S1461957116000061jra 36..73


Aging Well: Treherne’s ‘Warrior’s Beauty’
Two Decades Later

CATHERINE J. FRIEMAN1, JOANNA BRÜCK2, KATHARINA REBAY-SALISBURY3,
SOPHIE BERGERBRANT4, SANDRA MONTÓN SUBÍAS5, JOANNA SOFAER6,
CHRISTOPHER J. KNÜSEL7, HELLE VANDKILDE8, MELANIE GILES9 AND
PAUL TREHERNE10

1
School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University, Canberra,

Australia
2
Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

3
Institute for Oriental and European Archaeology, Austrian Academy of Sciences,

Vienna, Austria
4
Department of Historical Studies, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

5
ICREA, Departament d’Humanitats, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain

6
Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

7
UMR 5199 PACEA, University of Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France

8
Department of Archaeology, Institute of Culture and Society, Aarhus University,

Aarhus, Denmark
9
School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

10
St Stephen’s International School, Rome, Italy

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
Catherine J. Frieman

Over the (slightly more than) two decades
that the European Journal of Archaeology
(formerly the Journal of European
Archaeology) has been in print, we have
published a number of excellent and high
profile articles. Among these, Paul
Treherne’s seminal meditation on Bronze
Age male identity and warriorhood stands
out as both the highest cited and the most
regularly downloaded paper in our archive.
Speaking informally with friends and col-
leagues who work on Bronze Age topics
as diverse as ceramics, metalwork, land-
scape phenomenology, and settlement

structure, I found that this paper holds a
special place in their hearts. Certainly, it
is a staple of seminar reading lists and, in
my experience at least, is prone to
provoke heated discussions among stu-
dents on topics as far ranging as gender
identity in the past and present, theoret-
ically informed methods for material
culture studies, and the validity of using
Classical texts for understanding prehis-
toric worlds. Moreover, in its themes of
violence, embodiment, materiality, and
the fluidity or ephemeral nature of gen-
dered identities, it remains a crucial foun-
dational text for major debates raging in
European prehistoric archaeology in the
present day.

European Journal of Archaeology 20 (1) 2017, 36–73

© European Association of Archaeologists 2017 doi:10.1017/eaa.2016.6
Manuscript received 10 August 2016,
accepted 16 August 2016

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Thus, it seemed pertinent that, as part
of the commemoration of our 20th
volume, we should return to our most
loved paper to ask why and how it has
aged so well, in what ways the debates we
are currently having build on its themes,
and where new data or interpretations
have since enhanced (or challenged)
Treherne’s compelling narrative. The fol-
lowing short articles were solicited as
responses to and reflections on Treherne’s
original article. Authors were asked simply
to build on Treherne’s work and to reflect
on how it had impacted their own research
and their wider field. These reflections
range from reviews of the ongoing signifi-
cance of Treherne’s ideas to our under-
standing of gendered identities in the
Bronze Age (Brück, Rebay-Salisbury,
Bergerbrant), to the political impact of
prehistoric research into gender identity
and masculinity (Montón Subiás, Sofaer),
and to the identification and social pos-
ition of war, warfare, warrior’s bodies, and
depictions of warriorhood in prehistoric
societies (Knüsel, Vandkilde, Giles). We
are also pleased to include a short response
by Paul Treherne, now chair of history at
St Stephen’s International School in Rome,
to these reviews and to the ongoing signifi-
cance of his postgraduate research for
European prehistoric archaeology.

GENDER AND PERSONHOOD IN THE
EUROPEAN BRONZE AGE

Joanna Brück

Paul Treherne’s article in the Journal of
European Archaeology for 1995 is one of
the most influential pieces of work on the
Bronze Age written in the past few
decades. It effectively critiqued previous
work on prestige goods—arguing, for
example, that we need to account for the
particular character of the grave goods that
accompany high status burials—but it also

sustained and crystallized existing models
of a Bronze Age warrior elite.
The image of the Bronze Age warrior is

extraordinarily enduring; but it is, in my
opinion, highly problematic, for it domi-
nates our narratives of the period to the
virtual exclusion of alternative interpret-
ative frameworks, and it runs the risk of
missing much of the depth, texture, and
complexity of Bronze Age life. The fol-
lowing comments are based on many years
of work on the British Bronze Age, but
are relevant, I believe, for other areas of
Europe too. It is true, of course, that
burials accompanied by swords and other
weaponry are a feature of many regions,
but there are other sorts of grave groups
that provide equally interesting, and often
rather different, insights into Bronze Age
society. In particular, there is a danger
that, by focusing on warrior burials and
accoutrements, we may inadvertently con-
struct an androcentric vision of the period:
in common with Treherne, recent work
on the role of warriors and warfare in the
Bronze Age (e.g. Kristiansen & Larsson,
2005; Harding, 2007) assumes that posi-
tions of social, political, and economic
power were held solely by men, and that
women were (like fine weaponry) the
objects of elite exchange rather than social
agents in their own right. There is, of
course, copious evidence to counter such
assumptions. ‘Wealthy’ female burials are
found in many regions: the cremation
burial of an adult female from the Early
Bronze Age cemetery at Barrow Hills,
Oxfordshire, was accompanied by a bronze
awl, knife-dagger, and necklace of amber,
faience, and jet/shale (Barclay & Halpin,
1999: 162–65), while the adult female
from the famous barrow of Borum Eshøj
on Jutland was buried with a dagger, a
fibula, an elaborately-decorated belt disc, a
neck-ring, two arm rings, two spiral finger
rings, and two small bronze tutuli, among
other things (Glob, 1973: 43–45). Our

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tendency to sideline this evidence, or to
interpret it as an indication that women
acted as ‘vehicles for the display of their
husband’s resources’ (Shennan, 1975: 286),
is primarily a reflection of the position of
women in our own recent past and can be
critiqued on theoretical grounds: post-
Enlightenment understandings of the self
construct men as active subjects and
women as passive objects, but this is part of
an ideology that served particular purposes
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
facilitating the colonial endeavour, for
example, by feminizing and commodifying
landscape.
Treherne argues that Bronze Age mor-

tuary practices worked to construct an
image of bodily perfection for the individ-
ual—the warrior’s beauty, as he puts it.
Yet, this emphasis on the individual, and
the assumption that the integrity of the
body was a key concern during this period,
are problematic, for they impose onto the
past a model of the self that is particular
to the contemporary western world. Body
image is a matter of enormous concern in
Euro-American society today, and the
ideological primacy of the individual
means that the body and the self are
viewed as coterminous, one mapping
neatly onto the other, and both having
well-defined and impermeable boundaries.
There is much to suggest, however, that
Bronze Age concepts of the person were
very different. Mortuary practices in
Britain often involve the deliberate frag-
mentation of the body. This is true even
for those funerary traditions most com-
monly invoked as evidence for an increas-
ing concern with the ‘individual’, for
example Beaker burials of the Chalcolithic
and Early Bronze Age. The grave of the
‘Boscombe bowmen’, for example, con-
tained the incomplete remains of several
adults and children (McKinley, 2011:
28–31): the articulated adult male (burial
25004) was missing his left hand and

forearm, while the two bundles of disarti-
culated bone found just above and below
this burial comprise selected skeletal ele-
ments from five other individuals, pre-
dominantly skull and longbone fragments
from the left side of the body. Cremation
burials are characteristic of the Later
Bronze Age in the same region, and the
majority of these comprise only a portion
of the remains of the deceased. The three
heaviest of the twenty-one urned adult
cremation burials found at Coneygre Farm
in Nottinghamshire weighed 1475 g, 915
g, and 735 g respectively, but the remain-
ing eighteen burials weighed less than
600 g, and fourteen of these were under
400 g (Allen et al., 1987: table 1). The
evidence for the deliberate destruction of
grave goods (Brück, 2004, 2006) and the
circulation of heirlooms (themselves often
incomplete or composite objects: Sheridan
& Davis, 2002; Woodward, 2002) indi-
cates that objects were subject to practices
of fragmentation and curation, and we can
suggest that human bodies may have been
treated in similar ways: the resulting ele-
ments were exchanged over space and
time to mark, mediate, and transform
inter-personal relationships. Such practices
hint at relational or dividual concepts of
the self very different from modern Western
ideologies of the individual (see Strathern,
1988; Busby, 1997).
An interest in ancestral ‘relics’ perhaps

explains the evidence for the reopening of
burials and for the reordering of the bones
encountered when graves were reused.
The Early Bronze Age shaft grave at
South Dumpton Down in Kent contained
a sequence of burials (Perkins, nd); each
time a body was placed in the grave, the
skull of the previous interment was
removed. Evidence for the reopening of
graves on the Continent has often been
interpreted as ‘grave robbing’, but could
equally have acted as a means of acquiring
the bodily remains or objects associated

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with known and important deceased
members of the community. The Middle
Bronze Age cremation graves at Pitten, in
Austria, were provided with special
‘doorway’ structures that allowed mourners
to access the grave: it has been suggested
that their purpose was to allow food offer-
ings to be given to the deceased over a
protracted period of time (Sørensen &
Rebay-Salisbury, 2005: 166–67), but they
may also have allowed grave goods or
quantities of cremated bone to be
removed. Certainly, cremation burials in
Continental Europe sometimes contain
only portions of the bodies of the
deceased: the urn from grave 11 in area 1
of the Late Bronze Age cemetery at
Niederkaina in eastern Saxony, for
example, contained just 427 g of burnt
bone belonging to an adult (Coblenz &
Nebelsick, 1997: 40). Because my own
research specialism is the British Bronze
Age, I do not have a clear sense of how
prevalent such practices were on the
Continent, although this is certainly a
question that would be worth exploring.
In Britain, the deliberate deposition of
fragments of human bone in domestic
contexts (for example, in pits or postholes
at the entrance to settlements: Brück,
1995) provides some insight into the
‘afterlives’ of such relics. Usually, such
finds comprise single fragments of skull or
longbone, although the complete mummi-
fied ‘body’ of an adult male buried under
the floor of roundhouse 1370 at Cladh
Hallan in Scotland was composed of the
skull and cervical vertebrae from one indi-
vidual, the mandible of a second, and the
postcranial bones of a third (Parker
Pearson et al., 2005), all several centuries
old on burial, suggesting a protracted and
complex phase of post-mortem manipula-
tion. Together, what such practices indi-
cate is that the identity of the deceased
was not considered fixed on burial but
could in fact be reworked as and when

fragments of bodies and associated objects
were removed, exchanged, inherited, and
(re)combined in a variety of mortuary and
non-mortuary contexts. Treherne’s argu-
ment that there was a finality to the
moment of burial resulting in the creation
of a fixed image of the deceased can there-
fore be called into question: instead,
memory was created through practices that
involved the reworking and recontextuali-
zation of fragments of the dead.
In addition, it is of course problematic

to assume that grave goods were owned by
the deceased and reference intrinsic per-
sonal attributes (Brück, 2004). Grave
goods may not have functioned as objects
of display, but may instead have described
aspects of the relationship between the
living and the dead, or ideas about death
and the afterlife. Although it is often
assumed that cremation burials accompan-
ied by razors must be male, in fact such
items may be the product of ritual prac-
tices enacted as part of the funerary rite.
Toilet articles such as razors, tweezers, and
awls may have been used to mark the
bodies of the mourners, for example by
shaving the hair (Woodward, 2000: 115).
This would have helped to distinguish dif-
ferent phases of the mortuary rite, particu-
larly periods of separation or liminality.
Objects such as wagons reference connect-
ivity, travel, and transformation, while
drinking cups are as much about com-
mensality and the consumption of sub-
stances that facilitated communication
with the otherworld, as personal status.
Across much of western Europe, swords
are found not in burials but were instead
deposited in rivers (e.g. Fontijn, 2002),
sometimes complete and still usable, and
sometimes deliberately decommissioned—
bent and broken in ways that cannot
simply be explained as a product of
combat damage. Often, large numbers of
swords and other bladed weapons are
found at particular locations, for example

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fording places or the confluences of rivers.
Such finds hint at the fluidity of personal
identity for they suggest that the role of
the warrior may have related only to a par-
ticular phase in the lifecourse, or may have
been a temporary and highly ritualized
form of identity that was taken up in par-
ticular political contexts and subsequently
relinquished (Fontijn, 2005). The depos-
ition of quantities of metalwork in rivers
and their separation from the bodies of
particular individuals hints at collective or
community identities tied to place, with
the character of the objects (weapons
made of metal) referencing the dangerous
and transformative properties of social and
political boundaries. Yet, the relative
paucity of defended settlements in these
regions suggests that other concerns occu-
pied those same ‘warriors’ for much of
their daily lives.
There is, therefore, much to suggest

that Bronze Age models of the self were
very different from those common in our
own cultural context. If we call anachron-
istic ideas about the individual, subjectiv-
ity, and the body into question, we must
surely also revisit our assumptions about
gendered identity: both women and men
were actively involved in the construction
of Bronze Age lifeworlds—lifeworlds that
involved fluid and contextually-specific
concepts of identity and power, and where
inter-personal violence was just one
element of a complex range of social
relationships.

