Scotland's First Warriors

Three thousand years ago, prehistoric Scotland was a landscape of rival communities, raids and warfare. Bands of warriors fought for power and territory leaving behind extraordinary weapons that reveal a more violent side to Scotland’s ancient past. In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr Matthew Knight, Senior Curator of Prehistory at the National Museum of Scotland, to explore Scotland’s first warriors. Who were these Bronze Age fighters? What did their weapons reveal about their status and identity? And how did warfare shape life in prehistoric Scotland? MORE The Ancients is now on YouTube! Watch here: @TheAncientsPodcast https://www.youtube.com/@TheAncientsPodcast Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. Video Editor is Matthew Wilson. Produced by Joseph Knight and McKenna Fernandez. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week, plus early access, ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 0:34Speaker 01

  I'm Connor Tomlinson from Love on the Spectrum. History is my thing, and I've been waiting my whole life for a show like this one.

• 0:41Speaker 02

  And I'm Carter Roy, and this is What the Fact? Three facts a week, each with a whole story behind it. The history class you actually wished you had in school. New episodes every Wednesday. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.

• 1:16Tristan Hughes?

  Scotland, 3,000 years ago. And a small group of men approach a settlement. They come intent on violence and plunder. In their hands are an array of deadly weapons. Axes, spears, rapiers. Leather and wooden shields form their main defence alongside woolen cloaks. Leading these warriors is a much more splendid figure, clad in bronze armour, wielding a deadly looking sword and a decorated round shield.

• 1:56Tristan Hughes?

  He is the leader, the chief of the settlement they had come from, not too far away. This warband had come to raid, to steal the livestock of this neighbouring community that was competing with them for these lands. But they had also come to kill. It's this more violent side of Scotland's prehistoric story that we're going to delve into today. A new exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland has brought together lots of incredible artefacts discovered across the country, wielded for war and violence by people thousands of years ago.

• 2:37Tristan Hughes?

  Brazen shields, razor sharp rapiers, pointed spears, bizarre halberds, axes, swords, daggers, you name it. Welcome to the Ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the story of Scotland's first warriors. Our guest is Dr Matthew Knight, Senior Curator of Prehistory at the National Museum of Scotland.

• 3:10Tristan Hughes?

  Matt, it is such a pleasure to see you again. Welcome to the show.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me, Tristan.

• 3:16Tristan Hughes?

  It's been some time since we last spoke, and that was all about Kilmartin Galen and the story of Bronze Age Scotland for our Prehistoric Scotland series. And Matt, I mean, I love Scotland's archaeology. It has such a rich prehistoric story. And that is certainly the case when you explore its Bronze Age archaeology.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I have the great privilege to study the Bronze Age in Scotland and share the stories that people left behind through the archaeology, curating hundreds, thousands of artefacts at the National Museum of Scotland. And it's, yeah, fantastic.

• 3:54Tristan Hughes?

  And you have created lots of those artefacts into this brand new exhibition, Scotland's First Warriors. So Matt, I'm guessing from that title, do we have quite a lot of evidence from the archaeology for conflict at this time too?

• 4:06Speaker 02

  Yes and no. It's part of what the exhibition is, is doing is sort of challenging people to think about, when, when do we think conflict started or what defines conflict? And when does two people hitting each other on the head with a hammer or an axe change from an act of violence to an act of war? There's plenty of evidence to suggest that there's conflict going on, but it's obviously a much more nuanced story than that. And that's part of what we're trying to tell with the exhibition.

• 4:38Tristan Hughes?

  Well, we're going to delve into all of that, Matt. But let's set the scene first of all. When someone says Bronze Age Scotland, when in time should we be thinking?

• 4:47Speaker 02

  So we are dealing with a period about four and a half thousand years ago, 2,450 B.C.

• 4:56Tristan Hughes?

  Wow, okay.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  To be slightly more precise. And that's the conventional beginning of the Bronze Age in Scotland and Britain in general. And that extends to around 800 B.C. So about 1,600 years later, at which point we change to the Iron Age.

• 5:13Tristan Hughes?

  And so is this, I know it's such a general term, but with the Bronze Age in Scotland, is it very much the time when bronze is the metal of choice? When the tin and, when the combining of tin and copper really comes to the fore in the artefacts that we have surviving?

• 5:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, the bronze artefacts are what defines the Bronze Age in general. But it's now generally seen as shifting from what's conventionally called the Late Neolithic, the Late Stone Age, around the start of the Bronze Age is defined by the coming of the Beaker people and the influx of migrating communities from the continent. And they don't, they bring knowledge of metalworking and, and that's when metalworking begins. But they also bring new burial practices. They bring new ideas. They bring a new types of tools. I mean, the Beaker people themselves are defined by this very elegant style of pottery that they bring and they often bury with their dead. So yes, we call it the Bronze Age.

• 6:15Speaker 02

  We define it by this one material, but actually there's a whole range of practices and other ideologies going on that sort of shift over this period. I mean, the Bronze Age covers about 1,500 years, 1,600 years. So it's, you know, it's like us defining the entire period from the, the end of the Roman period to the modern day as one single age, you know? It's, I always try to bear that in mind when I'm trying to define any one aspect of it.

• 6:42Tristan Hughes?

  Absolutely. It does make you appreciate it when you put it like from the end of Roman times to present day, just how large a period of time we, we, we give to these ages in prehistory. And Matt, going on from that, I apologise because I feel this is, because it is covering such a large period of time. But, but generally speaking, what types of societies? What types of communities, of settlements should we be thinking of with the Bronze Age in Scotland?

