The war as seen by an archaeologist. Reconstruction of barbarian ...

110
Fig. 2: Shield boss from Nasławice with traces of deformation
(KONTNY 2001a: Fig 2).
changed in time, yet it never fell below 50%, and sometimes
reached (A 2 ) or even exceeded (B 2b ) 90% 14 .
Diagram 1 does not, however, distinguish between the
burials with single shafted weapon heads and those with their
greater number. For that reason I decided to study also other
aspects of this problem. First I put together the burials with
more than a single shafted weapon head (changes of frequency
measured in the same way as above) - Diagram 2. It yielded
the following picture: burials with several shafted weapon
heads can be found as early as in phase A 1 , yet their number
is very small. The phases which follow manifest a tendency
towards increase, reaching a culmination in phase B 2b (more
than 70 % burials with weapons had several heads). Then there
was a gradual decline of importance of this category of grave
goods, which completely disappeared in phases C 2 -D 15 .
Bartosz Kontny
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
%
65,5
87,1
81,2 77,5 83,1
91,6
76,4 68,8
51,4
A1 A2 A3 B1 B1a B2b B2/C1 late C2-D
stage
of phase
C1a-C1b
Diagram 1: Frequency of weapon graves furnished with
weapon head(s) in the Przeworsk Culture
%
80
60
40
20
0
20,8 26,5
52,3
70,9
43,4
24,7
3,4 3,2
0
A1 A2 A3 B1 B1a B2b B2/C1 late C2-D
stage
of phase
C1a-C1b
Diagram 2: Frequency of weapon graves furnished
with than one shafted weapon head in the
Przeworsk Culture
The appearance of more than two heads of shafted weapons
in burials has been remarked upon in literature and this
phenomenon was mainly linked with phase B 2b 16 . In this
connection it seemed worth while to study the importance
of this phenomenon. A histogram (Diagram 3) presenting
the numbers of grave assemblages containing several heads
was made. Two variants: two shafted weapon heads, and
more than two shafted weapon heads were taken into consideration.
The diagram indicates that burials with more than
two shafted weapon heads were very rare and those with two
heads were predominant 17 .
It is worth reviewing how the frequency of barbed heads
looks against that background (these heads were included
in Diagram 2). It is known that they appeared in the Roman
Period until phase C 1a 18 , and were considered to be the
most numerous in phases B 1 and B 2a 19 . The data (frequen-