This warfare and violence anthology is the latest in a series that started to appear around the time when archaeology first discovered warfare (Keeley, Reference Keeley1996). Over this twenty-year period, the archaeology of war has grown into a considerable field, which has had time to mature and develop in terms of conceptual underpinnings, datasets, analytic approaches, scope, and interpretations. This is probably the reason why the present anthology brands itself with the subtitle of quantitative and qualitative approaches. The editors define the first approach as ‘archaeological science’ and the second as ‘social archaeology’, and contributors able to integrate these two were invited. The book contains sixteen chapters organised in four parts. The introductory chapter by the team of editors and the concluding chapter (by R. Schulting) offer the reader insights into the past, present, and future of war studies, and the position of the collected papers on this roadmap. There is also a useful index in addition to many good quality illustrations. The anthology stems from the papers presented in a session at the twenty-first annual meeting of the EAA at Glasgow in 2015.

Part One, focusing on skeletal markers of violence and weapon training, contains three papers that complement each other well while offering important new insights. Meyer et al. (Ch. 2) present a valuable comparative analysis of LBK mass graves in Germany and Austria. They show what one might have suspected beforehand, namely that young women and (female?) adolescents are generally not among the victims. They were in all likelihood taken captive and incorporated in the captor's society as extra wives or members of an unfree workforce (cf. Cameron, Reference Cameron2016). Brinker et al. (Ch.3) scrutinize peri-mortem injuries at Tollense in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern to identify the weapon types that caused them and the angle from which the weapon penetrated the body. A suite of technologies aided the study, such as replication experiments, 3D imaging, and digital simulations. Since weapons are rarely found in situ in the bone, the study is very convincing and offers results applicable beyond this, so far unique, Bronze Age battlefield (Uhlich et al., Reference Uhlich, Krüger, Lidke, Jantzen, Lorentz, Ialongo and Terberger2019). The focus of Gentile et al. (Ch. 4) is a ‘Samnite’ inhumation cemetery in central Italy dated to 800–500 bce. The study compares the deposition of weapons in the burials with the marked right hand side humeral asymmetries attributable to fighting and training, and arrives at some discrepancy. This can indicate that a warrior is not necessarily buried with his weapons and that placing weapons in a grave can be motivated by factors such as social rank. These are convincing results overall. In particular, the analysis of body asymmetry represents a big step forward in this field of research, and the statistics involved convincingly make sense of complex data.

Part Two concerns the representation of conflict in prehistoric rock art and shows how digital scanning and tracing techniques are now integrated in this field of inquiry. Untangling the data complexity and meanings embedded in the imagery no doubt require sophisticated methods that will keep evolving. Pictorial rock art has always stimulated imagination, and provided scholars with a framework for testing theoretical ideas and interpretations. This is mostly very inspiring. López-Montalvo's contribution (Ch. 5) addresses the debated chronology of Levantine rock art. Through instances of stratified images and the styles of the overlapping scenes, a convincing case is made for placing this bellicose rock art within the process of Neolithization. The war depictions begin with the arrival of the first farmers and probably continue into the Late Neolithic (and even later?) since warriors and battles form part of the youngest imagery. Horn (Ch. 6) advocates several parallel motivations behind Scandinavian Bronze Age rock art based on the intriguing pictorial variation of the evidence. Supported by a network analysis, this article is concerned with the panoply of objects in the images, such as swords and spears. He introduces the idea of ‘pragmamorphism’ to conceptualise the phenomenon of human body parts and objects being ‘morphed’ into each other. This phenomenon is then linked to speedy and, thus, efficient warfare on land and sea. Bertilsson's contribution (Ch. 7) reveals his comprehensive knowledge of rock carvings, particularly the carving of weapons on the rock. Applying Structure for Motion 3D modelling techniques, he shows how several carvings of spears match actual Nordic Bronze Age (NBA) spearheads and that carvings were re-carved to match real spears in use. The spear wielder at Litsleby in Tanum is aggrandised to a mighty supernatural being. Ling et al. (Ch. 8) explain how rock art connects to society and war in the NBA. This is a major challenge, which is necessary to confront. This article makes several moves in this direction using the three-fold model of ritualised, staged, and real warfare depicted on the panels. The authors draw on the ethnographic record of a tight connection between warfare, imaging on rock, and secret warrior societies (cf. Vandkilde, Reference Vandkilde, Otto, Thrane and Vandkilde2006; Reference Vandkilde, Gardner, Lake and Sommer2014; Raffield et al., Reference Raffield, Greenlow, Price and Collard2016).