• 7:10Speaker 02

  The Bronze Age in Scotland and, you know, generally in Britain at this time and Ireland, you're dealing with small farming communities. They, you know, agriculture has been a thing for over, well over a thousand years by this point. So people know how to farm. They're generally living in round houses. And this might range from a small individual farmsteads with field systems attached, or it might range up to settlements of six or seven round houses. You do get some larger than that, but generally communities are around 100 people large. And they're close knit family networks. They, they're farmers, they're craft workers.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  They tend to livestock, they make pottery, they weave textiles. You know, they are settled communities at this time and quite sophisticated in, in what they do and their ways of life.

• 8:07Tristan Hughes?

  And do we get a sense at this time, should we be thinking egalitarian? Or do we see clear signs probably that there were, there were hierarchies as well?

• 8:15Speaker 02

  That's a fun question. I think we definitely have signs of high status individuals. That comes through some of the burial practices, particularly in the early Bronze Age. You have men and women who are buried with really, really rich jewellery or weaponry or pottery or, you know, very nicely made things that not everybody gets buried with. And then even in the later Bronze Age, we see fewer and fewer burials and we don't get such a clear sign of status through how people are buried. But you definitely have items that suggest that you, you know, somebody has a little bit more power than somebody else

• 8:58Speaker 02

  or someone has a bit more authority than somebody else. But yes, exactly whether, how hierarchical this society is, it's, it's a bit unclear at this time. But you're, you know, you're, you can be reasonably certain that, you know, there's someone in charge.

• 9:14Tristan Hughes?

  And I think we'll delve more into that when we get into the words of like chiefs and, and warriors as this chat goes on, which leads me to my last big background question, Matt, which is, you hinted at it earlier, the, the definition of organised warfare and warriors. I mean, how would you, you know, separate that from evidence of violence in the archaeological record?

• 9:38Speaker 02

  It's a really challenging question and one that we've thought about a lot with this exhibition. You know, one of the, one of the ways this exhibition was first pitched was like the origins of war. Then it became quite clear that actually for us to do the origins of war, we have to define what we mean by war. And that looks different in lots of different places and certainly very different when you, when you're faced with the archaeological record. Generally speaking, you'd want evidence of warfare to comprise of large fortifications in the landscape, um, large amounts of weaponry, trauma on human remains, so remains from sword blows or axe blows or something like that. And if you're really lucky, like battlefield sites.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  And in Scotland, at any one time, we, we have one, maybe two pieces of each of those evidence. So we either have fortifications but no weapons or we have weapons but no fortifications. So we've stuck very clearly with the idea that we're dealing with acts of conflict and violence. And some of that might be more organised or not. And the exhibition doesn't just cover the Bronze Age. It stretches from the Neolithic through to the Roman period. Because the Romans sort of provide a point at which most people would agree, like you're looking at modern, the beginnings of modern militarisation in Western Europe. It's probably what most people think of when they think of the origins of warfare.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  But some of what you see through the Iron Age and the Roman period very clearly begins in the Bronze Age. And I think that's, that's one of the really exciting aspects of the Bronze Age for us.

• 11:18Tristan Hughes?

  And for a time before the written word, when you know, to do this, you're looking at the weapons themselves. We're definitely going to delve into that. Interesting mention about battlefields too. So we'll certainly come back to that as well. But let's go back to the beginning. You mentioned how this exhibition is not just the Bronze Age, it actually goes to the period before that as well, the Neolithic, the Stone Age. So thinking of the times like those great stone monuments of, of Orkney, Skara Bray and the Ring of Broca and so on. And is it back in the Stone Age, Matt, that you first start seeing archaeologically signs of conflict and violence?

• 11:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's certainly in Scotland, it seems to originate in the early Neolithic. And we, we have glimpses of this from across Europe. And in some places, it, it seems to occur earlier, there seems to be earlier signs of conflict. But in Scotland, what we have at the beginning of the Neolithic is some larger implements are being made. There's also innovations in arrowhead technology. So you have these quite distinctive leaf shaped arrowheads that emerge. And they're, they're really very elegant little things, but they're really effective at penetrating deep into the flesh of an animal. But some theories suggest that they were also innovated because they're pretty good at piercing into a human

• 12:38Speaker 02

  as well. And it's interesting because we have all these monuments being built in particularly northern Scotland and around Orkney. And these chambered tombs contain the remains of individuals and many of them seem, well, have died violent deaths or have seen repeated acts of violence against them. So we have arrowheads that are embedded in the back of someone. And you, so we have a single vertebra that has an arrowhead embedded in it. And you, you know, you can say, is this a hunting accident gone wrong? Is this somebody who loosed an arrow and accidentally hit, hit another member of their hunting party?

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Or was this shot in, in anger? And we, there's quite a concentration of, of evidence of violence on all, all members of society at this point. Like, it seems to be men, women and children are all found in these tombs. And several of them do show signs of trauma from something like an axe or an arrow. So we've definitely got enough evidence to suggest that there's some form of conflict going on. How organised it is, how regular it is, there's some suggestions that say that the people who are buried in these tombs are part of genealogies of particular families. So maybe the family you belong to has something to do with whether or not you engage in ceremonial violence, for instance. But yeah, we definitely

• 14:01Speaker 02

  have growing evidence that it's becoming a preoccupation at that time.

• 14:04Tristan Hughes?

  The early Neolithic, so that's between 6000 and 5000 years ago, roughly about that time?

