Warfare has remained an intractable feature of the human condition throughout most of our species’ tenure on this planet and is thus a topic of inherent interest. This is evident in the massive output of the relevant academic subfield, military history, as well expansive archaeological and anthropological scholarship aimed at examining and explaining the many forms of violence, physical conflict and power dynamics that attend, but are not entirely coterminous with, warfare itself.
Given the broadness of this scholarly realm, a volume framed around the topic of warfare could take any number of different tacks in conception and approach. Readers of this volume, which offers a series of essays addressing military conflict in the Aegean Bronze Age, will therefore want to note the specific orientation set out by the editors because it explains the logic that shaped the choices made in this particular context. The editors explain that the volume was conceived primarily as a resource for ‘those whose entrée to Aegean prehistory might result from Homeric encounters’ (p. 3). In other words, the primary intended audience includes students who have been fascinated by the literary accounts in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and would like to know more about relevant evidence.
With this audience in mind, the volume offers a handsome menu of content. Following the introduction there are eleven chapters organised into three parts and a brief concluding discussion, again by the editors. The first four chapters offer empirical syntheses of four relevant evidentiary categories: architectural, artefactual, textual and iconographical. These useful and expert summaries are followed by a second quartet of chapters setting out interpretative discussions on the role of war and warriors in society. The final group of three chapters covers two phenomena attested in later Greek historical texts that have often become interpretatively embroiled with Bronze Age archaeology: a Minoan thalassocracy and, of course, the Trojan War.
The organisation of the volume appears sensible enough at first glance. In practice it makes for some awkwardness, since much material presented in the first four empirical chapters is reviewed again as the basis for drawing conclusions about war in society in the second group of interpretative papers. Thus, readers going through the full volume from cover to cover will encounter repeated treatments of the basic evidence for the role of longboats during the Early Bronze Age (pp. 163–8 and 203–4), chariots and their use (or not) in warfare during the Late Bronze Age (pp. 108–11 and 310–13), the meaning of hunter and warrior figurines (pp. 164–6, 204–5, 272–4), and changes in sword typology (pp. 91–6, 182–3, 213–18, 230–1, 248–53). Presumably this issue will not hamper readers who do not read through the volume from start to finish.
In some cases arguments and interpretations put forth about the same evidence are at odds with one other. For example, M. Kramer-Hajos and A. Papadopoulos do not seem to agree about the frequency of military themes in the iconography of the LH IIIA–LH IIIB periods. Kramer-Hajos argues that warriors become ‘domesticated’ in the mature Mycenaean palatial period, appearing in mainly ceremonial contexts (pp. 184–5) during the LH IIIA and LH IIIB periods. Papadopoulos, on the other hand, writes that ‘mural decoration with violent and military themes reached its peak’ in the same period, and takes this as an indication that ‘military … activities were commonly practiced in the life of the community’ at that time (p. 283). It seems that there is some mixed messaging, which could prove confusing for students approaching the material for the first time.
Aside from the excellent and succinct evidentiary reviews in Chapters 2–5, Chapters 10 and 12, on the Minoan thalassocracy and the historicity of the Trojan War, are very successful. N. Abell writes fluidly and with obvious expertise on the archaeological evidence for culture and society in the coastal and insular Aegean for the relevant periods. While this overview is well tailored for students, other scholars (this one included) will surely find the updated review of evidence for Minoan and Minoanising practices and objects in the Aegean highly useful. S. LaFayette Hogue's chapter likewise covers a lot of complex ground in a structured, clear format that should find happy readers in many ‘Homer and the Trojan War’ classes. T. Bryce's input is always welcome when the Ahhiyawa question is concerned, though my impression is that this chapter was not very well tailored to the specific context. Much of the evidence from this chapter is discussed once again in LaFayette Hogue's broader coverage of whether the Trojan War is based on a ‘real’ ancient conflict. Other topics treated, such as how mechanisms of communication between Mycenaeans and Hittites might have worked (p. 425), are not immediately relevant to the nature or social meaning of warfare in the Aegean Bronze Age.