COMMENTS ON PAUL TREHERNE’S ‘THE
WARRIOR’S BEAUTY’: THE MASCULINE
BODY AND SELF-IDENTITY IN BRONZE

AGE EUROPE
Katharina Rebay-Salisbury

Twenty-one years after its publication in
1995, Paul Treherne’s ‘The Warrior’s
Beauty’ remains an influential article for

scholars interested in the archaeology of
the body, gender, and identity in later
European prehistory. The archaeology of
the body and identity has since developed
and grown, becoming a popular field of
study in many different regional archaeol-
ogies (e.g. Meskell, 1999; Hamilakis
et al., 2002; Joyce, 2005; Robb & Harris,
2013). This article, originally conceived as
an MPhil dissertation at the University of
Cambridge, investigates how the identity
of the European Bronze Age warrior
emerged from practices and beliefs cen-
tring on the human body and its
aesthetics.
Treherne presents warrior identities as a

pan-European phenomenon and an import-
ant part of Europe’s long-term social fabric.
First formulated in the Bronze Age, a spe-
cific way of making identity continues into
the Iron Age and beyond well into the
Middle Ages. The warrior lives a particular
lifestyle, which includes war/warfare,
alcohol, riding/driving, and bodily orna-
mentation (Treherne, 1995: 108, hereafter
only page numbers cited); in death, these
themes are further developed and become
archaeologically visible in burial practices
and grave goods. The ‘warrior package’ thus
contains several elements, which include
personal weaponry, drinking equipment,
bodily ornamentation, grooming tools, and
horse harness and/or wheeled vehicles
(p. 105).
Among the archaeological evidence,

Treherne scrutinizes toilet articles such as
combs, tweezers, razors, mirrors, and tat-
tooing awls in particular. Male self-iden-
tity, according to Treherne, is linked to a
specific kind of masculine beauty and
achieved through bodily regimes.
Treherne’s study is unique in that it aims
to integrate the concepts of beauty and
aesthetics into the large body of literature
on Bronze Age war, warfare, and violence.
To the modern reader, the catchy and
intriguing title of Treherne’s article

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provokes an association of dissonance:
beauty is a concept that tends to be asso-
ciated with femininity rather than mascu-
linity today. The notion of the beauty of
the warrior seems at odds with that of
beauty. Bodily beauty and physical attract-
iveness, however, are important for both
sexes, although what is considered beautiful
is different for men and women; it under-
lies evolutionary principles of sexual selec-
tion and connotes health, symmetry, and
sexual dimorphism (Grammer et al., 2003).
Further, Treherne’s is one of the few

articles that explicitly thematize masculin-
ity, not only theoretically (as Knapp, 1998
has done admirably), but using archaeo-
logical evidence constructively to paint a
vivid picture of what a particular kind of
male identity might have been like. As
such, he fulfils the call for understanding
the warrior identity as one of ‘divergent,
multiple masculinities’ (p. 91).
The development of a warrior ideology

is tied into two large-scale social shifts in
later European prehistory. The first con-
cerns a shift from an ideology of place and
community in Late Neolithic/Copper Age
societies to an ideology of individual and
personal display, which characterizes
Bronze Age societies (p. 107). This shift
took place at different times in different
places, notably in a first wave during the
fourth and third millennium BC (asso-
ciated, for example, with Bell Beakers).
Burial in communal, megalithic tombs
gives way to funerary rites that include the
interment of a single body in an individual
grave, with personal grave goods including
prestige goods acquired through long-term
exchange networks. Social categorization,
including gender and status, was achieved
and played out in elaborate funerary
rituals, but they were fleeting events: as
the body was only visible for a very short
time, it had to be represented in a very for-
malized and stereotyped way to communi-
cate the message of identity unambiguously,

‘fixing an image of the deceased’ in the
memory of the participants in the funeral
(p. 113).
A second wave of ideological change

began in the mid-second millennium BC
(associated with the central European Middle
Bronze Age) and intensified towards the Iron
Age: a ‘differentiated warrior ideology’ devel-
oped from a ‘generalised male ethos’ (p. 108).
Traditionally, this has been interpreted in
terms of increasing social hierarchies and the
rise of chiefdoms. Importantly, the warrior
identity now includes membership in a spe-
cialized group, attached to a patron in para-
mount position. Warriors engage in a system
of relationships of hospitality and reciprocity,
which includes exchange, the consumption of
alcohol, a shared belief system, shared daily
life, and ritualized warfare (p. 109), accom-
panied by cultural emotions such as honour
(see Péristiany, 1966).
Archaeological evidence of this change

include the sword—the first object
designed solely for combat—among other
weaponry and sets of drinking vessels
which go beyond meeting an individual’s
needs, ornaments that ‘accentuate every
part of the body and its movement’
(p. 110, a theme further developed by
Sørensen, 1997, 2010), and an emphasis
on textiles as well as ‘toilet articles’.
Toilet articles are artefacts specifically

designed for bodily grooming and decorat-
ing, such as combs, tweezers, razors,
mirrors, and tattooing awls. Shaving,
combing, plucking hair, manicuring nails,
scarification, and tattooing are argued to
be part of the daily routine of taking care
of the body. Like weapons, toilet articles
show signs of wear and tear, which sug-
gests they were used to achieve ‘beauty in
life’. Bog bodies with exquisitely mani-
cured hands, which requires attention over
extended periods of time, attest to daily
self-care. Further evidence comes from
Bronze Age anthropomorphic representa-
tions with carefully shaved and groomed

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hair. The aesthetics of the warrior were
achieved through reflexive, personal
action; they were important in life and
death, ‘mutually constituting one another
and together the individual’s self-identity’
(p. 125). Toilet articles might have also
played a role in specific rituals for particu-
lar occasions, e.g. before entering battle or
during funerary activities; the fact that
they were placed around the body in the
grave points to their use in the preparation
of the corpse or in ritual mourning.
At this point, I have always wondered

why Treherne did not develop this argu-
ment one small step further: namely, to
see toilet items as means of identity trans-
formation. By employing bodily rituals
such as shaving, cutting, and grooming
hair, the transition between different kinds
of male identity—perhaps that of the
warrior and that of a more civil nature—
could have been marked and achieved.
Multiple masculinities may have had dif-
ferent appearances. The warrior identity
would then appear less fixed, although
perhaps bound to a certain age and status
group or group membership, and more
fluid, situational, and temporal. The
warrior identity could have been taken up
on particular occasions by different people,
at times perhaps even by women.
Interestingly, the discussion of beauty is

centred on hair and nails, and there is
little discussion of other bodily constitu-
ents of beauty. For the warrior especially,
attractive body proportions with a lean
body mass and well trained and defined
muscles would have certainly been the
ideal, and could only be achieved through
regular training. Bronze and Iron Age
body cuirasses (e.g. from Kleinklein,
Austria: Egg & Kramer, 2013) with hints
of muscle lines are indicators of such
beauty standards.
Treherne’s article develops theoretical

thoughts on transformations of ideology
and the emergence of elites. He reacts

against the prevailing interpretation of the
focus on the human body in the grave as a
medium of ideological expression, with the
grave as the arena of power negotiation
and the ‘ideology of prestige display’
employed in legitimization through mysti-
fication. The mantra of funerary archaeol-
ogists at the time—that the ‘dead do not
bury themselves’ (see Parker Pearson,
1999: 84)—had begun to disregard and
overshadow the lives of the buried people.
Drawing on materialist formulations of
ideology, tension between ideology as illu-
sion and social reality had emerged.
Treherne, however, insists that people
lived their ideology as real (p. 116). Grave
goods chosen for display and conspicu-
ous consumption as well as ostentatious
funerary rituals are expressions of social
practices and beliefs people actually sub-
scribed to. To explain why specific
objects are selected for social legitimiza-
tion and aggrandizement, their specific
socio-historic context has to be taken
into account.
Formulating his own philosophical pos-

ition on the body against the work of
Althusser, Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu,
Giddens, and others, Treherne stresses the
‘fundamental materiality of the body and
self’ (p. 119). The body is more than a
social construct, a product of discourse or
the symbolic; the self is practically
mediated and lived through the body.
Self-identity emerges through sensory
exploration with the body as the medium
of experience; self-care and beauty main-
tenance, therefore, play an important part
in identity construction.
To explain why beauty was important

to the Bronze Age warrior, Treherne
draws on sources and scholarship on the
heroes of Greek Antiquity (e.g. Vernant &
Zeitlin, 1991; Shanks, 1999). In particular
the (lack of) beliefs in a life after death
meant that the self could only transcend
death in the minds of the living (p. 123).

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Fixing the image of the deceased in the
mortuary sphere was therefore paramount,
because only memory preserved the
deceased in the social discourse (p. 124).
The emphasis on beauty counteracted the
notions of mutilation, dismemberment,
and decay associated with the corpse; elab-
orate funerary practices helped to cope
with the emotion of existential anxiety and
counteracted forgetting.
These notions are not necessarily appar-

ent from the archaeological evidence alone
and they raise questions about the applic-
ability of the concept of the ‘warrior’s
beauty’. Treherne’s focus on a detailed
interpretation of the warrior identity led
him to neglect temporal and regional dif-
ferences; and the extent of the phenom-
enon remains vaguely defined. Treherne
traces roots in the emerging urban soci-
eties of the Near East and Anatolia
(p. 108), from which elements were select-
ively adapted; a part of the ideological
transformation towards an emphasis on
the individual seems anchored in northern
and western Europe (although other forms
of personhood than the individual may
have prevailed; see Fowler, 2004) and does
not fit central and eastern Europe in my
opinion, where single graves have a much
longer pedigree. Cemeteries with individ-
ual graves and personal grave goods were
already common forms of body disposal
during the LBK (Linearbandkeramik,
c. 5500–4900). Subsequently, the depos-
ition of ‘multiple and fragmented bodies’
in cairns, passage graves, and other mega-
lithic structures became popular from
Scandinavia to Iberia (Hofmann & Whittle,
2008: 296), but remained a northern and
western European phenomenon.
The ‘differentiated warrior ideology’, in

contrast, has perhaps most archaeological
support in central Europe, where social dif-
ference became expressed through burial
practices and grave goods since the early
second millennium BC at the latest

(examples include the ‘princely graves’ from
Leubingen and Helmsdorf, Germany;
Meller, 2015: 245). Treherne, however,
seeks interpretative analogies in much later
Greece. And although the warrior identity
is discussed as a historically situated product
of time and place (Joyce, 2005: 150), one
wonders if the combination of groups of
males engaging in violence, intoxication,
and beautification is not indeed a cross-
cultural phenomenon. Specific to the
European Bronze Age are then merely the
burial practices and the specific kind of
prestige good economy tied into metal
circulation.
It further remains unclear how broadly

the concept of the ‘warrior’s beauty’
applies within a given society. Does the
ethos of the warrior form part of the
general social ideology, adopted by every
male of a certain age group, or how select-
ive was membership in the warrior society?
Treherne laid out how elite warriors had a
lifestyle that involved risk and violence,
but also of luxury and excess, apparent in
valuable weaponry and bodily grooming,
and with it a worldly existence of honour,
glory, and beauty to be remembered so as
to transcend death. However, what about
the common fighter? The family father
defending his farmstead, the youth gang
raiding the neighbouring village, the mer-
cenaries, and those forced to fight for
others’ causes?
It seems that the Bronze Age elite

warrior was similarly removed from those
fighters as the officer in command is
remote from the common soldier today,
who, through discipline, control, and sub-
ordination, emerges as a non-individual
(p. 128). The unknown, anonymous
soldier encompasses all nuances ranging
from the operator of a killing drone to the
injured and traumatized homecoming
hero. Perhaps it is time to shed light on
the diversity of fighters in later European
prehistory, too.