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, we're talking around 3700 B.C.

• 14:12Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, wow. Okay, that's pretty early. So that's much earlier than Mace Howe and the likes of that. Okay. Yeah, but ceremonial violence, sorry, when I think of that, I think they're toasting a dead person in a tomb, and then they set three people against each other like gladiators or those kind of things.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I don't know. I, I have no idea what the nature of violence, like what, what it looks like at this time. You know, I'm not going to speculate on, you know, exactly how these ceremonies were set up. But slightly later on, at around 2900 B.C. So we're still in the Neolithic, but nearly eight, 900 years later, we have evidence of two people from the, from the same tomb on Orkney at a site called Coeine. And they've both got blunt force trauma on the top of their head, which means they've been hit on the head at death or close to the point of death by something blunt and heavy. And it's almost like they

• 15:11Speaker 02

  would have been kneeling down for that, or they would have, you know, the blow would have come from above. And so it looks like they've been violently killed. But then actually, there's a, there's a hint that there's something a bit more coordinated about it than two people just going at it with some axes. And, and no doubt that did happen. But I, the Neolithic, I would say is defined by this ambiguity. I think it's this, you have an axe, but an axe isn't designed for, as a weapon, it's designed to chop down a tree. An arrow is designed to shoot down an animal. A spear is designed for hunting. So all of these objects could be used against another human at some point if you wanted them to. But

• 15:54Speaker 02

  that's not their primary function. And so you then enter the debate of why are they producing these objects?

• 16:00Tristan Hughes?

  Well, Matt, I mean, I feel we need to do a quick shout out for that amazing enigmatic set of objects you have from the, the Stone Age. Those balls, which some people think are maceheads.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, the Neolithic carved stone balls, they're, they're wonderful things.

• 16:17Tristan Hughes?

  Hugo Anderson Weimar's favourite.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely. Whether he likes it or not, they're his favourite. My colleague who curates the Neolithic at National Museum of Scotland, he's responsible for this collection and has done amazing research looking into these objects. And they're very, very localised to Scotland. They only occur in Scotland with one exception, that's, but whatever reason, I think it's ended up in Norway. But all of them are sort of spherical stone balls that fit quite neatly in the palm of your hand. You know, they're not much bigger than that. Some are very smooth and polished, but many are ornamented with these knobs. And some of them are highly decorated, some of them are much more uneven, some are unfinished,

• 17:04Speaker 02

  some are completely finished. And they are, no two carved stone balls are the same. And so there's an awful lot of debate around what they're used for. And there are hundreds of theories, whether they're astronomical, or whether they're for like superstitious amulets or, or gaming pieces. Or, but one of the persistent theories is that they are used to bludgeon things, you know, that you would attach some sort of bong or strap to them, and they could be swung like a mace, or they could be hit like a hammer. I think as it goes, if you need something to hit somebody else on the head with something, a carved stone ball works. But in the same way that a rock works as for hitting someone

• 17:45Speaker 02

  on the head, it's one theory amongst a plethora of theories. There's 500 odd of these things. And I, they cover, I think they span about 300 or 400 years of use. Some of them even show up into the early Bronze Age, they get buried with people centuries after they were made. So I think for us to define them by a single use is, we, we like, we can't do that. I suspect that they have many, many uses, but we can't rule out that they were weapons. And intriguingly enough, the, the skulls I was mentioning earlier, the crania that have been hit on the head from this tomb at Coeine, the size and shape of the whole fits with a Neolithic macehead or a Neolithic carved stone ball. So it's, you

• 18:28Speaker 02

  know, you can, you know, you can join the dots in many different ways, but I quite like that sort of notion.

• 18:34Tristan Hughes?

  No, and I remember going up to Orkney on the mainland and, and walking up to Coeine tomb. And it's that chambered tomb, and you have to crawl in. And it's not one of the biggest, it's not like Unston or, as a Mace Howe or Skara Bray, one of the main places, Stone Age sites to visit. But, you know, once you add the story of those two figures to it, Matt, also the dog, I believe is there as well.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah, the dog.

• 18:58Tristan Hughes?

  And then like, like, definitely visit Coeine if you get the chance. And with that context as well, it's very interesting. So Matt, to summarise this, this Neolithic part.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:11Tristan Hughes?

  Clear evidence of violence and trauma.

• 19:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:16Tristan Hughes?

  Not clear evidence of warfare just yet, though.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  I wouldn't say so. I certainly not in Scotland. I think you, some people might make the case for other parts of Europe, but in Scotland, we're limited to the remains of a few individuals buried on Orkney, buried on Inca Thennesse, and fairly ambiguous stone tools.

• 19:36Tristan Hughes?

  And Inca Thennesse, that's the big region just opposite Orkney in the north east of Scotland mainland.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah.

• 19:41Tristan Hughes?

  Okay. So Matt, we get to the beginning of the Bronze Age, and you mentioned earlier, defined by these new people coming in, these migrations of people. And what shift do we start to see, if any, in regards to violence when we get to the Bronze Age?

