CHAPTER FOUR
THE ARMY, WEAPONS
AND FIGHTING
--..... --
J.N. G. and w.P. Ritchie
INTRODUCTION
C
eremonial uniform and weaponry today would give but a poor impression of the
realities of modern warfare, armament and battle formations; second-hand news-
paper accounts would offer an unreliable picture of the background to a territorial
skirmish or the social customs of the participants. The archaeological and literary
information relating to Celtic warfare is equally partial and one-sided, for the arms
discovered in a burial or a ritual deposit may not reflect those of the warrior class as a
whole; classical writers were neither dispassionate nor necessarily knowledgeable
reporters, frequently collating snippets of received information from a variety of
sources. From such evidence it would be wrong to try to present even a series of
snapshots for the wide chronological span or geographical range of Celtic activity in
Europe. In most cases classical writers were evoking events in areas where archaeo-
logical evidence is sparse, and we have no knowledge of how stylized their apparent
descriptions are. In other areas our evidence comes from weaponry itself, but in
contexts that may involve special selection either to accompany a burial or as a religious
offering. The choice of weapons may equally represent particular regional burial
traditions (Lorenz 1986). Thus although our canvas is as wide as possible throughout
the Celtic world, we have inevitably focused on certain areas where the results of
research may be fuller than others; thus the detail of our tapestry leaves intervening
parts unworked. The literature on Celtic warriors is too extensive to review, for, if we
are to believe Strabo that the whole race was madly fond of war, warriors and the
panoply of war enter many aspects of Celtic life, art, technology and religion.
Our knowledge is also skewed by the differential survival in the archaeological
record of the various components: a mass of ironwork is known, although only a tiny
proportion is fully conserved; wood survives more rarely, although spears and shields
are known to have played important parts in regular armament; leather and other
fittings are, like the clamour and trumpeting of the battlefield, largely matters for the
imagination.
Dechelette offered one of the first detailed accounts of the archaeology of the
warrior (1927: 612-710). The broad sequence of armament has been reconstructed
visually in popular form by Connolly (1978: 49-"69); Rapin, in bringing together