The Sword Guy Podcast

Guy Windsor 

I’m here today with Dr James Dilley, who is an archaeologist and craftsman specializing in prehistoric technologies such as flintknapping, and casting bronze weaponry. He is the founder of Ancient Craft, a company that provides expertise and experiences to individuals and educational institutions. I can confirm, casting your broadsword is really good fun. I did that with James a while ago. There are blog posts about it. And he has three archaeology degrees, which seems like an awful lot. He has a BSc exploring polished stone axes, an MA focusing on bone flintknapping hammers, and a PhD from the University of Southampton on Upper Paleolithic hunting technology. So if you get lost in the woods with just a stone, James is clearly your man. Now without further ado, let’s get on with the interview. So James, welcome to the show.

 

James Dilley 

Hello, Guy.

 

Guy Windsor 

Just to orient everybody, whereabouts in the world are you?

 

James Dilley 

I am in Norfolk, England.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, I’m sorry. I live in Suffolk. Us in Suffolk are convinced that everyone in Norfolk has like six toes on each foot.

 

James Dilley 

But I’m not actually from Norfolk. I live in Norfolk at the moment, but I’m from North Hertfordshire originally.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah. And the people who are in Suffolk have such a narrow worldview that they don’t even have an opinion about people from that far away.

 

James Dilley 

Yeah, we have pretty neutral accents there. We are just north of London.

 

Guy Windsor 

So what drew you to Norfolk?

 

James Dilley 

Well, we’ve been living in Norfolk since February this year, and we moved for workshop availability that you were able to see, because like many young people trying to live in the south east is particularly tricky and expensive at the moment. And for what we do, we need a workshop space to actually run the business. So we both liked Norfolk, and it just is a little more affordable, but not too far from home. Because, you know, we could go all the way up to Scotland or north Wales and things would be more affordable, but it’d be far from anywhere. Not that North Norfolk isn’t far from anywhere.

 

Guy Windsor 

Well, you’re about 20 minutes outside Norwich itself, which is a reasonable sized town, and it has good rail connections. There is this weird thing in Britain, how everything stops working in winter. It’s almost like winter is a surprise, we’ve never seen winter before. We have no idea what to do with it. You moved to Norfolk because you could find a workshop space that actually you could afford? I can sympathise. When I was when I was living in Helsinki my salle was on the edge of town in a rather dodgy neighbourhood called Jakomäki. Because I could afford it. So you moved there in February this year. How did you get into prehistoric crafts and when?

 

James Dilley 

I got into prehistoric crafts as a kid, and like most young kids loved making things, liked history, particularly liked the ancient Egyptians in school and dead bodies, because kids are grim. And kids are morbid and they like dead things. And they like poking the dead things. So I was very much within that mould. And I’ve got quite a practical family, no family in archeology or history in any way, but very practical. So would be always encouraging of making things and picking up sticks and stones and would be frequently taken on walks with my grandfather who made missile boxes after the war.

 

Guy Windsor 

I’m sorry, he made missile boxes. Boxes for missiles.

 

James Dilley 

Yep. So they had to be pretty secure and stable. No rattling.

 

Guy Windsor 

Oh right. Actually for the military so they could store their missiles. I had never really thought of that as a job. I mean, how’d you get into making missile boxes?

 

James Dilley 

Well, I guess you start as a wood chopper and then you level up to sort of a, I guess, a carpenter, then a cabinet maker. And if you’re good enough to make pretty secure cabinets, then you can make boxes that don’t rattle too much.

 

Guy Windsor 

I’ve never heard of missile box maker as a profession. But I guess somebody has to make them, there they are.