• 19:59Speaker 02

  I think in the very earliest elements of the Bronze Age, the shift is not massive towards violence. I think that there was some genetic research done nearly a decade ago now, actually, which suggested or highlighted that there was this, what's called a genetic turnover of the people living in Britain at this time. And many people wondered if that might be a wipeout invasion, invading people from northwestern Europe, coming in and wiping out local populations. We now know that the story is much more complex than that. When the geneticists refer to a genetic turnover, it's not the same as

• 20:40Speaker 02

  what an archaeologist hears as a genetic turnover. It's not a genocidal thing. What seems to happen is several small communities, well, many, many small communities coming over and assimilating with the local populations and the local populations adopting many of the ideas that these foreigners bring in. So they like the look of their pottery. They bring in that pottery and then they start making it in their own way. And it just seems that over time, that genetic signature just drowns out the previous genetic signature. And people bury their dead in new ways. They go from more like, rather than cremating

• 21:22Speaker 02

  their dead or burying them in big communal tombs, they start to bury the individual in individual graves. And some of the status of specific individuals starts to become clearer to us as archaeologists when you find a female grave that's buried with ornately decorated jet jewelry and a finely crafted pot, for instance. What the introduction of these ideas means in terms of conflict and violence, it's more to do with the fact that they bring metal and metal allows people to do things that they haven't been able to do before. So one of the things that I think really marks a fundamental shift in

• 22:02Speaker 02

  society is the introduction of copper, gold, and later bronze, which, as you said, was as an alloy of tin and copper, but it's the first recyclable material in human history. Never before have you been able to make something and decide, that's not very good, I'm going to melt it down and try again. You know, stone tools, you're forever reducing, they're called reductive technologies, and a pot, if it misfires, you have to smash it down, you can't reuse that material. So bronze allows people to really fine tune that craft quite quickly and at the same time, make objects they already knew about, but in a

• 22:43Speaker 02

  new, harder and sharper material. So they make axes from bronze, they make daggers from bronze. And this is not to say that stone daggers didn't exist before, or stone axes didn't exist before. But once they figure out how to make a really, really strong material and sharpen it, it brings up that level of efficiency in terms of how they can do certain things. And what it also allows, and I should say, this is over the course of about 600 years. So the Bronze Age, let's say it starts around 2450 B.C. People start off making some types of daggers and weaponry and axes, but it's not really until about

• 23:27Speaker 02

  600 years later that in around 1800, 1700 B.C. that they really invest a lot of time in it, in making what look more like weapons.

• 23:40Tristan Hughes?

  And I'd like in context, like, because you use that nice example of between the Romans and us today, like for the period, I mean, that's the roughly the equivalent of between the Romans leaving Britain and the Battle of Hastings. So once again, a big amount of time.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. All of these generalisations have to be viewed in that context of, you know, we're so used to modern history, you know, you're dealing with the 10 years here or 10 years there. But prehistory is such huge swathes of time and technological development is gradual and quite stable for a lot of these periods. You know, there are these sudden shifts in how things change. But, you know, the assimilation of the beaker culture, for instance, takes place over about 300 or 400 years. It's not a, you know, it's not like one day someone comes over, says, here's a nice new pot, and then everyone makes new pots. It's, you know, it takes several hundred years and several generations of people to

• 24:36Speaker 02

  the shift towards that. And the same, I think, is true with adopting bronze. Not everyone adopts bronze everywhere at the same time. You know, for some people, stone was always good for my grandfather and it's good for me too. You know, they just don't use it.

• 24:50Tristan Hughes?

  And so what happens some 600, roughly 600 years into the Bronze Age, you do see this, this shift in, what am I saying, warfare, in conflict with the development of new types of artefacts.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think the, I would say the pinnacle, or rather the key changing point in the Bronze Age is the invention of the sword.

• 25:12Tristan Hughes?

  The sword, okay.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  Which you couldn't do in any other material up until this point. Bronze allowed people to cast longer and longer blades. And they, they start off making various types of blades. They have these blades that we refer to as daggers and they're quite, what you imagine in a dagger to be, a very short blade, maybe up to 30 centimetres long with a handle on it. But these objects slowly get longer and longer and sharper and sharper. The sort of first true swords, I guess, are, they're down by the misnomer of rapiers and dirks. And most people will think of like a medieval musketeer rapier or, you know, or a medieval

• 25:58Speaker 02

  dirk. But these look nothing like that. You know, they're just very long, sharp bits of bronze. That would have been harped on a, on a handle and would have been really, really effective at harming another human. And that's, that's the fundamental shift here that I, I see, is that up until this point, as I mentioned earlier, everything that's been made in human history has been made for some other function and maybe it was turned to violence. You know, spears for hunting, very good at pointing at another person, axes for chopping down trees, but a sword isn't good for anything other than harming another human.

• 26:35Tristan Hughes?

  And but for daggers, you mentioned that daggers came earlier. They, is that, I guess, a little hunting dagger, we should think, primary purpose, kind of thing?

• 26:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's, there's some speculation around whether daggers are for harming people or not. There's been some research that was done in Italy recently that found the remains of animal hide and animal skins on, on the edges of daggers. So they, they might be for skinning animals on it. And again, sure, it's, it's great if you're sacrificing people. I don't mean, there's not huge evidence of, of anyone doing that. But, you know, if you need to harm, harm somebody with it, then you can do that. But it's quite a, I think, one of the things that I, I'm always trying to remind myself of with this topic

• 27:22Speaker 02

  is it's easy to frame it as a technological development over time. But actually, you, if you think about what a dagger entails, it entails you getting very close to somebody and it's a very intimate way of harming someone. Even, you know, even swinging an axe at somebody is quite a violent act. You know, I think the, you have to consider what the, what the motivations for all of this were, and we might come back to that. But the, I don't think that it's a given that people take up weapons and then just start fighting. Or they're looking for things to fight with. I, I think that, that in a world that we

• 28:05Speaker 02

  live in today, where you can press a button and fire something on the other side of the world, actually, all conflict and violence is very, very close up and personal. You know, it's very intimate in that way.