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The nature of warfare and violence and
its associated archaeological evidence in
the form of weaponry, defensive architec-
ture, and trauma on human remains has
not lost its appeal since the publication of
Treherne’s article (e.g. Osgood & Monks,
2000; Parker Pearson & Thorpe, 2005;
Otto et al., 2006; Peter-Röcher, 2007;
Uckelmann & Mödlinger, 2011). Krieg,
the current exhibition at the Landesmuseum
für Vorgeschichte in Halle (Saale), traces
the origins of war in the Neolithic (Meller
& Schefzik, 2015). Anthony Harding
perhaps best described the chronological
and regional variations in the evidence
for fighting. He found the characterization
of Bronze Age warriors as a war-band
engaging in inter-group raiding more to
the point (Harding, 2007: 169), although
he too maintained the existence of an
encompassing ideology of honour, prestige,
and violence. Kristian Kristiansen and
Thomas Larsson (2005), as well as Richard
Harrison (2004), stressed the religious and
ritual role of the warrior. A persuasive
interpretation of Bronze Age religion on
the basis of the iconography on razors has
been put forward by Flemming Kaul (1998).
The idea that the warrior’s self-identity was
connected to the maintenance of bodily
ideas, however, was nowhere else formu-
lated as concisely as in Treherne’s article—
it seems to have stood the test of time.

WARRIOR’S BEAUTY: REVISITED FROM A
NORDIC PERSPECTIVE
Sophie Bergerbrant

Paul Treherne’s article ‘The Warrior’s
Beauty’ was published in the Journal of
European Archaeology twenty-one years ago
(1995); it remains the most downloaded
article in the history of the European
Journal of Archaeology.
The article was a reworked version of

his MPhil dissertation submitted to the

University of Cambridge. In it he argued
for the need to revitalize and revise the
concept of the ‘warrior aristocracy’
(Kriegeradel in German). The article thus
redefined the warrior ideal, both in life
and in death. Treherne emphasized tan-
gible, personal consumables that were
essential for identifying this developing
status group, and these centred around
four important themes: weaponry, drink-
ing equipment, bodily ornamentation
(toilet articles), and horse harnesses and/or
wheeled vehicles. He pointed out that not
all attributes were present in all cases of
warrior graves, and that a distinct form of
masculinity, which was present both in life
and in death, was central to the warrior
ideological complex. He argued that a
warrior ideal and lifestyle was born in or
around the Bronze Age and that it
endured for an extended period in history.
Treherne’s contribution was an import-

ant catalyst for reviving the topic of the
warrior class and ideal in history. Many
studies have followed since (Vandkilde,
2006a: 57), and Treherne’s article can be
seen as having had a significant role in
this revival. Indeed, it has been one of the
inspirations and starting points for numer-
ous studies about prehistoric masculinity.
It has also been referred to in many sub-
sequent Scandinavian studies (e.g. my own
PhD: Bergerbrant, 2007), and in studies
about warrior graves (e.g. Sarauw, 2007)
and warrior identity (e.g. Skogstrand,
2014). However, the article’s emphasis on
the longevity of the warrior ideals has, in
many ways, led the notion that ‘warrior
identity’ was a monolithic cultural norm
through many periods and regions, effacing
subtle variations and culturally specific views
of warriors. For example, Skogstrand (2014:
251–56) has shown that warriors disappear
from the archaeological record on Funen in
the Early Pre-Roman Iron Age; and, when
they reappear, in the Late Pre-Roman Iron
Age, the warrior role has profoundly changed

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from the Late Bronze Age form described
by Treherne. Despite this, Treherne’s con-
tribution provided a key to opening up new
angles for the study of masculinity, although
explorations of gender and masculinity are
unlikely to have been the conscious or
primary aims of the author as it is largely
grounded in a different body of theory from
most gender and masculinity studies. It also
has quite a narrow focus, with the warrior
class being treated as the only male identity
worth defining, while today we are more
likely to acknowledge the permutations and
variations of masculinity (e.g. Skogstrand,
2014). Indeed, a close study of the male
costumes recovered from the anaerobically
preserved Danish oak log coffin burials
has shown that there are at least two, and
probably more, variations in male gendered
attire, only one of which could be related
to warriors (Bergerbrant, 2007: 50–54;
Bergerbrant et al., 2013).
As the title indicates, Treherne’s article

focuses on appearance and the beauty of
the warrior, the softer and aristocratic side
of warriorhood: the flashy weapons, the
horse riding/chariots, the drinking, and
the grooming. These are the positive sides
that create bonds between males.
Although it also claims to touch upon the
darker sides of warriorhood, it really only
mentions the actual hardship of a warrior
lifestyle, i.e. war, and even that gets only a
brief mention. Lately, remains of large-
scale warfare have been excavated in nor-
thern Europe, such as at Tollense for the
Bronze Age (Jantzen et al., 2015) and
Alken Enge for the Iron Age (Holst,
2014), both showing the more brutal and
unsavoury side of warfare. The Tollense
publication, for example, demonstrates
that many of individuals who died in the
battle and ended up in the river were non-
locals, and the evidence for their diet indi-
cates that they had been eating millet
(Jantzen et al., 2015), a plant that did not
normally form part of the local diet. The

site indicates that warriors travelled long
distances, and many died as a result of
warfare, as demonstrated by the examples
of arrowheads found embedded in skulls
(Jantzen et al., 2015). Of course, one
could always discuss whether these indivi-
duals were part of the warrior aristocracy
or whether they were ‘mere’ foot soldiers.
The first publication about Tollense
focuses on the actual remains of warfare
found at the site, and, not surprisingly,
there is no reference to Treherne’s article
in the book (Jantzen et al., 2015).
The main focus in Treherne’s article is

the theoretical perspective it puts forward,
with the archaeological material being
included mainly as an illustration of the
idea. The author emphasizes the import-
ance not of a beautiful death as much as
that of a beautiful treatment after death
and in burial and hints that the presence of
beauty in the burial might have been a way
to cope with the anxiety that may have
arisen after a warrior’s death. Drawing on
the evidence that swords have been
reshaped and toilet-equipment used, he
suggested that ‘beauty’ was a fundamental
part of the warrior lifestyle, too. Even
though the body of the warrior is inter-
preted as an important part of the self-
identity of the warrior aristocracy, the body
of the warriors, the skeletal remains, are
not brought into the argumentation. Bodies
are often an important archaeological source
for obtaining information and knowledge
about prehistoric warfare. In The Routledge
Handbook of the Bioarchaeology of Human
Conflict (Knüsel & Smith, 2013a) there are
no references to Treherne’s article either,
whereas in The Oxford Handbook of The
European Bronze Age (Fokkens & Harding,
2013) a number of articles refer to it. The
physical sides of warfare and warriorhood
need to meet the identity and status side
put forward by Treherne. The challenge for
the future is to combine these different
aspects of warriors in prehistory, and to tell

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a more complete story as there are always
two sides to a coin (see Knüsel, this
section).
Over the last ten years there has been a

growing interest in the archaeology of the
body in research (e.g. Sofaer, 2006; Boric ́
& Robb, 2008). Many of these studies
have shown the importance of connecting
the physical body with archaeological
interpretations of identity, in line with
some of Treherne’s arguments. Not only
have there been theoretical developments
concerning the archaeology of the body,
there has also been great progress in scien-
tific analyses that can help us gain informa-
tion about the body. New developments in
isotopic analyses and aDNA have given us
new and unique possibilities for investigat-
ing the diet, mobility, and genetic heritage
of deceased individuals, warriors or not, at
a much more detailed level than ever
before. So far, the most in-depth studies of
this kind have been conducted on female
graves (e.g. the new analysis of the Egtved
girl by Frei et al., 2015), but future work
on warriors’ graves would clearly expand
our understanding of warriorhood in the
Bronze Age. An increase in the number of
experimental warfare studies has also taken
place over the last decade. All these recent
developments need to be viewed together
for an up-to-date reassessment on the
Bronze Age warrior. We might not need to
revitalize the archaeology of warfare and
warriors, as Treherne’s article did twenty-
one years ago, but all this new research
demands another serious theoretical and
methodological discussion to bring together
and reassess the different dimensions of
warriorhood, both the beauty and the beast.
It is easy to find flaws in an article

written two decades ago. The intention
here is not to belittle Treherne’s article in
any way. It was, and remains, a sound and
influential text, and it has been an import-
ant article for many fields of archaeology.
As has been noted above, this article was

significant for changing perspectives and
redirecting research on warfare and war-
riors. However, twenty-one years later its
contribution and role has changed from
being a new and innovative article to
being ‘a classic’; a starting point for many
fields of research. It set a new baseline
upon which we continue to build. The
problem is, are we not becoming lazy if we
simply go on accepting this article’s inter-
pretation as the norm?
The time has come for another young

scholar to write a new thought-provoking
article with a fresh interpretation on
warfare and warriors in order for research
to move another step forward, an article
that embraces the multitude of ideas and
data available through new theoretical and
methodological developments within the
archaeology of the body, or body-centred
archaeology, without forgetting the many
important contributions highlighted by
Treherne. We should never forget that the
beauty of the warrior ideal is always fol-
lowed by the threat and unpleasantness of
warfare. I hope there is someone out there
who might be up to the task of again
writing an article that challenges our per-
ceptions so profoundly that it shifts and
changes the course of many fields of
archaeology.

AN IBERIAN PERSPECTIVE ON ‘THE
WARRIOR’S BEAUTY’

Sandra Montón Subías

Twenty-one years ago, in his now classic
article under discussion here, Paul
Treherne brought to the fore the analysis
of subjectivity in understanding what hap-
pened in the prehistory of Europe. After
reviewing the evidence for warriors and
warfare, he rejected as ‘deficient’ the
ideology-as-a-resource mainstream inter-
pretive models for the Neolithic/Bronze
Age transition, and re-evaluated this shift

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in terms of changes in the construction
of the male self. In so doing, he pioneered
studies of masculinity, of embodiment and
symmetrical analysis in archaeology. In
addition, his work remains a fine example
of the role that prehistory can play in the
construction of world history.
Contrary to the quite common convic-

tion that interest in warfare and warriors is
mainly a product of the 1990s, I regard
the subject as deeply ingrained in the
fabric of archaeology. Indeed, the emer-
gence of militant male warrior elites has
been considered inherent to processes of
growing social complexity since the begin-
ning of our discipline (see Siret & Siret,
1890 as an early example from Iberia).
Although frequently theoretically under-
developed, concepts such as warriors, con-
flict, instability, warfare, and militarism
have been widely used in the archaeo-
logical literature of all time. Poorly devel-
oped theorizing is, in my view, not so
much related to a lack of interest or a con-
scious wish to pacify the past (as stated,
for instance, by Keeley, 1996), but to the
very idiosyncrasy of archaeological schools
of thought and background assumptions
that have taken the phenomenon for
granted (see Aranda Jiménez et al., 2009
as an example, again from Iberia).
Within culture history, for instance, the

theme was ubiquitous in the form of
studies of weaponry (especially typologies),
which were and are widely used as
fossil types to define and characterize cul-
tures, and to construct temporalities and
chronological sequences across the whole
of Europe. From the 1970s onwards,
growing attention (from heterogeneous
perspectives too) to the evolution of social
complexity during the transition from the
Neolithic to the Bronze Age also corre-
lated the increase in social hierarchy with
the rise and consolidation of a male body
of warriors. Treherne drew on the same
material evidence handled by these

previous studies (new specialized weap-
onry, horse harness, wheeled vehicles,
ornaments, and grooming tools) and
accepted them as proof of new war-like
practices and body language. However, he
rejected the modernist dualistic thinking
that took these shifts to merely represent a
change ‘from an ideology of place and
community to one of the individual and
personal display’ (Treherne, 1995: 107,
hereafter cited by page number only). To
him, the Neolithic/Bronze Age transition
was, first and foremost, an ontological
process.
‘The Warrior’s Beauty’ connected the

emergence of individualization and per-
sonal display in the archaeological record
with a new style of life and changes in
what it was to be a person (p. 122) and,
more specifically, in male self-identity
(p. 106). Warrior paraphernalia did not,
thus, allude to a restricted elite mobilizing
ideology as an external resource for its own
benefit—as if persons and ideology
belonged to different plans of action, as
ideology could embrace structured thoughts
detached from people’s actions—but to
new men’s embodied understandings of
themselves, their identity, and their way of
being in their surrounding world.
Having set out the outline of Treherne’s

argument, I would like to point out how
valuable I find the identification of general
trends in prehistory that may be related to
concerns of our current times, without
doubt a clear merit of Treherne’s overview.
Maybe because I teach an MPhil course
on world history and most of my depart-
mental colleagues are historians of the
written sources, I have for some time
insisted on how important prehistory is in
the construction (and teaching) of world
history. Perceived sometimes as a remote
(and even exotic) domain, it is also often
thought to be unrelated to problems of the
present day. However, prehistory saw the
birth of many different processes that have

