I.M. Stead. British Iron Age Swords and Scabbards.

I.M. Stead. British Iron Age Swords and Scabbards. I.M. STEAD. British Iron Age In the British Isles, the Iron Age lasted from about the 7th century BC until the Roman conquest and until the 5th century in non-Romanised parts. This period is also called the era of Celtic Britain<ref name=>Celtic Britain (The Iron Age) c. Swords and Scabbards. xvi+288 pages,108 figures, 31 plates, 55 tables. 2006. London: British Museum British Museum,the national repository in London for treasures in science and art. Located in the Bloomsbury section of the city, it has departments of antiquities, prints and drawings, coins and medals, and ethnography. ;0-7141-2323-4 hardback 85 [pounds sterling]. Artefact See artifact. studies overall have not been very fashionable in recentyears and, even when they have, ironwork is nearly always left at thebottom of the pile in terms of priorities or interest amongstarchaeologists or museum professionals. The result is that we still knowvery little about iron, how it fitted into the patterns of pastsocieties, or even about how it was made or viewed, steel being the mostpoorly understood aspect of all. Swords, often seen as an eliteartefact, have attracted a little more attention; but much of theattention comes from weapon enthusiasts and the views which circulatetend to be based on received wisdom, myth and tradition, some of whichregrettably gets repeated by scholars. Thus the publication of Ian Stead's book, the end result ofover 30 years of painstaking research at the British Museum, is a verywelcome event. Bringing together all the Iron Age swords found inBritain was a task not tackled since 1950, when Stuart Piggott collected93 examples; now Stead's exhaustive study includes material whichhas lain unnoticed in museum stores for a long time and other itemswhich have been mis-identified as being of later date. In this way thecorpus of all British Iron Age swords has grown to 279, exactly threetimes the total in Piggott's study. The quality of production ofthe book, which includes 70 pages of fine line drawings, is high. Thetext is clear and well written although much of the descriptions are bynecessity quite technical; a glossary of all the technical terms wouldhave helped make the material more accessible to non-specialists, letalone other specialists who may be using slightly different terminology.Overall Stead's book is a mine of information, though notparticularly easy to use. A master table giving basic information abouteach sword, with approximate date, group and sub-group affiliation,burial/deposition context, place of origin, and references to thesub-tables, could have helped. The index could also be more detailed(for instance brass appears under copper alloys but gunmetal gunmetal,a bronze, an alloy of copper, tin, and a small amount of zinc. Although originally used extensively for making guns (from which it received its name), it has been superseded by steel, and it is now chiefly employed in casting machine parts. and bronzedo not). The book begins with an introduction to all the swords andscabbards belonging to the La Tene period or mid fifth century BC to theRoman conquest, and points out just how little of this material can bedated independently. This dating is indeed almost entirely dependent ona floating chronology based on sword and scabbard types and thedecoration found on them and any associated fittings. These are verythoroughly discussed by Stead who constructs an approximate chronology;but for individual artefacts, this approximate date is not given whereone might expect to find it, in the catalogue. Another problem concernsswords pre-dating the mid fifth century BC. The assumption seems to bethat a sword is only a sword if it is more than 32cm long--and that allswords longer than this are of La Tene type. This may not be true in allcases, for example sword no. 224, could, I think, belong to the BronzeAge/Iron Age overlap period. These quibbles apart, the introduction to the typologies andterminology (chapter 2), group-by-group descriptions and accompanyingdiscussion (chapters 3 to 11) are excellent. Chapter 2 includes adistribution map illustrating the striking division between northern andsouthern groups; it seems that the more conservative north shows amarked disinterest for the newer La Tene tradition of long swords sopopular in southern Britain. But why have so few swords been found inDevon/Cornwall and Wales? Is this due to different depositionalpractices or a lack of interest in sword ownership? There seems to be acurious reluctance in this book to discuss fully why swords are foundwhere they are, despite increasing interest in the subject in recentyears. Such interest in depositional significance is championed mostnotably by Richard Bradley; the Witham Valley river finds have also beenre-examined in this light by Stocker & Everson in 2003. Thus I waspuzzled to see this comment on p. 79: 'Why complete swords,sometimes in their scabbards ended their days in rivers remains amystery despite a lot of speculation. Chance loss could explain thewatery deposition of some weapons, for there must have been many abattle or skirmish at river crossings, and it would not be easy torecover weapons once they had fallen in the water.' This issurprising, given that research all points to intentional deposition ofweapons and related artefacts in watery contexts. The mystery is not howthey came to be there, but why--what exactly was the association withwater which was clearly so important. Amongst a number of associations,watery locations may have represented liminal