A weapon of choice – experiments with a replica Irish Early Bronze Age halberd

Abstract

The halberd – a famous weapon of prehistoric Europe – is thought by some to have had a symbolic rather than a functional purpose. To find out if, and how, it might have worked as a weapon, the author tested a replica on a number of sheep's heads, finding it highly effective in administering killer blows. Studies taking off from these experiments show that the halberd probably performed both in fighting and ritual, and in ritualised fighting, during its predominance in the Early Bronze Age.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 42 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.