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moulded the world to its actual shape.
The fact that present social and gender
inequality, existing identities and ways of
being a person, and cultural values and
attitudes have been formed by complex
long-standing processes beginning in pre-
history, and that these can only be well
understood and modified in light of their
historical backgrounds, has been insuffi-
ciently explored.
I find it worrisome, however, that long-

term reviews are usually constructed to
enhance social change(s) at the cost of social
continuity(ies). Because I find Treherne’s
contribution to fit this tendency, I will now
focus in greater detail on his main subject:
the emergence of individuality in wide-
spread areas of Europe. My intention here
is to discuss the article on its own terms
and not so much to point out missing
topics that fall outside Treherne’s purpose.
Fundamental to the author’s argument

is the relationship between material
culture, the body, and the new type of
subjectivity incarnated in the male warrior.
According to Treherne, previous works
had not really grasped the reasons why
objects designated as ‘prestige items’ (an
expression that he considers reductionist)
are those and not others. Mainly consid-
ered as signs of elevated status, their intri-
cate and vital relationship with the
manipulation of the warrior’s body had
remained unattended. Pioneering symmet-
rical archaeology, Treherne claims that
these goods are not only expressing but
also constructing a new ‘notion of self and
personhood, grounded in changing atti-
tudes to and practices in, on, and through
the body’ (p. 125). However, to me, the
importance of the body is more announced
by Treherne than it is explained. Even
when, inspired by works about the
Homeric warrior, he assumes the centrality
of the body in societies with no body/
mind dichotomies, the reader may remain
mystified by why the body is so paramount

in constructing individualization and dif-
ferentiation. At this point, I would like to
draw attention to a series of works that
have contextualized the importance of the
body for personhood construction in the
framework of oral societies (especially
Hernando, 2002, 2012; Moragón, 2013).
Drawing also on the absence of the

body/mind dichotomies and on studies
promoted (among others) by Norbert
Elias, Walter J. Ong, and David R. Olson,
such works have explained that, in prehis-
toric oral societies, there must have been
no disconnect between what persons were
and their bodies, no fracture between what
persons thought they were and what they
actually were. Persons became selves
through their embodied actions. Under
such circumstances, the body was precisely
the main mechanism (instead of abstract
thinking and reflection) to construct and
manifest identity (through its management,
movements, actions, and associated material
culture). In this sense, the importance of
the body in self-hood construction was
nothing new to Bronze Age Europe.
However, while community belonging was
previously performed, Bronze Age warriors
set themselves apart and emphasized differ-
ence. The difference was thus between
being a part of and being apart from, but
always through the body.
However, and here I refer again to the

change versus continuity issue mentioned
before, it is not possible to be apart from
something without at the same time being
a part of it, as Almudena Hernando has
shown in her works. While most scholar-
ship has read Bronze Age warrior’s gear,
she argues, in terms of individuality and
difference, it has at the same time ignored
its meaning regarding relational bonding.
While warriors were setting themselves
apart, they were simultaneously bonding
with new peers (warrior fraternities), and
thus maintaining, although in a new
fashion, relational identity (Hernando,

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2012: 137–41). Treherne thus ignores
relational mechanisms that remained in
the construction of the new subjectivity. In
this sense, we could say that Treherne’s is
a masculinist study on masculinity. In
focusing only on individuality and social
change, he is stressing values that define
hegemonic masculinity in the present and
dominate the mainstream writing of (pre)
history (see on this issue Hernando, 2012
and Montón Subías & Lozano, 2012).
In mentioning these flaws (in my view)

I would not like to diminish the article’s
merits. I regard it as a fundamental piece
in archaeology’s literature, not surprisingly
‘the most downloaded paper in the entire
EJA archive’, as Catherine Frieman men-
tioned when she invited me to contribute
here. Paul Treherne is among the first
scholars explicitly reflecting on the con-
struction of the male self in prehistory. In
the 1990s, when gender studies in archae-
ology were mainly perceived as women’s
affair, it was very important to reflect on
the fact that men also had gender. In add-
ition, Treherne’s article made very clear
that, during prehistory, there were differ-
ent ways of being a person and, import-
antly, that individuality had a (pre)historic
starting point. That is beyond any doubt,
and as such needs to be acknowledged.
I want to insist, however, on how import-

ant it is to complement overviews such as
Treherne’s with studies of social dynamics,
values, and principles that have been mar-
ginalized from the mainstream of scholarly
discourse and thus left outside history. To
continue with examples from Iberia, differ-
ent works—from a feminist or feminist sen-
sitive standpoint—have already attempted to
redress imbalances created by this neglect,
focusing on the role of stability, continuity,
recurrence, relationality, and interdepend-
ence (see, also for the Bronze Age, Colomer
et al., 1998 and Aranda Jiménez, 2013 as
two examples). Only by considering the
interplay between change and permanence

can social complexity and diversity in the
past be comprehended, changes be under-
stood in their full dimension, and an inclu-
sive World (pre)History be constructed. It is
not only a question of fairness or representa-
tion; it is a question of improving archaeo-
logical and historical knowledge.

THE WARRIOR’S SEDUCTION
Joanna Sofaer

In his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep
North, Richard Flanagan describes the atti-
tude to virtue of his central character, war
hero Dorrigo Evans:

‘Dorrigo Evans hated virtue, hated virtue

being admired, hated people who pretended

he had virtue or pretended to virtue them-

selves. And the more he was accused of

virtue as he grew older, the more he hated

it. He did not believe in virtue. Virtue was

vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.’

(Flanagan, 2013: 53)

Virtue, then, is not a matter of self-identity,
which, as Dorrigo Evans’s story unfolds, is
full of complexity and doubt borne of self-
knowledge and introspection. Instead,
virtue in relation to self does not really
exist, or at most is shallow and showy. It
emerges primarily from the desire of
people to attribute qualities to others as if
to give themselves hope in a world where
honour and heroism seem in short supply.
As I write, the news is full of refugees

fleeing conflict, stories of soldiers suffering
from post-traumatic stress disorder, and
terrorist atrocities. Perhaps it is precisely
because of the lack of virtue in the modern
world that the romantic vision of a warrior
golden age offered by Treherne is so
appealing. Yet it is both striking and dis-
turbing that the combination of heroic
traits identified by Treherne—a focus on
hair and grooming as a marker of identity

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and lifestyle, the search for glory, eternal
remembrance, and heroic death—are hall-
marks of a range of modern military and
terrorist groups, albeit in different ways.
One thinks of the ‘buzz-cut’ in the US
military, the immaculately groomed and
uniformed soldiers of the North Korean
regime, and the propaganda promulgated
by the self-styled warriors of Daesh. In
each of these cases, the individual male
body is linked to the body politic (Brod &
Kaufman, 1994: 8). There seems very little
of beauty here.
I do not doubt the importance of social

categories in the Bronze Age, that ‘the
warrior’ may have been one such category,
or that the body, its display, and adorn-
ment played a significant role in the medi-
ation of Bronze Age social relations.
However, ‘The Warrior’s Beauty’ proffers
a highly sanitized and hegemonic view of
Bronze Age masculinity that does little
justice to the complexity of human identity
(see Cornwall & Lindisfarne, 1994).
Asserting that there was a ‘coherent
warrior lifestyle’ does not mean that all eli-
gible men conformed to it. The evidence
for how regularly masculine ideals were
enacted and sustained, or how individuals
entered the warrior ‘class’ is thin—to what
extent was it ‘action-based’ or inherited?
Similarly, the extent to which warrior
values can be exclusively equated with
social status, or whether status might be
expressed or achieved in a variety of other
ways, is unclear. One might also ask to
whom the performance of beauty was
directed and whether it took place in
public or in private. In an age before
mirrors, did men groom themselves or was
this done for them? In the case of the
latter, was identity, therefore, a co-cre-
ation? How might modifications to the
body aim to meet the expectations of
others rather than of self? Furthermore,
the Homeric epic poems (a key strand in
Treherne’s argument) post-date the

Bronze Age (Finkelberg, 1998). Thus,
they cannot be understood to represent a
Bronze Age reality, but are likely to
represent an amalgam (Snodgrass, 1974)
or ‘unhistorical composite’ relevant to the
values of the intended audience (Osborne,
1996: 153). Yet these unresolved ques-
tions, tensions, and deficiencies often
seem to be willingly overlooked, such is
the draw of Treherne’s narrative.
‘The Warrior’s Beauty’ remains one of

the few unambiguous discussions of mascu-
line identity in the prehistory literature and
here, too, lies some of its allure. It is useful
to recognize that the article was written in
the early days of gender archaeology. The
potential of mortuary contexts for gendered
analyses in terms of the relationship
between the physical body and grave goods
had recently been highlighted in a range of
publications (e.g. Bertelsen et al., 1987;
Gero & Conkey, 1991; see also Sofaer &
Sørensen, 2013). While these and many
other subsequent works aimed to rectify the
‘invisibility’ of women and other social
groups, on the whole men have remained
visible but ‘unmarked’ (Alberti, 2006: 401).
Treherne’s article, therefore, offers a form
of analysis that remains largely unavailable
elsewhere. It may also provide a potential
point of self-identification for modern men,
something noticeable in responses to ‘The
Warrior’s Beauty’ in my own teaching prac-
tice: a delight (and relief) that the study of
social identity and gender has a place for
men and is not just about women!
However, whether the enduring popularity
of the article is due to the particular nature
of the insights it provides into the Bronze
Age and the nature of masculinity, or
whether it results from disciplinary failure
to develop a range of recognizable narra-
tives about men (and thus a lack of alterna-
tive points of contact with the past for
young men in particular), is unclear. In
claiming that the origins of feudalism lie
with the Bronze Age warrior, Treherne

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positions the Bronze Age in a particular
way with regard to the construction of
modernity and creates a seductive legacy for
modern masculine identity. However, this
apparent legacy deserves scrutiny since the
elision of two distant and entirely different
periods is awkward. There is, therefore,
potential for a vibrant, more contextually-
specific discussion that enriches archaeology
by recognizing dynamics, complexity, and
nuances in the interwoven histories of
women and men.
Though presented through the lens of

theoretical debates surrounding various
Marxist and post-processualist understand-
ings of the expression of ideology that took
root in the 1980s and 1990s, much of the
article reads as if it could have been written
more recently. Re-reading ‘The Warrior’s
Beauty’ twenty-one years after its publica-
tion, it is striking how current some of the
terminology is. Terms such as ‘embodi-
ment’, ‘performance’, ‘subjectivity’, and ‘per-
sonhood’, along with an explicit focus on
the physicality of the body as a source for
the construction and mediation of identity,
resonate with contemporary concerns
regarding the nature of past human experi-
ence. The article, therefore, retains discip-
linary relevance, although it is notable that,
in contrast to the extended discussion of
ideology in the first part of the publication,
the theoretical vocabulary that may be of
most interest today is comparatively under-
referenced and used relatively loosely. A
lack of explicit ‘positioning’ in terms of the
shades of meaning that accompany some of
these theoretical strands may be an add-
itional reason for the article’s continuing
appeal. In other words, it is easier to agree
with generalities rather than specifics. A
number of highly relevant volumes arguing
both for and against Treherne’s position in
relation to the body had already been pub-
lished prior to 1995, but are not cited by
him (e.g. Butler, 1990, 1993; Featherstone,
1991; Shilling, 1993; Cornwall &

Lindisfarne, 1994; Moore, 1994). It is,
therefore, interesting to consider whether
the impact and continued relevance of the
publication reflects its original aims and
intentions. Rather than continuing to use
the article in order to understand masculine
identity, it may be profitable to return to,
and critically engage with, Treherne’s
broader initial goals and arguments regard-
ing the lived experience of ideology. Today,
when it seems that ideology is everywhere,
a critical re-reading of Treherne’s text has
particular poignancy in reflecting upon the
potential role of ideology in the develop-
ment of human experiences. It challenges
us to consider how the expression of indi-
vidual and group action is tied to beliefs
about the world and one’s place within it.
Though Treherne’s article retains its

popularity twenty-one years after its ori-
ginal publication, this is not necessarily
due to its complete veracity or the bullet-
proof nature of its arguments and evidence
base. Instead, it appeals to the all too
human desire for his narrative in our own
turbulent world. It speaks to the pressing
need for particular kinds of histories and
thereby highlights both missed opportun-
ities and constructive disciplinary develop-
ments. It will doubtless continue to be
widely read as new generations of archae-
ologists find inspiration in its pages.