liminal/lim��i��nal/ (lim��i-n'l) barely perceptible; pertaining to a threshold. lim��i��naladj.Relating to a threshold.liminalbarely perceptible; pertaining to a threshold. zones between this worldand the next. The fact that swords are not found at Iron Age shrines (p.81) must also be significant in this discussion. The few stamped marks on Iron Age sword Swords made of iron (as opposed to bronze) appear from the Early Iron Age (ca. 12th century BC), but do not become widespread before the 8th century BC.Iron has the advantage of mass-production due to the wider availability of the raw material. blades in Britain areinterpreted as maker's marks; however, as Stead points out, somemarks (those apparently showing the sun and moon) may have an astralsignificance and may have been used in religious ceremonies rather thanin battle. This may well be the case for more swords as the link withbattles is assumed rather than demonstrated. Apart from carefulexamination of context a very thorough technological examination may beof use in this respect. This brings us to the specialist reports, by Stead's BritishMuseum colleagues, which make up six appendices in the book. By far thebiggest is Janet Lang's technological report on 12 of the swords inthe corpus (Appendix 1). Few people realise just how much technologicalinformation there is locked up in iron objects. Radiography radiography:see X ray. and theremoval of one or two samples can shed much light on the swords'original structure and appearance. Swords can (and should) be treated asmini archaeological excavations which depend for their success on plansand sections as well as the recording and recovery of metallurgicalstructures. It is therefore particularly good to see the detailed examinationof 12 swords, even though they represent just 4% of the corpus; 11 weresampled for metallographic analysis, one was examined by x-ray only.There is a great deal of detailed description of the metallographicstructures, all of which is accurate, except perhaps for the Vickersmicro-hardness results. What is lacking is what all this detail means.In my view, for each of the swords examined the structures observed onx-ray should be presented in plan, in section and in three-dimensionalreconstruction, which in turn can be used to revisit interpretations. In the analytical section, the energy dispersive dispersive/dis��per��sive/ (-per��siv)1. tending to become dispersed.2. promoting dispersion. (EDX EDX Energy Dispersive X-Ray (Spectroscopy)EDX Electronic Data ExchangeEDX Extended Data RegisterEDX Event-Driven Executive (IBM Series/1 OS)EDX Event-Based Data Exchange (UPNet)) analysis ofthe non-metallic inclusions is reported in great detail, but there is nocorresponding detailed analysis of the metal at various points, possiblybecause wavelength dispersive (WDX WDX Woot Dynam-X (gaming clan)WDX WarDroX (online game)WDX Wavelength Dispersive X-RaysWDX World Doc Exchange, LLC (Arlington Heights, IL)) analysis was not available. What isneeded is an elemental map of each section, or several--one for eachsignificant element present apart from iron and carbon which are visiblein the etched section and can therefore be described separately. To befair, this was probably not available when this work was carried out; ithas become, over the past 15 years, an invaluable way of identifyingconcentrations of minor elements, which may lead, for instance, toexposing the position of welds that can otherwise be virtuallyinvisible. Finally, I would quibble QUIBBLE. A slight difficulty raised without necessity or propriety; a cavil. 2. No justly eminent member of the bar will resort to a quibble in his argument. over the tem carburisation: it suggeststhat the carbon got into the iron during the smithing rather than thesmelting process. I would suggest that inhomogeneous Adj. 1. inhomogeneous - not homogeneousnonuniformheterogeneous, heterogenous - consisting of elements that are not of the same kind or nature; "the population of the United States is vast and heterogeneous" structures aresimply distorted and modified versions of the inhomogeneities present inthe original smelted bloom after it was consolidated into a billet(referred to here as an ingot ingotMass of metal cast into a size and shape such as a bar, plate, or sheet convenient to store, transport, and work into a semifinished or finished product. The term also refers to a mold in which metal is so cast. ). I suspect, for example, that somecomplex and odd-looking structures, most notably Melsonby (no. 199), mayin fact be a case of a relatively simple but highly inhomogeneous andquite distorted bloomery structure. Overall, more emphasis could havebeen placed on the x-ray study of the swords, and the style of reportingcould on occasions be more dispassionate dis��pas��sion��ate?adj.Devoid of or unaffected by passion, emotion, or bias. See Synonyms at fair1.dis��pas ; for example 'the smithhas not capitalised on the quality of the metal by quenching' (p.94). In fact, quenching might have ruined the blade, if, as seemslikely, the structure was not homogeneous along the blade. Despite these comments, this book is the very readable andinformative end product of an immense amount of work on the part of IanStead. It will become the standard reference and the basis for futureresearch in this field of Iron Age studies. I hope that this futureresearch will continue to build on the different approaches to the studyof ironwork outlined here. This is surely the only way in which thismuch overlooked material will ever be properly understood and set in itsrightful cultural context. BRIAN GILMOUR Oxford, UK