 

James Dilley 

I don’t think that was his main profession for too long. And that was after the war. But he then went back into cabinet making, so it was very, very practical. And would often encourage walks and picking up sticks and stones and pointing out the uses of different trees and that sort of thing. So again, like most young kids, had a very much encouraged collection of sticks and stones. And as I started to learn more about history in school, that practical interest of making things and making the objects from the time periods you’re learning about, I guess, starts to come in, and creep in. And I think I had mostly an interest in ancient Egypt again, the trips to the British Museum were not too difficult being from North Hertfordshire. And again, they’ve got mummies and dead bodies there. But I was not put off Ancient Egypt, but I’ve not had many mature thoughts in my life. But mature thoughts age seven, that you watch loads of these Egyptology documentaries, and quite understandably, any of these excellent new tombs and other finds that have been found or been opened by Egyptian officials, quite understandably. The days of English gentleman going over to Egypt or other places around the world and opening tombs and bringing them back for a baying audience to watch the unwrapping have, thankfully, long since gone. So I guess partly because of that. And just for the distance that Egypt was, I became interested in local history of the same sort of time, which for Britain puts it in prehistory, again, for the area that we are in the southeast, although much of Britain has a huge amount of prehistoric archaeology. There’s a lot in the area. And with the likes of Time Team, which, I guess audiences in Britain and possibly Europe, Time Team is a bit of a historical archaeological cultural phenomenon that people still talk about at great lengths.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, it’s like a reality TV show where a bunch of archaeologists descend on this place, and they start doing archaeology and trying to figure out what happened there. And then they go away again. It’s a great, great show.

 

James Dilley 

Within three days, they would excavate and sort of execute the entire operation. Yeah, totally insane. But it’s been off the television for what must be 15 years now. So it’s been off for a long, long time, but it’s still very much cemented within the archaeological world even today. So that’s just how much of an impact it had, and drew that many people. And I was one of them as a young kid. And I seem to distantly remember, someone showing flintknapping, making stone tools on TV. And with TV, as it is any complex or difficult skill or process is shown in a matter of moments, with no outtakes or problems. And as a 9-10 year-old seeing that I could immediately pick up on that and think, yeah, I can do that straight away. There’s plenty of flint in the ground here we find it in big lumps.

 

Guy Windsor 

You just bang the stones together. And there’s an arrowhead.

 

James Dilley 

Even with that description, you could be a very experienced flint knapper based on my 10 year old approach to well, that’s surely all it is. And rushed out into the garden, found the most knackered frozen piece of flint you could ever imagine, and bashed it and got some, well, to say flakes would be generous, got some chunks. But for some reason, persisted with it and carried on. And through school and college, it was just something I did and practiced, and would often be found in local nearby fields looking for larger fresh pieces of flint. And once they became exhausted, would then have to try and find a nearby quarry. And things started to get a bit more serious after that point.

 

Guy Windsor 

So you were basically you were knapping flint the way most kids draw, just did it all the time, just because you liked doing it. And eventually got quite good at it because you did it a lot. Were there any resources for actual instruction back then? Because YouTube didn’t exist yet.

 

James Dilley 

No, no, it didn’t. I think there was only really books that would be about pre-History and Archaeology, but not really books that were focused on flintknapping. And there may have been one or two that I wasn’t aware of, but certainly not to the same level that we have today.

 

Guy Windsor 

It’s a very nuanced skill. So, you must have got the idea from somewhere of how to use one of those flaking tools where you kind of push the flakes off the flint. Rather than whacking them. How did you develop the skill set?

 

James Dilley 

Well, I think that’s come from a mixture of watching these very occasional documentaries that would have a segment on flintknapping or reading in one of these more generalised archaeology or pre-history books that they used this or they did that. And I’m sure you’ve come across the same with weapons and armour from across time that if whoever’s writing about isn’t particularly comfortable with it, it will be “they did this”. Is that true? That hasn’t really expanded on it very much that suggests we’ll gloss over that section, we’ll just mention it. And that’s an awful lot of what was available. So it’s very limited. And I’m sure, if there were greater resources, or there was more tuition in any way available, it would have been a far quicker journey for me, because I only got my first hand axe, which is a butchery tool. It’s sort of a lens shaped tool, after about three or four years practice. And when people come on flintknapping workshops with me after just a weekend, they are generally at the point where they’re getting a fairly competent understanding, perhaps with minor tuition, but they’re starting to read the process, understand the rock more independently. And that’s within a matter of hours, not years or months. So that trial and error takes much longer.

 

Guy Windsor 

So what you’re saying is basically having a teacher who knows what they’re doing to show you stuff massively speeds up the learning process. That’s not surprising, it works the same with historical martial arts. When I think about how much trial and error we had to do back in the 90s, because access to the sources was almost non-existent, access to decent weapons was almost non-existent. And yeah, I mean, people talk about the good old days, but they really weren’t. Yeah, it’s much easier to show up and get taught.