THE ONGOING SIGNIFICANCE OF PAUL
TREHERNE’S CLASSIC 1995 ARTICLE ‘THE
WARRIOR’S BEAUTY: THE MASCULINE
BODY AND SELF-IDENTITY IN BRONZE-
AGE EUROPE’ (JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN

ARCHAEOLOGY, 3(1), 105–44.) IN
RECOGNITION OF THE 20TH VOLUME OF
THE EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY

Christopher J. Knüsel

This review comes in the midst of what
has been described as a ‘crisis of masculin-
ity’ in societies across the world, a social

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phenomenon that is characterized by a
male attainment deficit, increased incar-
ceration and recidivism, poor employment
prospects, and low self-esteem. In 2001
The Economist noted that ‘throughout the
world, developed and developing, anti-
social behaviour is essentially male.
Violence, sexual abuse of children, illicit
drug use, alcohol misuse, gambling, all are
overwhelmingly male activities’. The
article goes on to observe that ‘Men […]
have been robbed of their traditional roles
as providers, protectors and even procrea-
tors’. Nearly fifteen years later, in 2015,
The Economist characterized this trend in
rich countries as ‘no job, no family and no
prospects’.
This description of contemporary mas-

culinity is completely at odds with the
image Paul Treherne paints of masculinity
some 4000 years ago in ‘The Warrior’s
Beauty’. Treherne characterizes these
Bronze Age warriors as epitomized by a
concern with physical appearance, as
implied by items described as ‘toilet kits’
found in their graves, consisting of combs,
razors, and tweezers, which probably
groomed them in life and at death. He
describes these warriors as ‘beautiful’,
adorned in shiny gold and bronze metal-
work displayed on woollen garments, with
elaborate, well-groomed, and probably dis-
tinctive hairstyles and perhaps facial hair
or lack thereof. They may have employed
make-up, perhaps using the peculiar
wooden ‘spatulas’ sometimes found in
burials, contemporary examples of which
were found with Gristhorpe Man (Melton
et al., 2013 and see below) and another
with the Amesbury Archer (Fitzpatrick,
2011: 75). These Bronze Age men
engaged in feats of conviviality—drinking
bouts and feasts—and in the skilled use of
the first specialized arms requiring both
physical co-ordination and more assiduous
training. They had personal character and
their appearance expressed a developed

self-identity based on a weapon-bearing
warrior lifestyle. Perhaps, like their later
medieval counterparts, they evinced
prowess; not only physical skill, but
bearing and poise in conduct (see Knüsel
2011, 2015) that won glory, renown, and
remembrance that formed the goals of life
and contributed to a good death (Bloch
and Parry, 1982: 15; Binski, 1996) as
represented by an elaborate single burial
beneath a mound visible for all to see.
These men seem to have exuded confi-
dence, self-esteem, and self-assurance
within their societies, as reflected and
represented in the treatment of their
bodies in death. Treherne draws splen-
didly on the notion that ‘the body and its
treatment becomes [sic] an artefact of and
canvas for symbolic and social expression’
(Knüsel et al., 2010: 306).
Although Treherne’s article is admirable

for highlighting the accoutrements, mater-
ial culture, and aspects of the social
context of these Bronze Age warriors, it
inspired my interest, in part, because of
the areas in which it is least developed.
Despite repeated mentions and discussion
of the body from a metaphysical point of
view based on funerary remains, few
remains of bodies enter into the piece and
when they do they involve apparent
manipulations of the remains of the
deceased with presumed symbolic value
that has more recently been ascribed to
other processes in many instances. In
effect, this leaves the use of ‘male’ and
‘masculine’ in his treatment in the same
realm as the use of the word ‘prestige’ that
is critiqued so thoroughly in it. The phys-
icality of these warrior males is left
untouched—their height, weight, phys-
ique, their maladies and wounds, the
extent of their masculinity as defined by
masculine physical traits—and even if all
the individuals accompanied by such
objects were indeed males, all of these
attributes can be determined from the

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analysis of the skeletal remains of the
deceased. Were these men physically dis-
tinctive? Where did they come from, and
to whom were they related? Did these
physical attributes also have an influence
on the appearance and status of the
warrior as much as their dress and accou-
trements? Some of these questions have
been answered in the twenty-one years
since the article was published, but many
have not, and geographic and temporal
coverage is uneven. These corporeal attri-
butes could act as a complement to, and
contribute much, if not more, to the ‘sub-
stantive content and implications for sub-
jectivity’ (Treherne, 1995: 117, hereafter
cited by page number only), to address
‘the relationship between the body and
subjectivity’ (italics in the original) implicit
in the objects found with the dead. This
means that the template provided by
Treherne could be judged against individ-
ual Bronze Age warrior graves, and it
could inspire similar approaches in later
periods, as indeed it did in the medieval
examples referred to above.
Deeper consideration of the physical

remains of the dead would also contribute
to better understand the placement of
objects on the body with respect to skeletal
remains; this would do much to unravel
the ideological underpinnings of these
objects, revealing in the process a grammar
of symbolic intent present in the pattern-
ing of material with respect to the remains
of the body.
The corporeal attributes of these well-

appointed male burials can also provide a
means to study the social effects of ideolo-
gies that permeate all forms of human
practice and whether or not their manifes-
tations were indeed a conspiratorial prac-
tice of a ‘small group of cynical men’
(p. 115) to obtain a pre-eminent social
status that conferred membership to ‘the
warrior fraternity’ (p. 114). As noted by
Treherne, the societies of the Late

Neolithic and Bronze Age were not egali-
tarian (if not before, see below), and it
may well be that the activities and beha-
viours linked to the appearance of these
individuals was indeed a conspiracy to
legitimate social inequality. And this may
have been enforced through threat and
fear of retribution—from within social
groups and from the outside—that led to
the hegemony of groups of people, at least
in some places and times. The means to
explore these relationships come in two
forms: measures of well-being and physical
injuries, including weapon-related trauma.
Again, both relate to the physical remains
of the deceased.
One of the occupants of these Bronze

Age single burials, the nearly complete
skeleton known as Gristhorpe Man, was
buried in an oak log coffin on the coast
overlooking the North Sea, near
Scarborough in Yorkshire (Melton, et al.,
2010, 2013). He was buried with a whale-
bone-embellished dagger, among other
artefacts. Gristhorpe Man and other single
inhumations form a distinctive group of
‘tall men’ from the Early Bronze Age in
Britain that suggests preferential access to
good nutrition and growth environments
commensurate with social advantage from
birth, stature being a good measure of
population and individual health and well-
being (see discussion in McKinley, 2011;
Knüsel et al., 2013). These men may have
belonged to an inherited social elite for a
period of time, though one that was not
apparently sustainably inter-generational
over the longer term. Gristhorpe Man was
of robust build with an enviable body
mass, producing a high normal body mass
index by today’s standards. His was of ath-
letic build. His strongly developed right
dominant arm (i.e. humerus) testifies to its
use in strenuous physical activities that are
likely to have included technological and
subsistence-linked activities such as manu-
facture and maintenance of objects, as in

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woodworking and metalworking, and pur-
suits requiring physical effort, including
long-distance walking and sport, as well as
weapon use. Dietary isotopes suggest that
he had benefited from a rich, high-protein
diet, which also predisposed him to renal
stones. During life he had developed an
intracranial tumour, the placement of
which may have affected movement of the
right side of his body, including his well-
developed right upper limb, and his ability
to speak and comprehend speech. His
remains also show evidence of a chronic
infection of the maxillary dentition from
dental caries, as well as other carious
lesions. These are indications of the phys-
ical consequences of a socially pre-eminent
lifestyle that included the consumption of
cariogenic foods.
Gristhorpe Man had sustained four

ante-mortem (i.e. all healed) traumatic
injuries, two to his ribs, another to his
neck, and yet another to his chin. These
attest to an active lifestyle that exposed
him to injury. The Amesbury Archer
(named after the arrowheads among the
grave goods accompanying this Early
Bronze Age male burial in Wiltshire) also
had sustained a crippling knee injury in
his young adult years (McKinley, 2011). A
worldwide review of traumatic lesions
related to inter-personal conflict found
that such injuries occurred overwhelmingly
in males from the Bronze Age to the
modern period (Knüsel & Smith, 2013b).
These sumptuously adorned men and their
followers were not only able to deliver
injurious blows, but also exposed them-
selves repeatedly to injury as well.
The Neolithic forms a turning point in

the level of violence (Schulting, 2006;
Schulting & Fibiger, 2012; Smith, 2014)
Although there is noticeably more evi-
dence of injuries resulting from interper-
sonal violence in the Neolithic than in
preceding periods, there appears to be a
more equal distribution of traumatic

injuries between the sexes (Schulting &
Wysocki, 2005; Fibiger et al., 2013;
Knüsel & Smith, 2013b), attesting to the
differing circumstance in which these
wounds were received. Neolithic warfare
appears to have been more about surprise
and hit-and-run tactics, as may be indi-
cated by a lack of static, defensible forti-
fied places. Support for this statement
comes in at least two additional forms of
physical evidence, in addition to skeletal
trauma: mass graves and bilateral limb
asymmetry. The Early Neolithic mass
grave at Talheim, which Schulting (2013:
22) describes as ‘paradigm-shifting’, was
the first to provide evidence that apparent
‘tools’ (adzes) were responsible for cranial
trauma that resulted in the deaths of mul-
tiple men, women, and children (Wahl &
König, 1987). It was not only in the Early
Neolithic that such violence is documen-
ted (Meyer et al., 2014, 2015), other
notable examples being known from the
Late Neolithic (Meyer et al., 2009).
Already in the Early Neolithic, males
buried with adzes seem to have employed
their right upper limbs in activities that
predisposed them to thrower’s elbow
(Villotte & Knüsel, 2014), a disorder
linked to single-handed tool-use that
probably included weapons.
Schulting (2013: 25) notes that ‘we do

not see a specialized warrior identity in the
Mesolithic or Neolithic and that every
able-bodied male would be expected to
perform this role alongside his other roles:
as hunter, farmer, herder, fisher, weaver,
potter, etc.’. If discernible warrior graves
are apparently absent, it appears that their
activities seem to have been present.
Warriors, then, probably emerged before
they became archaeologically visible in the
Bronze Age (see Jeunesse, 1996), when a
more highly organized entourage of (male)
warriors and more highly orchestrated
warfare that is familiar to historians of the
ancient world came into being.

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When combined with the type of
material associations described by
Treherne, these studies have the capacity
to break the symbolic/utilitarian interpret-
ive equifinality implicit in apparently
socially-identifying objects. In short, a
great corpus, made up of theory, historical
precedent, and material cultural correlates,
lacks a synthetic biological component,
and we are thus left with the conundrum
of whether elaborately interred individuals
constitute an orchestrated symbolic, but in
essence unreal or even misleading,
representation, or a true reflection of the
emergence of a socially differentiated
group that contributes leaders, i.e. active
social agents, wielding unequal power to
influence social change. This question
finds its correlate in the work of Härke
(1990, 1992) on early medieval weapon
burials, which are described by Steuer
(1989) as also representing a ‘warrior life-
style’ in the early medieval period. As sug-
gested in Treherne’s essay, the key to
unpicking this knot of ambiguity—to
break the equifinality implicit in the term
‘weapon burial’—lies in the physical attri-
butes of individuals buried in elaborate
graves.
The emergence of warriors in the

Bronze Age may go far to explain some of
the population movements/mass migra-
tions that are thought to have taken place
on a grand scale in the period (Haak
et al., 2015), but such an explanation may
also be employed on a local or regional
scale to account for the origin of warrior-
leaders. This would also help resolve the
question of whether individual cases
represent true warriors—who had actually
fought—and distinguish them from others
who were non-combatants buried in ways
which mimicked the warrior’s beauty, in a
manner that is similar to the transform-
ation from warrior to courtier-aristocrat of
the Later Middle Ages (see p. 130). This
diachronic perspective, hinted at in the

conclusion of Treherne’s piece, speaks for
what appears to be a recurrent and endur-
ing phenomenon of a certain type of mas-
culinity. It seems clear that by the advent
of the European Bronze Age, if not
before, the martial component of mascu-
linity had emerged, and it continues to be
present in a less personally active but
increasingly powerful and deadly form in
leadership today.