• 28:18Tristan Hughes?

  And so you get the development of the sword, which gives a more reach and, you know, longer weapons. But as you say, this is a time when, for the first time, it's clear that something has been made primarily for hurting another human.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it sparks what I refer to as the Bronze Age arms race. You know, I think it's, yeah, it's, if you have a sword, or if your neighbour has a sword, you want a bigger sword, right? I mean, that's a story as old as time.

• 28:46Tristan Hughes?

  He has a sword, I have a sword.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  I have a sword. Yeah. But also, if you can't get a bigger sword, you want something to defend yourself from that sword, you know. So you don't just, the sword doesn't just represent somebody making a pointy thing. It's also, people start needing shields in a different way. They need armour, they need to think about how do they defend their settlements. Also, crafts, you have to decide that this is a suitable investment of time and resources. So if a crafts person is making a sword, they're not making other tools. So, you know, one sword by weight roughly equates to about three axes. So you decide that you, your

• 29:32Speaker 02

  investment of bronze is going to go into this weapon. And you can't just pick up a sword and start swinging it around. You need to start training with it. And if you're training with the sword, you're not out in the fields farming. Somebody else is doing that and somebody else is picking up the slack and feeding you. And I think this is, this is sort of the complexity of the sword as an, as an object. And sure, many of these things may have been happening before the sword, but the sword is the first identifiable moment where you go, actually, people have to really think this is worth it.

• 30:04Tristan Hughes?

  And do we have a lot of swords surviving from Bronze Age Scotland?

• 30:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, we, we have hundreds.

• 30:10Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  You know, it's, it's quite astonishing. This is hundreds over several hundred years. But it's alongside hundreds of spears, hundreds of bronze axes, which, as some evidence suggests that they were used in violence as well, as it comes alongside evidence for shields. So exactly what the scale of this was and how many people were fighting, we're not sure. But there's definitely a lot of swords and a lot of weapons. And I said at the start, if you want evidence, one of the key evidences for violence or organised conflict that you would want is weapons. And we certainly have plenty of those.

• 30:55Tristan Hughes?

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• 32:13Tristan Hughes?

  And where do we find these weapons, like swords? Do we usually find them in graves or elsewhere?

• 32:19Speaker 02

  Generally not in graves. It's one of the great mysteries of the sort of later Bronze Age period, this period around 1200 B.C. to about 800 B.C. We don't know where people are being buried at this time. The way that people are treating their dead leaves no archaeological trace. You can think that they're cremating them and scattering their ashes, for instance. You know, they're not building monuments to the dead. So where we find weapons is generally in the landscape, in what archaeologists tend to call natural places. So this is either the top of a hill, or maybe in a loch, or in a river, but generally away from where you have settlement activity. And this is true of hoarding of lots and

• 33:04Speaker 02

  lots of different items, but swords, particularly in Scotland, and Northern Britain more generally, are often found plunged into like peatbogs, or marshlands, and similar locations. And they're often buried complete and in their scabbards, which is completely different from what you see further south. So in Southern Britain at the same time, if people are burying a sword, they're hacking it into pieces, and it's usually mixed in with ingots and other bits of raw material. But in Scotland, there seems to be a bit of a reverence for burying complete spears and swords.

• 33:41Tristan Hughes?

  That is very cool.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, there were exceptions to this, and a couple that I guess are worth mentioning. Our general interpretation of these objects is people are giving up their arms, they're giving up their weapons. For whatever reason, you've decided that it's worth putting this sword into the ground. And there's a lovely case from the Isle of Shuna, which is on the west coast of Scotland. And there were three swords which are described when they're found as being point down in the bog as though thrust in. And you've kind of got this vision of three people thrusting swords into this bog, and I don't know, giving up their weapons in this way. We also have cases where people have gathered a lot of weapons and

• 34:24Speaker 02

  deliberately destroyed them. There's an example from Duddington Lock, which is a body of water at the base of Arthur's Seat, this great feature of the Edinburgh landscape. And people were dredging for what's called shelmile, it's good for agricultural stuff, in the 18th century. And then they pulled up this horde of weapons. And this is swords and spears that are all melted together or broken. And there's probably about 50 objects in total, and they've clearly been piled up onto a fire and just burned. You know, some of them are really heavily smashed up, some of them are really distorted. And then

• 35:09Speaker 02

  they've been sunk into this loch in prehistory. And it's not an accidental losing, because the accounts say that the dredgers dredged this up about 150 yards from the shore of the loch. So you start to get this picture that actually people have come together with all these weapons. They've put them onto a fire, and this would have been a massive fire that would have burned to about 1,000 degrees Celsius. They've then waited for this fire to die down. They've then collected up all these weapons, got into their logboat, gone out to the middle of the loch, and then dumped all these things overboard. Then you start to think, well, why are you doing that? You know, what is so significant about

• 35:54Speaker 02

  these things? Especially when you think these are dangerous objects, these represent threat and danger. And you think, is this an act of destroying them so ultimately that nobody could ever use them again? Nobody can ever get them back because they've been sunk to the bottom of the loch. And even if they did swim to the bottom of the loch, they're not, you know, the swords are so ruined at this point.

• 36:17Tristan Hughes?

  I said, the theories abound, and this is one of the joys of Bronze Age archaeology. There's no written records, so the various theories. Could it be that that community had recently, you know, successfully attacked another neighbouring community, then taken their weapons, confiscated them, and thrown them away so that they can't be used again?

