford in North Norfolk with well-preserved warrior burials. One must be careful however not to draw immediate connections between grave goods and a person's position in life, a problem highlighted by the new moveme

society.

Anglo-Saxon cemeteries have provided a useful line of broader investigation, including the cemetery at Sedgeford in North Norfolk with well-preserved warrior burials. One must be careful however not to draw immediate connections between grave goods and a person's position in life, a problem highlighted by the new movements of gender archaeology.

Following on from this, the battlefield itself provides, when it survives, possibly the best evidence for warfare. Not only may the later battlefields preserve the memory of fighting men, such as the Thermopylae mound memorial (although archaeologists are not allowed to excavate this heritage site), but solid evidence of a battle may be present in small finds littered around the site, or in mass graves for the deceased. It must be noted that mass graves are not always created by warfare, ritual or disease being two other possible causes, although usually these are easy to distinguish in the skeletal examination. One theory for a collection of skeletons at Maiden Castle Hill Fort is a mass grave after a battle, whilst there is an undisputed later one from the 14th century Battle of Towton, or from Napoleon's great Russian retreats via Vilnius. These sites are very interesting from a number of angles. First, Maiden Castle yielded a skeleton with a Roman scorpio bolt lodged in his spine, now in Dorchester Museum, a fine example of skeletal trauma where the offending implement was still in position.

At Towton, forensic pathology could do a great deal to reveal the nature and technology of warfare and medicine at the time, with the skull-shattering head wounds alluding to close-quartered fighti