THE ‘BEAUTIFUL WARRIOR’ TWENTY-ONE
YEARS AFTER: BRONZE AGE WARFARE

AND WARRIORS
Helle Vandkilde

The seminal article by Paul Treherne in
the 1995 volume of this journal seems to
have given rise to a mostly independent
thread unrelated to the current surge in
warfare research. The role of warfare and
warrior aesthetics is briefly discussed
against this background.
Warriors would seem topical to ques-

tions of prehistoric warfare, which until c.
1996 was a marginal subject area in
archaeology. Since then, war has gained
considerable momentum as a research
theme and today the archaeology of
warfare is firmly placed in the suite of
archaeologies addressed. The brilliant
‘Warrior’s Beauty’ paper by Paul Treherne,
published in 1995 in the European Journal
of Archaeology (then the Journal of
European Archaeology) can, given its many
citations, be categorized as a high-impact
article; it is a frequently accessed article on
the journal’s website. Against this back-
ground, it is pertinent to ask if the study
has had a role in driving the current inter-
est in war and, hence, has influenced the
new knowledge now emerging. Are the
visual appearance and bodily movements
of the ancient warrior, sensu Treherne, at
all present in the archaeology of warfare
now blooming?

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In the twentieth century, the warrior
was considered a heroic stereotype at the
head of an ancient society that was
deemed essentially peaceful. But, after
the ‘discovery’ of the war-like reality of
societies in the late 1990s, warriors have
paradoxically fallen out of the Bronze
Age research limelight, although warrior
elites sometimes figure in interpreta-
tions (Vandkilde, 2016). It is, therefore,
timely to assess the value of Treherne’s
contribution.

An impactful essay ahead of its time

Treherne’s essay contains a number of
observations and theory-driven hypotheses,
which have the potential to throw light on
the main strands of change in Neolithic
and Bronze Age Europe and increase our
understanding of the role of the warrior in
these societies. In addition, it is a mani-
festo replete with theoretical insights:
classic, mainstream, and scholarly. The
position taken is not easily slotted in to any
theoretical school or paradigm; the article
works equally well as a grand history on
an Eurasian scale, and, by contrast, as an
examination of the male body and equip-
ment as both unique and reiterated
materiality in life and death. This epis-
temological stance embedded in Classical
history may explain the immediate success
of Treherne’s article, not least in the mid-
1990s when much energy was invested in
aligning with processual, post-processual,
or post-structural persuasions.
Characteristically, the essay works with

dualities rather than dichotomies. In fact,
the inseparability of ideology and reality
on the one hand, and of the body, iden-
tity, and personhood on the other, may
have been an eye-opener for many archae-
ologists struggling to make sense of spe-
cific archaeological remains, in particular
burials: it became clearer that people’s

beliefs were lived through their social
interactions and affiliations, and that con-
cepts such as ‘false consciousness’ tends to
victimize, especially, those people ‘without
history’ and thence to simplify complex pre-
historic realities. People live out their ideolo-
gies and form their identities through their
bodies in an entanglement where power is
an inherent element. In providing a simul-
taneously sophisticated and straightforward
framework for thinking theoretically about
archaeological things, data, culture, and
change, Treherne was well ahead of his
time. First, the essay can be read as a cri-
tique of archaeology rooted in philosophy,
while at the same time promoting body,
gender, identity, agency, the senses, and
even history as an interleaved package
central to the interpretive agenda. Second,
the essay can be taken to be an innovative
framework for better understanding the
numerous weapons recovered in burials and
hoards from around 3000 BC onwards, and
here Classical studies and early written
sources support the argument well. The
immediate impression is nevertheless that
this second aspect has not been invigorated
to any significant extent by the general aca-
demic turn set out by Treherne’s essay.
Internet data may confirm this broad

canvas. Even if the number of citations is
likely to be an underestimate, the statistics
in Table 1 show that Treherne’s article has
contributed more significantly to other
subject areas (eighty-four per cent) than to
warfare, weapons, and warriorhood (sixteen
per cent). Its main impact is on questions
of identity and gender, body and agency,
emotion, art, and the senses, in addition
to general theory and overviews. Its low
impact (very few, if any, references) on the
otherwise thriving genre of war studies is
illustrated when leafing through a number
of anthologies: e.g. those of Carman &
Harding (1999); Osgood et al. (2000);
Otto et al. (2006); Ralph (2013). Given
this essay’s heading and principal message,

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it is surprising that warrior studies show up
in such a low proportion in the statistics,
but this may relate to warriors being rather
marginal to the current rise in warfare
studies. In fact, a handful of major warrior
studies do recognize Treherne 1995 as
central to the analysis of ancient warriors:
Harrison (2004); Vandkilde (2006b);
Harding (2007); Knöpke (2009); Schulting
(2013). One could argue that it was
Keeley’s book (War Before Civilization,
1996) and the wars and genocide of the
1990s that heralded research in prehistoric
warfare. Meanwhile Treherne’s essay
became one of the guiding threads in a par-
allel thrust to populate prehistory with
able-bodied real people, but this comprised
few analyses of warriors until recently.
Treherne’s article thus seems to have insti-
gated an independent thread of research
mostly disconnected from the surge of
warfare studies from 1996 to the present.
While Treherne’s article demonstrates a

good knowledge of the archaeology outside
the English-speaking world, the works
quoting Treherne come predominantly from
the latter. German archaeology has recently
discovered war as a research area; this

Kriegsarchäologie seems to largely be an inde-
pendent development apparently little influ-
enced by the global rise in war studies since
1996, as the few cross-references reveal (e.g.
Meller & Schefzik, 2015). It may be that the
interest in war now manifest in German
archaeology is a logical continuation, or off-
shoot, of the strong Kriegergräber tradition,
which was also a major source of inspiration
for Treherne (p. 105). More broadly, weap-
onry is still an important research focus in
Germany (as well as elsewhere), albeit the
interest has shifted slightly more towards
investigations of damage and wear on deadly
weapons, such as swords and spears, as well
as research on traumata (e.g. Peter-Röcher,
2007; Horn, 2013). Furthermore, recent dis-
coveries have been influential too, notably the
Corded Ware multiple burial at Eulau in
central Germany (Meyer et al., 2009) and
two early Urnfield sites, the battlefield of
Tollense (Jantzen et al., 2011) and the
Neckarsulm warrior cemetery (Knöpke,
2009; Wahl & Price, 2013) in north-eastern
and southern Germany, respectively.
In sum, the growing field of the archae-

ology of warfare follows several research
directions which have so far been little
concerned with the beautifully-bodied
warrior, despite his implicit capacity for
violence. It may well be that the warrior
needs to be instated as an instrumental
agent in the sometimes war-like reality of
prehistoric society.

The Bronze Age warrior: epic hero or
militant professional?

Treherne used as a springboard, firstly, the
ostentatious panoplies of weapons deposited
in the so-called Kriegergräber and, secondly,
Homer’s warrior tales and their reinterpreta-
tions in Classical studies traditionally
favouring masculine bodily aesthetics. The
association of both these categories with
grooming tools, dress and accessories,

Table 1 Citations of Treherne 1995.

Treherne 1995

Archaeological themes Citations Year span

Overviews 28 1999–2015

Identity-gender 36 1997–2016

Rituals-death-burial 23 2002–2015

Body-agency 17 2005–2013

Theory, e.g. mind-matter 13 1999–2014

Emotion-senses-art 12 2000–2014

Weapons 6 2003–2015

Warriors 9 1999–2016

Warfare 9 2003–2013

Sum 153

Source: Google Scholar February 2016

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drinking equipment, and wheeled vehicles
may be a convincing argument that they
represent the shared characteristics of
warrior elites—centred on both the living
and the dead masculine body: common life/
death style and norms, beliefs, appearance,
as well as inbred social superiority and
habits of cultural consumption. This ideol-
ogy is accordingly lived through individua-
lizing and communal action in the group of
warriors among which courtly conduct is
pre-eminent, not least during the funerals
of companions. It is, indeed, the Weberian
notion of the status group which permeates
the analysis and which is similar to van
Wees’ status warriors in the setting of
Homer’s epics (1992), or for that matter
Kristiansen’s warrior aristocracies in the
Bronze Age (1984, 1999). Treherne does
not use the word ‘hero’, which is neverthe-
less implicit throughout his article, in
which, furthermore, the concept of warrior
elites is not criticized and becomes a static
component of Bronze Age society.
Today we know that prehistoric warfare

cannot be reduced to rituals such as
Treherne erroneously contends (pp. 109),
extending the paradigmatic absence of war
and violence prevalent in much earlier
archaeological interpretation, which also
venerated the gallant warrior as the head
of society. Homeric warfare is, to put it
simply, about prowess and honour, and
about fame and glory on an epic scale; but
bloody raids and piracy represent the
reverse of the gleaming coin. Van Wees
(1992) shows that Homer’s epics narrate a
social world in which rivalry thrived, and
where power and leadership were con-
stantly under pressure rather than making
an undisputed, stable warrior hierarchy.
Ugly violence and brutal assaults, such as
plundering cities for revenue and taking
captives for slavery, are present as subtexts
to the dominant narrative of heroic
conduct, which also tends to evaporate
when the fallen heroes are left unburied

and mutilated on the battlefield, in danger
of losing their social status.
These are important nuances to con-

sider in regard to Bronze Age archaeology
too; the interface between heroic and
violent realities is becoming clearer, but
still needs further study. Van Wees’ find-
ings can be said to parallel the duality
present in the archaeological sources for
the Bronze Age:
There can, first of all, be no doubt that

a heroic logic is embedded within much
Bronze Age materiality in the same way as
it is at the core of Homeric society,
reflected in particular in the Iliad. This
implies that heroization formed part of the
social reality in both these connected
worlds and later gave rise to the varied
and probably quite widespread practice of
hero cults (Whitley, 1995; Vandkilde,
2013a), echoed in Hesiod’s men of bronze
and his notion of an age of heroes.
Against this background, it becomes prob-
lematic merely to dismiss the hypothesis
of warrior aristocracies, even though this
institution needs to be nuanced in Bronze
Age settings. Treherne is not overmuch
concerned with bodily techniques as phys-
ical action, sensu Mauss (1936), and is
more in line with Vernant’s (1991a) aes-
thetic body perspective. Aesthetics on its
own is, however, inadequate: through a
more complete body perspective, Warnier
(2011) contends that warfare always
involves the fighter’s subjectivity and that
warriors are the professional agents specif-
ically trained in the techniques of warfare.
The movements of both body and
weapons have to be synchronized to effect-
ively overcome the innate fear, as mental-
ity is clearly important for survival.
Secondly, new data strongly suggest that

prehistoric warfare was quite widespread and
often deadly: there is now substantial skel-
etal evidence for war-related violence (e.g.
Schulting, 2013). Kriegergräber have so far
not revealed skeletal trauma—probably not

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because it did not exist, but because the
skeletons are generally badly preserved and
often cremated. The social status of the
warrior as sword carrier or as charioteer is
effectively commemorated in the burial
rites (e.g. Clausing, 1999; Winghart,
1999), and there is nothing to suggest that
this did not have a bearing on conflict and
war. A violent reality at the transition to
the Urnfield period emerges clearly from
two recently excavated sites. Around 1250
BC in the Tollense river valley, numerous
plundered corpses of warriors with projec-
tiles often still embedded in their bodies
were left on the battlefield by the victors
(Jantzen et al., 2011). This is paralleled at
the cemetery of Neckarsulm, dated to the
early Urnfield period (Ha A1) (Knöpke,
2009). Both sites contain almost exclusively
young male warriors, many of them for-
eigners and probably mounted (Wahl &
Price, 2013; Brinker et al., 2015). This
matches well the quantification of weapon
burials calculated by Clausing (1999: 392)
with peaks at the beginning and end of
this long period. Earlier evidence, such as
the Corded Ware burials at Gjerrild and
Eulau, and the Wassenar and Over-
Vindinge burials dated to the transition to
the Middle Bronze Age, clearly show that
war-related violence occurred, if not
throughout the period then definitely at the
thresholds of change (see Otto et al., 2006;
Peter-Röcher, 2007; Vandkilde, 2013b).
These datasets concur with the outcome of
use-wear studies of Bronze Age weaponry
(e.g. Kristiansen, 2002; Mörtz, 2010;
Horn, 2013). In addition, weapons such as
swords, spears, shields, and armour became
more deadly, effective, and standardized
over time, culminating in the Urnfield
period. While bows and arrows are infre-
quent in burials and other deposits they are
prominently attested across the periods in
the data for skeletal trauma. This reveals
that archery was instrumental in war, while
it did not officially form part of the concept

of heroic valour and of special codes of life/
death style conducted in the companies of
warrior peers.
Warriorhood can thus be defined as a

social identity springing from militant
bodily-material interaction, but also from
heroic tales of men, war, and glory.
Therefore, Treherne’s warrior obsessed
with his bodily appearance ought to be
taken seriously when we add the violence
that is also integral to the warrior’s being
and doing. Such an entwined reality for a
Bronze Age warrior is in full agreement
with the outcomes of the few warrior-
focused studies mentioned in the intro-
duction. If the identity of the warrior is
disconnected from the activity of warfare,
there is a risk that the many data obtained,
notably for weaponry and trauma, will not
further our knowledge of how war and its
agents influenced history and vice versa.
Quantitative variations over time in
trauma and weaponry already hint that
warriors and their actions were placed cen-
trally in the historical web of causes and
effects with major thresholds at around
3000 BC, 1600 BC, and 1200 BC.