• 36:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I think, and there are Roman accounts of this in parts of Iron Age Northern Europe, where they refer to weapons being smashed up and thrown into watery places. It's hard to use that as an analogy, because there's about a thousand years difference between that Roman account and what we're talking about. But the similarities are really stark. And Duddington Lock isn't the only place that this happens. There's at least one other site in Scotland, and several sites across Britain as a whole, where if you want to think about the evidence of single events involving conflict, maybe these big hordes of destroyed weapons are glimpses of the aftermath of war.

• 37:21Tristan Hughes?

  Ah. Before we delve more into particular artefacts and hordes, and the shields, which we've hinted at already, that armour part of this topic, which is also so interesting. Shall we now kind of address that prickly topic of, you know, you've now got the sword?

• 37:39Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 37:40Tristan Hughes?

  And seemingly now evidence of organised warfare, and people dedicating time to training with these weapons. So the emergence of what we can see as warriors, can we match potentially?

• 37:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so. I definitely think of them as warriors at this time. I don't necessarily think of them as full-time warriors. I don't think that you've got people going around saying, I'm not going to do any farming because I'm a warrior.

• 38:07Tristan Hughes?

  Or going to be a mercenary or something like that.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't think you've got that. But certainly, you have an emergence of a new role in society, where this person reflects, or this role reflects, like, the threat of violence. They become very important as like the defender of the community, I think. Their status is marked out by the fact that they can fight, or that they might be dressed in particular costume. But most of this evidence is limited to the bronze material that's left behind, the swords or the spears, or occasionally you get decorative pins that are associated with swords. And one of the theories is that these are symbols of the

• 38:51Speaker 02

  warrior class, for instance. But actually, what role these people played, or how high up in society they might have been, is unclear. You know, they have, they must sit, or must have sat, at a very interesting threshold in society, because to one community, they are the defender, and to another community, they're a threat. And it depends on which end of the sword you're at, as to which way you view this figure.

• 39:20Tristan Hughes?

  Well, Matt, I mean, my next question then is, what type of warfare would they be engaged in? Should we be thinking of a community warband going out and raiding another community that they didn't get on with?

• 39:35Speaker 02

  I think so. I think that, I think that's exactly the most appropriate way of thinking about it at this time. I think we've got raiding parties that would have gathered together when they needed to. This ties into what motivates people to fight, which is, you know, another big question. But you can generally whittle it down to some very core principles of people are willing to go to war, or willing to fight either over resources, over territory, or prestige, or I would say, out of desperation. And so, and I think, you know, you might decide, I want that person's land, or that town, that community's land. So you go and

• 40:20Speaker 02

  you wage war, or you wage conflict. You might decide that you, it will bring you honour, or it brings your community honour if you go and attack these people, or what have you. But I suspect that certainly some acts were driven out of desperation, in the sense of, our harvest has failed, yours hasn't. And if we don't raid your supplies, or find like a way of trading with you, like, our community's going to starve. And then you, you know, you end up in sort of feuding, the realms of feuding. But the scale of warfare is a really, really interesting question. And the scale of conflict, how many people

• 41:02Speaker 02

  do you need to start a war? How many people need to be engaged in fights? To what extent is it an equal thing? Like, people have war forced upon them. You know, it's not always two sets of people decide, yes, we're going to go to war with each other. And we see that right through to the modern day. So.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  My conceptualisation of

• 41:26Speaker 02

  the scale of warfare at this time is you've got raiding parties of about thirty to fifty people. I can't, I think settlement patterns in Scotland, particularly during the Bronze Age, are sufficiently dispersed, but you would have known your neighbours, you would have had contact with local various communities and there would have been some densely occupied areas. But I don't, if you're thinking of communities that are living in groups of about a hundred, realistically, how many of those people are you going to send out at the risk of getting killed? And how many of those communities need to band together to build a force big enough to then go and, you know, attack another settlement?

• 42:10Speaker 02

  There's evidence in other parts of Europe that these conflicts might have been a bit bigger. There is a site in north eastern Germany called Tellenza and this was, this is a river valley that was being excavated in the nineties. And people started to discover human remains and bits of weaponry. And over the course of the last thirty, forty years, there's been ongoing investigations into a relatively small section of this river valley. But so far archaeologists have uncovered, I think it's up to around a hundred and forty remains, or remains of a hundred and forty people who have mostly seen traumatic deaths.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  But also evidence of horses and weaponry and a lot of weaponry that we wouldn't necessarily find in any other context. So they found things like axes, but also wooden clubs, bronze arrowheads. I think I read that there's something like more bronze arrowheads from this one site in Germany than there is in most of the rest of Germany or some, something like that. You know, if you had to define an item that was being used in conflict, you wouldn't say arrowheads. But that it seems to have been a core part of this battle in Tellenza. And it seems that this group of people who were killed were chased up the river valley and just slaughtered and they were left where they were, left where they died.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  It's an incredibly traumatic sounding event and archaeologists have only excavated a small portion of it. So we act, some people spec, wonder whether this was a couple of thousand people engaged in this conflict. We obviously don't, we only have the people that died there. And they are overwhelmingly young men. There are, there are some women and children, I think, but it's overwhelmingly men who have been, been killed here. So we have the people who would, who died, but we don't have the people who did the killing necessarily. So we don't know how many people were killed, how many people survived and got away.

