finally arrived in the Carpathian basin they were fully fledged. In the Near East
spearheads were for several centuries attached to their shafts by tangs, and the
tang was not replaced by the socket until ca. 2000 BC. In temperate Europe even
the earliest metal spearheads were socketed, indicating that they were brought in
from some place where socketed spearheads were familiar. Unlike their counter -
parts in the Shaft Graves at Mycenae, the earliest spearheads in the Carpathian
basin were cast (by the lost-wax method) rather than forged.
On present evidence we may say that the metal spearhead came to the Carpathian
basin within—but closer to the end than to the beginning of—the Bz A2 period.
In our chronology we may place its arrival ca. 1600 BC. At the important tell-settle -
ment of Feudvar in Serbia a stone mold for the casting of bronze spearheads was
found in the destruction level that separated the Early from the Middle Bronze Age
(or Bz A2 from Bz B).^85 In Moravia also the earliest bronze spearhead seems to
date from late in the Bz A2 period, although a copper object from the Bz A1 period
has sometimes been interpreted as coming from a spearhead.^86
Throughout the Bronze Age the spear had much less prestige than the sword,
and although some spearheads were decorated most were not. While the owner
of a sword was proud to be seen in public with his sword suspended from a belt
or a baldric, it is difficult to imagine a man strutting around his town with a spear.
The disparity between spear and sword is reflected in scholarship. Bronze Age
swords have been very well published, but publication of spearheads from the same
period has been slow. Hundreds of bronze spearheads have been found in Romania
and Hungary but still await cataloguing, and the number of unpublished spearheads
from all of temperate Europe runs in the thousands.^87 We are fortunate that a
considerable part of the story of the spear in Bronze Age Bulgaria has now been
reconstructed.^88
It is obvious from the numbers that the spear became very important as a weapon
in the Carpathian basin and elsewhere in temperate Europe. In northern Italy, the
Pila del Brancon votive deposit from ca. 1200 BCincluded ten times as many spears
as swords. Surprisingly, however, for a long time after the spear’s introduction
in temperate Europe the demand for it seems to have been relatively limited. Of
the dateable Moravian spearheads catalogued by Jiří Říhovský, only seven date
from the Bz A2 through the Bz C periods, while more than 100 date from the
Late Bronze Age.^89 This suggests that although warfare in temperate Europe was
endemic by the end of the second millennium BC, in the middle of that millennium
it was not.
The late appearance of bronze armor in temperate Europe
Another pointer in the same direction is the considerable delay in the manufacture
of defensive armor in temperate Europe. It is likely that already in the Bz A2 period
the man who was armed with a sword or a spear wore a leather helmet and corselet
and carried a leather shield stretched over a wooden frame, but these would not
have given the man much protection against an opponent’s sword or spear or against
an arrow shot from a composite bow. Already by 1600 BCchariot crews in the
154 Militarism in temperate Europe