THE BEAUTY OF THE CHALK WARRIOR:
A REFLECTION ON TREHERNE’S
CONTRIBUTION TO PREHISTORIC

MARTIAL CULTURE
Melanie Giles

Introduction

In 1995, archaeologists from the University
of Sheffield were excavating a Late Iron
Age-early Roman farmstead—a so-called
‘ladder’ or ‘droveway’ enclosure—on the
High Wolds of East Yorkshire (Giles,
2007). Among the objects in the box of
finds that has made its way into my care, is
a small, broken tablet of hard chalk with an
almost translucent or bony quality. It is

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roughly triangular and, even though it lacks
a head, it is clearly carved to represent a
human torso: a new, rare example of the
‘chalk figures’ first drawn by Mortimer
(1905: fig. 492) and published as a corpus
by Stead (1988). The fragment is damaged
by both plough and mattock, yet some ori-
ginal incised lines survive underneath the
unwashed rime of loam: the double stripe
of a belt, the flare of a sword’s hilt running
up the backbone, and the sleeve-edges of
both arms (Figure 1f). The right sleeve
reaches behind over the shoulder blade; the
left hangs down, truncated abruptly where
the front has sheared off in antiquity
(Figure 2). This diminutive armed figure is-
poised, frozen in the act of reaching for its
sword—appealing to be understood in the
context of the last century of Iron Age
life in Britain, and its difficult and
undoubtedly bloody entry into the
Roman world.
1995 also saw the publication of Paul

Treherne’s article on ‘The Warrior’s Beauty’,
and an increasingly battered photocopy of
this publication has accompanied me into
the field ever since. Useful evening reading
matter on an East Yorkshire Wolds dig
where Iron Age square burials cluster
along streams fed by violent springs. An
example of taut scholarship that drew
theory into skilful marriage with Bronze
Age material culture. An article glowing
with bronze feasting equipment, weap-
onry, and horse-gear, against which echo
the worlds of Homeric poetry and the
bloody sheen of figures such as Achilles
and Hector. Yet at its heart lay overlooked
and intimate objects of male bodily care:
‘accessories’ normally relegated to the
domestic realm. The small piece of
research presented here owes a debt of
inspiration to this publication and its
author. In the sections that follow, I want
first to highlight its key strengths and
then show how my own work continues to
tack back-and-forth to this seminal article.

‘The Warrior’s Beauty’

Treherne’s critique of the Bronze Age
‘warrior aristocracy’ model draws on
embodiment and practice theory of the late
1980s–1990s (particularly the theories
inspired by Mauss, Bourdieu, and Giddens),
and the work of John Barrett (1994), Julian
Thomas (1991), and Marie Louise Stig
Sørensen (1991) on ‘technologies of the
body’, ‘lifestyle’, and ‘biographical’ approaches
in archaeology. Like them, he takes the
materiality of the body and its life-cycle as a
fundamental frame of human experience,
meaning, and thus analysis. Yet his article
stands out from these studies through an
explicit interest in the character of the
warrior. Treherne does not problematize
this term (see Giles, forthcoming), nor
spend time discussing the scale and charac-
ter of violence in later prehistoric Europe,
citing instead the ‘heroic combat’ of
Classical Mediterranean literature as analo-
gous evidence. He contrasts this kind of
‘sovereign warrior’ with the hoplite phal-
anxes of Late Bronze Age Spartans or
serried ranks of Roman legionaries, for
example. At the end of the article, brief allu-
sions to medieval sacred masculinity,
knightly valour, and later court aristocracy
provide alternative models of male renown,
which foreshadow the work of Taylor (e.g.
2013) or Gilchrist (e.g. 2009). It is,
however, clear, as the article progresses, that
Treherne is arguing that these warriors were
not inevitable socio-evolutionary products of
complex societies: they were the outcome of
deliberate choices to elevate and perpetuate
a particular character, and celebrate the
ideals they embodied.
Such bodies took very particular histor-

ical and cultural forms, which required
work: habitualized regimes of bodily train-
ing, care, and adornment, alongside a suite
of cultural customs which valorized the
body as ‘a locus of individuality’ (Treherne,
1995: 107). Musculature, posture, hair,

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equipment, and dress. The work of train-
ing, practising, and honing one’s skills. The
work of crafting, sharpening, and repairing
arms. The symbolically charged arenas of
hunting and dancing through which war-
riors practised their arts. The drinking and
eating through which warriors distin-
guished themselves from others, celebrated
their courage, and bound themselves to
their comrades. And, not least, the work of
fighting: being wounded, dying with
honour, being remembered. This not only

gave rise to a specific male ‘life style’ as he
puts it, embodied in both ‘social practices
and cultural representations’, but also a
‘death style … a socio-culturally prescribed
way of expiring’ (p. 106).
Throughout his article, Treherne

deploys objects normally dismissed as part
of male vanity (‘horn, bone, and bronze
combs, bronze tweezers, razors, mirrors
and (‘tattooing’) awls’; p. 110) and sug-
gests they could be essential parts of the
kit and care of the warrior. He reminds us

Figure 1. Chalk figures from East Yorkshire: (a) Withernsea; (b) Garton Slack; (c) Fimber, Blealand’s
Nook; (d) Malton; (e) Garton Slack; (f) Wharram Grange Crossroads (after Stead, 1988 with addi-
tions, drawn by M. Giles).

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that personhood was ‘not limited to the
boundaries of the epidermis’ (p. 126), but
could also be constituted through body
art, hair styling, clothing, even the use of
incense or oils, alongside actual arms, as
part of costumes that ‘visually and acous-
tically accentuated the body’ (p. 127).
Qualities of youth, physical power, sexual
potency, and courage are illustrated
through the ‘blaze’ of light said to sur-
round heroes such as Achilles: a sheen
that Treherne discusses in relation to the
fleshy-material amalgam of shields, breast-
plates, blades, hair, muscles, sweat, used
in such synergy with the warrior’s body
that they became not just trappings but
extensions of the self. Treherne draws
archaeologists away from the field of vio-
lence itself into the most intimate rituals
of self-care that protected and strengthened
these figures, as well as the rites that dealt
with their injuries; prepared and buried
their corpses in a fitting send-off, and—
their direct corollary—despoiled, stripped,
and defamed the bodies of enemies. And
finally, he points to the after-work of com-
memoration: the graveside performances
and monuments (warrior ‘stelae’ or tumuli,
figurines or motifs) as corollaries of Greek
epic poetry, which fixed them in both the
land and the memory of their brothers-in-
arms and descendants. Seminal to all of

these ideas was the heavily referenced work
of Vernant (1991b).

Performing beauty, performing violence:
the Iron Age warrior

Treherne’s model of embodiment has
received critical attention from Bronze
Age scholars (e.g. Brück, 2004) on rela-
tional identity or Fowler (2013) on per-
sonhood. Yet his notion that later
prehistory marks the emergence of a form
of ‘masculine beauty peculiar to the
warrior’ (p. 106) was a compelling one.
Methodologically, he made scholars look
at the whole life-cycle of this persona
through its associated material culture: not
just weaponry, but objects of body care,
statuary, figurines, and even burial as a
kind of valorizing, material epigraph,
‘fixing a certain image in death’ (p. 121).
In my own field, James’s (2007) ‘call to

arms’ (regarding the pacification of the
Iron Age) has been complemented by
seminal studies on weaponry (Stead, 2006)
and violence (Redfern, 2009; Armit, 2012;
Kelly, 2013; Aldhouse-Green, 2015); it
created a richer understanding of the char-
acter of Iron Age conflict and a more crit-
ical approach to the ‘Celtic warrior’
(Creighton, 2000; Hunter, 2005; Giles,
forthcoming). In my own work, I have
combined osteological and material culture
evidence to suggest that codes of honour-
able conduct governed communities like
the Arras culture of Iron Age East
Yorkshire: agreed, staggered stages of con-
flict before blood was shed, which were
highly performative (Giles, 2012, 2015). It
is into such arenas of swaggering bravado
and bellicose posturing that we need to resi-
tuate decorated weapons and chariotry—not
just as intimidating for an enemy, but apo-
tropaically effective for the warrior (Giles,
2008). I have also revisited Vernant’s idea
that ‘dying well’—achieving a ‘beautiful
death’—was not merely a way of dealing

Figure 2. The Wharram Grange Crossroads fig-
urine fragment: dorsal face (Photo: M. Giles).

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with grief and enhancing status (p. 123), but
a vital means of grappling with the existen-
tial ‘angst’ that gripped young men commit-
ted to a brief but glorious life (p. 122):
achieving post-mortem honour particularly
in the case of untimely, mysterious, or igno-
minious deaths (Giles, 2015). But what
about the notion of ‘beauty’ specific to such
warriors? Let us return to the chalk figures.

The chalk figures

They emerge on the Yorkshire Wolds and
surrounding Vales in the context of a rad-
ically changing world: the first century BC–
first century AD (pre-dating the conquest
of northern Britain but continuing to be
made, used, and deposited into the later
Roman period; Stead, 1988: 22–23). The
final phase of this region’s square barrow
cemetery rite witnessed a higher propor-
tion of weapon burials than before (Stead,
1991), suggesting a renewed focus on
arms, reflected in later weapons caches
such as South Cave (Evans et al., forth-
coming). In an era when Roman conquest
and military occupation became a lived
reality, it is not perhaps surprising that
armed masculinity was culturally re-vita-
lized. Whether dealing with resistance and
its suppression, collaboration, or recruit-
ment as an auxiliary, the right to bear
arms and the skill to wield them must
have defined the aspirations of many
young men in this region.
Between forty and fifty figurines are

known: twenty-four complete/near-com-
plete examples, including Wharram
(Stead, 1988: table 1). They are carved in
a variety of different kinds of chalk: some
heavily modified, others nodules and
plaques apparently selected for their torso
form. Both substance and appearance may
have been key, not just for the ease of cre-
ating such figures from an everyday mater-
ial, but for its white, hard shine—

analogous to bone while exuding the
sheen of sweat which may have enhanced
its perceived animacy (see Conneller,
2011). Details are finely incised (e.g.
Malton, Figure 1d) or cut-back and
excised to create three-dimensional effects
(e.g. Withernsea, Figure 1a). The figures
create a strong sense of an idealized body:
composed, largely expressionless—simple
eyes and a nose, rarely a mouth, and only
then a flat line. Perhaps this conjured the
grim determination or fortitude expected
of a man poised for violence, enduring
pain, or steeled for death (see Armit,
2012). Rarely are they explicitly gendered:
Withernsea has a stylized phallus and
scrotum, as well as a moustache and beard
(or hood) and Fimber may also have a
pointed beard (Stead, 1988). Heads are
often missing, perhaps a point of structural
weakness but Stead (1988: 25) also sug-
gests that some may have been deliberately
‘decapitated’. Arms are depicted (but not
legs or feet): frequently shown in a dual
posture of left-handed welcome or hospi-
tality (spread open across the stomach)
and right-handed ‘readiness’, reaching for
or hovering above the sword—an apotro-
paic gesture (Giles, 2007) rather than a
realistic depiction of unsheathing a blade
(Stead, 1988: 19).
Fourteen of the near-complete figures

are depicted with swords (Stead, 1988:
19), twelve running vertically or diagonally
along the back and two at the right-hand
side (Anthoons, 2012). Stead links this to
the mid-scabbard suspension loops found
with his Group E (e.g. Mid–Late Iron
Age East Yorkshire: Kirkburn K5,
Wetwang Slack chariot burials 1 and 3)
and Group F (first century AD ‘Brigantian’
swords from north-west Britain) swords
(Stead, 2006). These weapons are often
composites of bronze or wooden scab-
bards, shielding iron blades. La Tène-
inspired Celtic art often draws the eye
down the bronze scabbard to elaborate

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chapes. Hilts and pommels frequently
combine organic materials (wood, horn,
and, in the case of South Cave sword 1,
whalebone tooth and elephant ivory;
O’Connor, 2013) with exquisite glasswork,
excised iron grips, or raised bronze plates
and studs. Rare scabbard fittings (rings,
miniature terrets, and strap unions) would
have fixed hide ties to belts. Importantly,
it is these lost, ‘ancillary’ organics and the
details of woven cloth that form the major
decorative focus on the figures. Hems,
hoods, collars, bands, and wrappings
(sometimes covering the scabbard) are
drawn as grids or alternating horizontal/
vertical stripes and herringbone patterns.
These might represent highly localized
weaving traditions that demarcated aspects
of neighbourhood, lineage, age, or gender
(Giles, 2012: 127). On several figures
(Figure 1e) repeated, incised gashes, slashes,
and scored lines overlie such clothing: sym-
bolic wounding or killing of an ‘enemy’
figure perhaps, or representations of injuries
endured—scars borne by a ‘hero’.

