Twitter discussion

[Brennus]

Very tricky questions to answer. The problem is that there just isn't enough archaeological evidence to reconstruct Iron Age Irish society. Personally, based on the data from the Wessex region of Britain which has been much studied, I would not be surprised if the majority of Irish society carried weapons. Iron had a process of democratising warfare; once you knew how to extract Iron it was fairly straightforward to work it, the same skills which produce a ploughshare or a scythe can easily produce a spear. In some contemporary societies, such as the Callaecians and Celtiberians the right to carry a weapon was restricted to certain sections of society, but in those societies we have good evidence for social stratification. Saying that carrying weapons should not automatically be equated with being a warrior; several Iron Age graves from central Europe have been found equipped with a full warrior panoply (spear, sword and shield) but the individuals interred within were children or adolescents.

Iron Age Ireland a great paradox, on the one hand we have beautiful and brilliant metalwork (see the Broighter hoard for a great example) and large, communal centers such as Emain Macha, Tara and Dun Aileane as well as objects which we would equate with warrior elites elsewhere in Iron Age Europe, such as weaponry and horse gear, but we have almost no evidence for settlements, very few every day objects and no ceramics. Furthermore the pollen record shows that until the late Iron Age there was a regrowth in tree coverage, strongly indicating that agriculture (and population) were in decline. Also, although they exist, the number of weapons recovered from the whole of Ireland is less than 100, by contrast the site of La Tene in Switzerland (which is one part of a lake) yielded thousands of swords and spears, or Gournay-sur-Aronde (a site smaller of comparable size to the average middle class Western European house) in Belgica was found to have several hundred swords and spears.

In theory there is no reason to suggest that most individuals in Iron Age Ireland did not carry weapons. In practice, however, the archaeological record does not support this as there is a lack of weaponry for the Irish Iron Age (as noted above carrying weapons does not automatically mean individuals were capable of taking part in battles) and we cannot, at the present time, be sure how Irish society operated.