• 44:23Speaker 02

  But it looks like they were chased up this river valley or routed or something like that. And it's, it's touted as the earliest battlefield in Europe, you know, it, it's dates to around fourteen hundred B.C. So, you know, the, the equivalent of, of sort of the Middle Bronze Age.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  And depending on who you ask, it has all sorts of connotations for the rest of Bronze Age Europe. You know, some people use this as evidence that we've got a rare glimpse of things that were really normal in the Bronze Age. I don't believe that's the case for Britain. I don't think we have sufficient evidence to say that you've got bands of up to a thousand people waging war on each other. It suggests a completely different organisation of society because you've got to get that many people together. And you are talking about an army at that point. It's not a raiding party of thirty, thirty of your mates that you've got together with some swords.

• 45:20Tristan Hughes?

  It would have to be a situation, you mentioned how Scotland is, well, how Northern Britain at that time in the Bronze Age, very much small settlements, maybe a hundred or well, hundreds of so people.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:31Tristan Hughes?

  It would have to be a few of those settlements basically coming together to fight another force, isn't it? Which isn't, you know, not possible, but that's a lot of logistical preparations of lots of warriors coming together for something like that.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think you also have to take Scotland's geography into account. You know, large swathes of Denmark and Northern Germany, it's flat and it's river valleys and it's quite transversible. Scotland has those areas across the lowlands, for instance, but you get the, you, you've got a lot of highland areas and a lot of upland areas that are quite tricky to, to navigate. We don't see, you know, like today, there are not, there are not hundreds of settlements across the Scottish Highlands. And there weren't in the Bronze Age either. So it, you know, even if you have more engaged conflict happening, perhaps in the southern lowlands,

• 46:29Speaker 02

  I don't think you can apply that wholesale across Scotland. And then you have the hundreds of islands and, you know, you, you get into the realms of, well, actually, if you want to mount an attack on somebody, you have to get everyone into a boat and, and sail across some quite dangerous stretches of water.

• 46:57Tristan Hughes?

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• 48:15Tristan Hughes?

  I do wonder if warriors from certain communities, this is all speculation now, but we know how like with the Highlanders later on and the clansmen and how they are renowned as some of the fiercest fighters.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:26Tristan Hughes?

  They're in Britain and beyond. I do wonder whether that had been similar in the Bronze Age, that maybe one or two communities spread out in the Highlands, but their fame, you know, was carried through people, that actually the people who trained with the sword there or their warriors were not to be messed with because they were more fierce than those from the lowlands. Who knows?

• 48:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't, I mean, I, I love make, I, I love coming up with ideas around this. I mean, it's one of the things I find really liberating about prehistory is that provided you've got the evidence, you can, you can start to think about all these different ways that society could happen. It's not, you know, I don't find the lack of writing a hindrance. I find it much more of a freedom so that you can say, actually, in some communities around the world or in part Scotland at different times, this is how they were seen or feared or revered. And there was this like cult of the Highlander or, you know, any of these, any of these speculative elements. You have to make sure you ground it in some sort of archaeological evidence.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  But then, you know, we can't just project one singular, singular idea of how we think society operated.

• 49:39Tristan Hughes?

  Absolutely. But I'm glad we took that little segue into Tellenza because we've never done story of that Bronze Age battlefield. But if you, the listener, if you'd like us to do it in the future, then send us a message, leave a comment on the podcast. If we get enough, then we will certainly do the story of the Bronze Age battlefield to Tellenza because it's such a great story.

• 49:58Speaker 02

  Can I put my vote for it?

• 49:59Tristan Hughes?

  Okay, yeah, you can.

• 50:02Tristan Hughes?

  But as you say, getting back to the archaeological evidence and we've talked about the swords and the idea that warfare seems, seems to emerge in the Bronze Age in the form of raiding thirty to fifty men, you're saying, against a nearby settlement? That idea, I vow to desperation or getting resources and so on and so forth. But let's talk about armour because this isn't a blue painted warrior, you know, just with a loincloth going into battle as a berserker with a shield and nothing else. We also have armour.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  Well, we have, we have bits of armour. We.

• 50:43Speaker 02

  In Scotland, we have, we have no evidence of armour at this time. What we do have are shields. But in other parts of Europe, armour exists. You have bronze curises, or you have bronze helmets, you have bronze greaves for protecting your shins, for instance. And I think it's reasonable to assume that people weren't just going into battle in a, in a tunic, in a cloth tunic. I think that these were skilled leather workers, you know, they, leather was incredibly important to people, and they were able to make really hard leather. And we have evidence of hardened leather shields

• 51:27Speaker 02

  from around this time, one rare example from, from Ireland, but none from Scotland. And I think two wooden shields from Ireland as well, but again, none from Scotland. But we can assume that people wanted to defend themselves. The evidence that we have from Scotland is the shield, and particularly bronze shields. These are, honestly, like, some of my favourite objects from Bronze Age Europe. They're so spectacular. They're just, they're a single piece of bronze that's been hammered out to about sixty to seventy centimetres large. Some are a bit smaller, but most are around sixty centimetres. Big, round shields, and they're often ornately decorated.