Discussion

This reflection on Treherne’s seminal
work began with a new example of an
Iron Age chalk figure. The brief example
given here furthers Treherne’s argument
that the ‘beauty’ of such warriors resided
in the melding of skilled body, kit, and
experience: flesh marked by combat, but
cared for; well-dressed hair and clothing;
strappings, fittings, and sheathed blades.
Yet beauty also resided in posture and
gesture … poised, prepared, ready …
exuding not the moment of violence, but
potential for bloodshed. They thus form
an important, indigenous contrast to the
Classical world’s representation of nor-
thern tribes—the noble, dying victim (e.g.
the ‘Dying Gaul’), or the defeated and
trampled Barbarian (e.g. Reitertyp

tombstones, such as that of Insus found in
Lancaster). The chalk figures were meant
to stand outside of time, unmoved (quite
literally, given the flat base and basal peg-
hole on many examples; Stead, 1988: 22).
What was their purpose? The idiosyncratic
nature of their crafting, the multiple frag-
ments found at sites like Garton Slack,
and their deposition among household
debris (as with the Wharram Grange
Crossroads example) suggest these were
not part of an elite art, but were made
expediently, locally, and frequently.
Household deity, toy, game-piece,
warrior-god, mythic ancestor (Stead, 1988:
25)? Feared and symbolically dispatched
enemy? Venerated mnemonic of an hon-
oured relative? Intimate surrogate, even,
for a body lost in conflict, defiled and
defamed? We may never know. Yet they
tell us of a concept of the armed figure
which (in Treherne’s words) did not
simply relate to appearance, but to living
beautifully and dying well.

AGING WELL … DYING BEAUTIFULLY
Paul Treherne

In the autumn of 2004, I was invited to
view a discovery brought to light in a
gorge below the little medieval town of
Sovana, in southern Tuscany. Workmen
clearing the vegetation around a large
mass of volcanic tufo (tuff) found the
block of stone engraved on its underside.
When I arrived, local archaeologists had
burrowed underneath the boulder, prop-
ping it up with timber supports. Lying on
my back, I shut my eyes, as they
instructed, and pulled myself into the
narrow space beneath the rock. I shall
never forget the sight when I opened my
eyes again. I found myself face to face
with a life-sized demon, a Scylla or
Triton, carved more than two thousand
years ago from the warm-hued stone.

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The Tomba dei demoni alati, as it is now
known, was discovered by chance in a
well-known necropolis where I, like
countless others, had walked many times
before. The winged demon once formed
the pediment of a tomb, which had
become detached centuries earlier from the
high cliff face where the tomb itself was
located. This accounted for the figure’s
incredible state of preservation—his flowing
hair, nude torso, and curling fishtails all
fresh and crisp as if carved yesterday.
Further excavation revealed a high arched
niche, in which a painted effigy of the
deceased lay. The false-door was flanked by
at least one lion and two other standing
figures that were largely intact from the
neck down.
At the time, I was part of a collabora-

tive project restoring the nearby Siren
tomb at Sovana, first publicized by Samuel
Ainsley and George Dennis in 1843. I
was sent to Grosseto to inspect a carved
head that had been found half a century
later amid the rubble around the tomb of
the Siren. The head had once belonged to
one of two statues that flanked the central
niche of the tomb’s façade, in exactly the
same fashion as the more recent and
better-preserved Tomba dei demoni alati.
After years in which it had been kept in
the vaults of the Archaeological Museum,
a plaster cast of the head was being made
for restoration on site.
Intriguingly, the curator showed me

something one could not observe from the
fragmentary torso on site, yet confirmed
by the figures from the newly discovered
tomb. In each statue, one hand drew back
a tress of hair, while the other reached
across with a blade to cut it. There was
something more that intrigued me.
Whereas the owner of the recent tomb
was male, as advertised by a crude phallus
etched in the rock face, the winged
demons cutting their own hair were all
female.

The experience cast my thoughts back
to the article I wrote in this journal in
1995: ‘The warrior’s beauty: the masculine
body and self-identity in Bronze Age
Europe.’ The paper grew out of an under-
graduate degree in anthropology and
Classics and was adapted from a disserta-
tion for an M.Phil degree in archaeology
at Cambridge University, written in a few
brief months over the summer of 1994.
The Tomba dei demoni alati at Sovana

invoked many of the same themes that
had informed my research. The monstrous
Scylla, heaving the deck of a ruined ship
over his shoulders, reminded me of the
threat of annihilation that death (at sea)
evokes, devoid of any notion of a redemp-
tive afterlife. The figures cutting their long
hair recalled the contrast between beauty
and bodily mutilation in death, like the
siren whose song promised not the splen-
dour of eternal renown, but a place among
the bleached bones and rotting corpses in
her coils.
Archaeologists have dated the Sovana

tombs to the third century BC, long after
the Iliad and Odyssey were committed to
writing and enshrined as part of a common
literary tradition across wide areas of the
Mediterranean. Explicit Homeric scenes
begin to appear in Etruscan funerary art
from at least the seventh century BC, in
some cases showing divergence from Greek
versions of the tales.
In my original article, I made much

more sweeping claims about the relevance
of Homeric poetry to our understanding
of masculinity and self-identity in later
European prehistory, while deliberately
avoiding questions as to how such a body
of myth or epic tradition might have been
transmitted, or adopted and reinterpreted
in new environments. The purpose was
not to pin-point Homeric epic in time
and space, much less to suggest, as an
earlier generation of archaeologists mis-
takenly did, that Bronze Age Europe was

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somehow the Heroic Age of which ‘the
bard’ had sung. Homer, if he ever existed,
composed his epics in the specific circum-
stances of eighth-century Greece, at a time
when society was undergoing rapid social
change.
The poems themselves are layered with

the accumulation of centuries of oral
transmission, arguably reaching back to
the Bronze Age. This is why archaeolo-
gists have tended to approach them like
monuments to be excavated for material
traces of the past. Instead, as Ian Morris
explains, ‘material culture and poetic
culture were two ways in which people in
eighth-century Greece constructed the
social world within which they moved.
Both were important arenas in which
people fashioned images of what they
wanted the world to be, and challenged
competing constructions which they did
not like’ (Morris, 1997: 539).
In this light, the development of epic

poetry itself only becomes intelligible
when viewed, alongside funerary rites, as
an historically contextualized response to
fundamental questions of being: ‘the same
strategy for dealing with death both
inspires the treatment of the corpse and
presides over the development of oral epic’
(Vernant, 1991b: 82).
The epic biography of a warrior often

began with his funerary dirge but, more
than this, heroic poetry and the ‘warrior
grave’ functioned through homologous sig-
nificatory structures. Both comprised histor-
ically unique modes of narrative
representation, relying on formulaic tools—
static epithets, stock phrases or imagery,
and highly standardized or repetitive scenes,
episodes, and sequences—involving the
living and dead body.
The exhibition of the individual in the

earth and epic song were both performa-
tive spectacles, mythopœic acts that
summed up an existence led in pursuit of
an aesthetic ideal. Beyond simply

idealising the lifestyle of the warrior, these
representational media shared a common
function: the enshrinement of personal
reputation and status in collective memory
through linking the individual to an
exalted heroic ‘past’ which stands outside
time and space. Through imprinting par-
ticular images or associations in the minds
of the audience, they were the sole oppor-
tunity for the individual to integrate and
transcend death. By dying beautifully in
the eyes of the living, the heroic warrior
inscribed his singular being on the collect-
ive memory of the group, even the soil
itself, thereby achieving a measure of
immortality.
Seen in this light, the introduction of

writing was only another strategy for ren-
dering memory durable, a set of signs like
the earthen mounds placed at conspicuous
locations in the landscape. Paradoxically,
however, the very technology that salvaged
oral poetry for posterity altered its nature
irrevocably, fossilizing it into a literary
corpus open to scrutiny as abstract text.
Self-conscious attempts to invoke an heroic
past, like the Tomba dei demoni alati at
Sovana, would henceforth take place in a
world of literary ‘quotes’. The funeral of
Misenus in the Aeneid is deliberately styled
after that of Hector in the Iliad, as is
the Tiber-side tumulus of the emperor
Augustus, to whom Virgil dedicated his
epic poem. Late Antique challenges to
these monumental expressions of the heroic
ideal would also be disseminated via the
written word—the myriad ‘technologies of
self’, as Foucault liked to call them, of
which Christianity was the most far
reaching.
On the fringes of Europe, where, over

the Early Middle Ages, Christian literacy
made inroads into what were still, essen-
tially, prehistoric societies, surviving epic
poetry and material culture reveal a great
deal about changing notions of the body,
masculinity, and personhood. Read side by

66 European Journal of Archaeology 20 (1) 2017

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side, rather than as passive reflections of
one another, the Sutton Hoo ship burial
and funeral passages in Beowulf offer a
rich and complex picture of the colliding
worldviews and different ‘psychic fabrics’,
as Seamus Heaney put it, that are woven
into the Anglo-Saxon poem—a piece of
narrative that speaks more than ever to us,
living as we do, ‘[i]n an age when “the
instability of the human subject” is con-
stantly argued for if not presumed’
(Heaney, 2001: xvii).
One of the challenges for those studying

the past is the way in which we inevitably
look at the body or masculinity, as we do
with everything else, through the lens of
modern values, preoccupations, and con-
cerns. I shall never forget one evening in a
pub in Cambridge shortly after my article
was published when a fellow student
enthused that I had discovered ‘queens in
the Bronze Age’.
It is gratifying to know that the article

continues to inspire debate.

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	Aging Well: Treherne's ‘Warrior's Beauty Two Decades Later
	Introductory Remarks Catherine J. Frieman
	Gender and Personhood in the European Bronze Age Joanna Brück
	Comments on Paul Treherne's ‘The Warrior's Beauty : The Masculine Body and Self-Identity in Bronze Age Europe Katharina Rebay-Salisbury
	Warrior's Beauty: Revisited from a Nordic Perspective Sophie Bergerbrant
	An Iberian Perspective on ‘The Warrior's Beauty  Sandra Montón Subías
	The Warrior's Seduction Joanna Sofaer
	The Ongoing Significance of Paul Treherne's Classic 1995 Article ‘The Warrior's Beauty: The Masculine Body and Self-Identity in Bronze-Age Europe (Journal of European Archaeology, 3(1), 105–44.) in Recognition of the 20th Volume of the European Journal of Archaeology Christopher J. Knüsel
	The ‘Beautiful Warrior Twenty-one Years After: Bronze Age Warfare and Warriors Helle Vandkilde
	An impactful essay ahead of its time
	The Bronze Age warrior: epic hero or militant professional?

	The Beauty of the Chalk Warrior: A Reflection on Treherne's Contribution to Prehistoric Martial Culture Melanie Giles
	Introduction
	‘The Warrior's Beauty 
	Performing beauty, performing violence: the Iron Age warrior
	The chalk figures
	Discussion

	Aging well … Dying Beautifully Paul Treherne
	References