The ‘Sword-bearers.’ A Reinterpretation

Abstract

Two celebrated archaeological studies laid the foundation upon which the prevailing conception of the Late Bronze Age in Britain has been built. In ‘A Prehistoric Invasion of England’ O. G. S. Crawford isolated a number of intrusive forms characteristic of British Late Bronze Age hoards, pointed out how these could be connected with intrusive ‘Deverel-Rimbury’ types of pottery by means of the maple-leaf razors, which occur in settlements as well as hoards, and inferred that these types, including leaf-shaped swords, represented an invasion, which he at first attributed to Goidelic Celts. Peake's Bronze Age and the Celtic World was wider in scope but less critical in method. The evolution of the sword in Bronze Age Europe was analyzed and an almost exclusive reliance placed on the diffusion of the successive types of sword as evidence for far-flung folk-movements. The importance of Peake's work for this study lies in the special turn given to its leading idea a few years later by Estyn Evans, who, in an able paper laid special emphasis on a particular type—the ‘carp's-tongue’ sword—as evidence of a definite folk-movement from the West Alpine area into south-eastern England. Soon afterwards Professor Hawkes gave fuller definition to the ‘Carp's-tongue’ sword complex, to which he assigned bag-shaped chapes, end-winged axes, socketed axes with winged decoration, ‘bugle-shaped objects,’ ‘hog-backed’ razors, and various other types, and clarified the distinction between it and the more widely distributed group of undifferentiated Late Bronze Age hoards regarded as representing the reaction of the native bronze industry.