• 52:13Speaker 02

  They will have concentric rings of ribs and bosses individually hammered in. There's one from Scotland, from an area called Beath in North Ayrshire, on the west of Scotland, that has nine thousand bosses hammered into it. Twenty-nine alternating rows of ribs and bosses. It's a spectacular looking object. And there would have been a handle that got riveted on to the back, and a central boss that would have been indented for receiving the hand of, of the person holding the shield. Generally, people have considered that these shields were too flimsy for use in battle. They were, they weren't effective at deflecting blows. They were seen

• 52:55Speaker 02

  as ceremonial. There's about ten of these known from Scotland, and about fifty in total known from Britain. But recent experiments, or rather, experiments with replicas in the last twenty years or so have shown that they're really effective at deflecting blows. You know, some of the characteristics that make them so spectacular, and make them quite fragile as objects, in the, as archaeological objects, also helps give you some of those defensive properties that you really want. So the flexibility of the shield, and the bronze, actually helps absorb the blows of swords and spears. It helps you deflect these things away. The shield itself is strengthened by those

• 53:39Speaker 02

  alternating ribs that I, that I mentioned earlier. And research into this by various scholars has shown that actually, if a sword hits one of these shields, or a spear hits one of these shields, it often glances off and leaves a very, very small scratch. It very rarely leaves like a huge sword dent, or a huge spear dent. And when you start looking for these tiny scratches, you start to find them. And that starts to suggest to us that these shields are definitely, definitely used in some conflicts. How many, how often, is, is unclear. But some of, some of them do have the Whacking Great Spear marks in them. You know, some of them have been really,

• 54:20Speaker 02

  really battered, and others have much more subtle dents from, from, you know, a rim catching a sword edge, or something like that. So it's, and it completely, I, I think it helps shape your idea of what a warrior is looking like at this time. And I would say, when we were talking about, talking earlier about class and status, and, and whether you've got elite figures, for instance, I, I think these bronze shields really mark out a person. Because if you think they're in use for several hundred years, and we've only got ten from Scotland, you know, you, you might be looking at very, very few people who have access to these. They're really, really hard to make. Maybe

• 55:04Speaker 02

  most people had a wooden or leather shield. Those might have been much more common. But wood and leather don't survive very well in the ground for three thousand years, whereas bronze survives much better. So our archaeological picture is skewed, but we know that there were enough of these things around that many people had access to them.

• 55:22Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah, Matt, it is fascinating to think that could there have been one or two members of one of those warbands which had that more ornate arms and armour, to very much signify to their followers, and also to the people they're attacking, that they're more powerful, that they're one of the, shall I say the word, chiefs of that society?

• 55:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think having access to these objects, being able to show that you know how to use them, it was a really powerful statement in the Bronze Age. It's a statement that has these long-lasting effects, you know, I think even through to the modern day, we still dress the, the top people of the military in particular decorative arms or armour, or with particular types of jewellery, that marks them out as sort of, of a special rank. And I think, for me, what's special about exploring this topic is, all of that started in the Bronze Age. You know,

• 56:26Speaker 02

  your first proper evidence for this comes in the Bronze Age.

• 56:31Tristan Hughes?

  Do we see much impact of this warfare on Scotland? I mean, what do you think is the real impact of this warfare, this very early warfare back in Bronze Age Scotland?

• 56:40Speaker 02

  I think that any impact of these conflicts is invisible to us. But it would have been nonetheless completely devastating to anyone who was present at that time. I think it's a whole other thing to think about in terms of not just getting obsessed with the warriors and the people doing the fighting, but the people who had to deal with the fallout of war, the people who were displaced by war, who lost their homes, who lost their loved ones. All of it is archaeologically invisible to us, I would say. You don't have war, the evidence of war-torn communities. And that is the brutal reality of war, unfortunately, and, and conflict. And again, that starts in the Bronze Age.

• 57:23Tristan Hughes?

  Matt, it is such a fascinating time period, and, and your brand new exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland that you have curated shines a light on this more violent side of Scotland's prehistoric communities. It is called?

• 57:36Speaker 02

  Scotland's First Warriors.

• 57:38Tristan Hughes?

  Fantastic. And it's on for some time, if I remember rightly?

• 57:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, it opens on the twenty-seventh of June, twenty twenty-six, and it closes on the seventeenth of May, twenty twenty-seven.

• 57:49Tristan Hughes?

  Well, I'll certainly make time to come up there. I always love visiting the National Museum of Scotland. And it promises to be a really, really good exhibition, shining a light on amazing Bronze Age archaeology, and Stone Age, and Iron Age from north of the border from Scotland today. Matt, it just goes to me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

• 58:08Speaker 02

  Thank you, Justin.

• 58:13Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Dr Matthew Knight from the National Museum of Scotland, talking all things Scotland's First Warriors. His new exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland, Scotland's First Warriors, sounds really, really interesting. I'm hoping to get up there in the coming months. I always like going back up to Edinburgh, where I did my university degree once every few months, every year. So I'll certainly be popping in to have a look at that brand new exhibition. The shields, the swords, those bizarre halberds, and so much more. Really do hope you enjoyed the episode. We will put a link in the show notes to other episodes we've done about prehistoric Scotland. We've done one on the Broch's of Iron Age Scotland,

• 58:57Tristan Hughes?

  but we'll also put a link to our episode on Orkney and its amazing Stone Age remains. You can find links to those episodes in the show notes. Now, if you've been enjoying the ancients, please make sure to follow the show on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us. You'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. Sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe. That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.

• 59:43Speaker 05

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• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  I'm Connor Tomlinson from Love on the Spectrum. History is my thing, and I've been waiting my whole life for a show like this one.

• 1:00:22Speaker 04

  And I'm Carter Roy, and this is What the Fact. Three facts a week, each with the whole story behind it. The history class you actually wished you had in school. New episodes every Wednesday. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen, or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.