The papers offer a lot of food for thought and encapsulate the state of the field very well. A central concern that emerges is the challenge of accessing insights about the role of war in society through primarily material evidence. While a mixture of textual and archaeological evidence is available for the Bronze Age, the textual evidence is relevant to a very narrow slice of the period under consideration; so material culture serves as the basis for most interpretations. However, reading any account of historically documented warfare makes abundantly clear that such conflicts are complicated and dynamic in ways that are not easily reconstructed from static material remains. Moreover, comparative studies of society in global perspective make equally obvious that the kinds of evidentiary categories we might identify as pertinent to warfare, such as swords and images and fortifications, do not always relate to this topic in straightforward ways. For example, swords served as vessels of ritual power and vectors of connection to ancestral spirits, not as military arms, in traditional Tana Toraja culture (C. Zerner, Indonesia 31 [1981], 89–112), while the ‘fortifications’ surrounding the palace of Versailles were intended as a symbolic representation of the magnificence and power of Louis XIV and to create a notional boundary between the royal and non-royal realms, not to serve as defense against military attack (C. Mukerji, Theory and Society 23 [1994], 651–77). Thus, it is not necessarily correct to assume that all physical evidence that we tend to code as relevant to warfare is certainly so in every ancient context; and disentangling where we may be right or wrong in our assumptions about these categories of evidence presents serious challenges, as acknowledged throughout the volume (e.g. pp. 217–18).
Often, when faced with such difficult evidentiary scenarios, archaeologists turn to theory to anchor interpretation in an explicit analytical framework that may help to alleviate empirical uncertainty. In general, it seems to me that the interpretations presented in Chapters 6–8 tend to depend on relatively traditional tropes or under-theorised ‘common-sense’ approaches to patterns in the evidence, rather than drawing from the considerable body of anthropological literature available for modelling the relationship between coercive force and human social organisation. Chapter 9 (S. O'Brien on warfare and social complexity) engages most thoroughly with wider anthropological literature, though only to critique some older ideas drawing on neo-evolutionary thought. This critical tone may suggest that Aegean Prehistorians avoid interacting with wider models and theory because they do not find them particularly useful. O'Brien's chapter, with its extended discussion of warfare in evolutionary theory, sharp argumentative vector and emphasis on post-Bronze Age developments, is a bit oddly situated amongst the other more synthetic and discursive chapters in the volume, though I agree with the overall conclusion that Early Iron Age society was more complex than often presumed.
In the concluding chapter the editors encourage scholars to reflect on where the study of warfare in Aegean prehistory currently stands, and where we might steer discourse from the current intellectual juncture. While recognising O'Brien's valid critique, my view is that Aegean prehistorians would benefit from engaging more with foundational research on war, violence and society by scholars such as C. Boix or P. Clastres, not to mention the ideas of fundamental theorists of violence and states such as Max Weber and Michel Foucault. Following Weber, anthropologists often conceptualise state formation as bound up in the pursuit of monopolisation over the legitimate use of violent force and the definition of all non-state violence as fundamentally transgressive (e.g. R. Campbell, Violence, Kinship, and the Early Chinese State [2018]). Some archaeologists have therefore come to see access to the legitimate wielding of violence as a ‘contested asset’, which may therefore be emphasised iconographically by those claiming its possession (T. Wilkinson, ‘Monopolizing the Means of Predation’, in: T. Leppard and S. Murray [edd.], Violence and Inequality [2023]). Considering such theories could be productive if applied to patterns in Bronze Age art, wherein emphasis on ‘warrior’ accoutrements and frequencies of violent imagery are not consistent over time. Another body of recent research offers collective action as an explanation for the emergence of military leaders, positing that self-interested groups might voluntarily empower those they saw as best equipped to defend the community (R. Blanton and L. Fargher, Social Evolution and History 8 [2009], 133–66). Engaging with this literature might offer Aegeanists a path to explain the rise of warrior-leaders by appeal to something other than individual ambition or coercive seizure of power. As far as empirical evidence is concerned, it would surely be profitable to consider skeletal evidence for physical violence in Bronze Age societies when reconstructing the commonality or rarity of combat. Compelling research into related pathologies exists in the scholarship (e.g. S. Smith and M. Liston, International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 30 [2020], 410–14), and a review of this evidence would have been welcome in the current context.
This volume, in sum, is both a welcome resource for students as well as a valuable reminder that traditional strictures of thought inherited from older generations of scholarship on the Bronze Age Aegean might be a bit limiting. It seems there is much analytical ground to be gained through better integration of theoretically and methodologically complementary literatures in adjacent fields, and by drawing on accumulating osteoarchaeological evidence for violence in Bronze Age society. One hopes that this volume represents but an opening salvo in a fresh hail of scholarship on the topic of Aegean warfare that brings interpretatively and empirically creative approaches to bear on the rich body of relevant evidence on display in these pages.