The material culture of conflict is the focus of Part Three. This section uses insights from archaeometallurgy (trace elemental analysis, metallography) as well as from use wear analysis and morphometrics. Mödlinger (Ch. 9) has expertise in Bronze Age body armour: cuirass, helmets, and greaves. These protective and status enhancing devices begin to appear c. 1400 bce and continue throughout the Bronze Age (and of course beyond this period). This is a profoundly useful and condensed overview of the complete European Bronze Age dataset, the distribution over time and regions, in addition to typological classifications and technical improvements. Repairs and forceful impact from weapons do occur, indicating uses in war. Clearly, the design of body armour resulted from a warrior-smith dialogue, perhaps even companionship, and with fashion as an influential factor. Molloy (Ch. 10) continues this thread setting the scene for conflict in the Balkans, a major crossroads in the Bronze Age. Again weaponry takes centre stage, in particular swords and spears but also axes, shields, and armour. Obviously large quantities of bronze were invested in the military domain; Molloy argues that this represented at least 5–10 per cent. It is striking how Balkan weaponry becomes formalized in shape already in the thirteenth century, matching the general trend at the threshold of the Urnfield period and the later Bronze Age Aegean. This is explained in terms of the requirement for larger companies of men capable of coordinated action (surely, armies). It is an amazingly rich dataset able to continually throw new light on the increasing militarisation of society in Late Bronze Age Europe. With Cao's (Ch. 11) contribution, the focus moves to China and a group of weapons from Anyang and other late Shang sites in the Yellow River area. This study pioneers an extensive examination of use-related marks and cuts on the cutting-edges of bronze weapons, showing how sharpening was carried out with rotary wheels. In Chapter 12 Birch breaks new ground through a multi-method approach to Havor-type lances found in Late Roman and Early Germanic Iron Age war booty offerings from southern Scandinavia. The methods include morphometrics, trace element and isotope scatter plots, metallography, X-radiographs, and slag-inclusion analysis, and the joint results suggest that Havor lances were made in one or a few workshops using standardised techniques. Yet, this apparent uniformity contrasts with the use of iron from several different sources.

Papers collected in Part Four, including Schulting's final comment, address ‘intergroup violence in archaeological discourse’. Crellin et al. (Ch. 13) provide a summary and evaluation of the Bronze Age Combat Project, which began in 2013. The project used scientific experiments to test what we think we know about how Bronze Age people handled their weapons. The paper proceeds from a critique of the way warriors are often portrayed as only males to argue that burials and images do not necessarily tally with the lived reality of people. This view has of course a strong foundation, and we need more cemetery analyses in line with Gentile and colleagues’ work (Ch. 4, mentioned above). The great value of the Combat Project lies in its methodically reflected and rigorous approach, and most of all in having demonstrated a clear connection between a broad range of marks on experimental weapons and those found on real Bronze Age weapons. Particular actions were identified, including sometimes the difference between attack and defence. The centrality of body-weapon cohesion is underlined, and also, on a more preliminary basis, it revealed that ritual destruction leaves different marks on the weapon to those produced through fighting. With Lehoërff's paper (Ch. 14) we return to the Bronze Age cuirass, the metallurgical knowledge that it presupposes, and how this must have created value in the past. Likewise, the present is involved through the interpretations we make of war-related data such as the cuirasses. Lehoërff draws on the French school. Scholarship like Mauss, Clastres, Levi-Strauss, Godelier, and Leroi-Gourhan, is used to situate weaponry at the intersection of smith, warrior/soldier, and a potential commissioner. In addition, design, quality, use, status and economy all contribute to the value of a weapon. Interestingly for Argaric Iberia, Aranda Jiménez (Ch. 15) arrives at conclusions that are at odds with the common assumption that warfare and militarisation played a prominent role in prehistoric southeast Iberia. There is an issue here, pertaining to the risk of either pacifying ancient society or contrarily overstating its bellicosity. Nevertheless, recent genetic results invite a closer inspection of the archaeological data once again (cf. Olalde et al., Reference Olalde, Mallick, Patterson, Rohland, Villalba-Mouco and Silva2019). Schulting's conclusion (Ch. 16) is grounded precisely in the fact that archaeology is itself rapidly changing and new bio-molecular methods and data pose challenges as well as new possibilities.

This book is not merely another collection of warfare studies. Every chapter presents high-quality research and valuable results integrating social archaeology and archaeological science in often admirable ways. From a fault-finding perspective though, it is obvious that warfare research, as presented in this book, is still compartmentalised into realms of enquiry that do not inform each other much, despite the fact that more than twenty years have passed since the publication of Keeley's seminal monograph. There is, moreover, a conceptual absence or confusion visible, for example, in the use of several different synonyms to denote ‘warfare’ as if the authors were uncomfortable with this concept. Most papers show little ambition to track patterns over time or to broaden their geographical perspective. Finally, it is worth remarking on the long production time, although this is likely a structural problem tied to anthologies and publishers.