 

James Dilley 

Often the good old days I’d seen with rose tinted spectacles. Regardless what your subject is. But I guess Ancient Craft became a thing when I was about 16. Because my dad who is works in IT and various computer systems helped me create my website, Ancient Craft, which was intended more of a sort of hobby show, this is who I am, this is what I do, but quite quickly started to get enquiries from museums or individuals who wanted things because of the pictures that they were seeing.

 

Guy Windsor 

But this was back in the relatively early days of the internet. What sort of year are we talking about?

 

James Dilley 

2009 I think.

 

Guy Windsor 

Oh really? God, you’re like 12.

 

James Dilley

I’m 31, Guy. It’s all this grey on my head.

 

Guy Windsor

I turned 50 last week. Honestly, it did that did skew my perception of your age a little bit. I assumed you were older. Wow. So your first website came up in like, 2009? Okay. So your dad helps you to put the website together. And I guess it’s one of those things where it’s so niche, it is so rare, there wasn’t really much in the way of competition. So anyone not googling for like flintknapping or whatever, you’re likely to come up quite quick.

 

James Dilley 

Yeah. And that’s really the case today, as well. The uptake of flint knappers and bronze casters for prehistoric bronze is extremely, extremely low, just because of the sheer amount of dedication and practice required. And I suppose that the best time to learn would probably be when you’re a kid without dependents or a job that you could put as much time as you want into it. That is much, much harder in later life. So I guess there’s more time required for the trial and error and the learning independently that was enabled, because I was a kid. But I guess on the other hand, and today, you can skip around some of that with some guidance and tuition. So it balances out I’m. I would say it’s more something that does require dedication, like any skill or craft or martial practice, that determination and focus and self-discipline. Again, with crafts or various arts, there are so many consistent character traits required. And some are suited to that. Some are not but they’re better suited to other things. And it’s as simple as that.

 

Guy Windsor 

I used to be a cabinet maker back in the 90s. And it didn’t suit me as a profession at all. I was basically miserable. I like woodwork. I love woodwork. I do quite a lot of woodwork even now. But as a job it was just not right for me. But teaching historical martial arts went absolutely fantastically. Suits me down to the ground. And what you’re saying about you know, starting young, I mean, it is possible to be in your late 40s and have three children and start a historical martial arts school for a living but I turned professional as a historical martial artists when I was 27. And no kids. And that made everything much easier because there just wasn’t the requirement actually make any money. And I wasn’t worried about being able to feed my children, I was only worried about being able to feed myself and I have friends who would very charitably shoved in dinner down my throat every now and then when the money was tight. So you went from school straight into university to do polished stone axes? I mean, I’m quite surprised that you could study stone axes at university.

 

James Dilley 

So the college that I went to in Cambridge, actually offered archaeology as an A level. It’s one of the handful of places that did, but I had already done my GCSE archaeology in year nine, at secondary school. And the reason I did that was because that was the last year that they were offering archaeology as a GCSE.

 

Guy Windsor 

So you took it two years early?

 

James Dilley 

I think it’d be 14 or 15.

 

Guy Windsor 

It would be 14. Because my daughter’s in Year 10 and she’s turning 15, she’s doing her GCSEs next year in year 11. So yeah, you were two full years ahead. So your school let you do an archaeology GCSE two years early. So they must have recognised that you are seriously interested in this subject?

 

James Dilley 

Well, not so much the school, they facilitated the examination. Actually it was my parents, my dad who managed to find a tutor who would be able to guide me and steward me, via the examining body. There’s an Open University type system. And throughout my entire journey, my parents have been incredibly supportive throughout. But they were able to find that, because my interest level, they felt, could be focused and guided by going through that examination process. And it absolutely was. And for a 14 year old, it was tough. Because your friends were going out to play football, and I had a module or homework or something to complete. And as soon as I finished it, dad turned around and said, Well, do you want to do the A-Level? And I immediately thought, oh God, why on earth? Do I want to put myself through that again? And those for some reason I did. And I did that in the following year.

 

Guy Windsor 

So you did you’re A Level in, in archaeology the year after you did your GCSE? So you took that A Level three years earlier than most kids do?

 

James Dilley 

That was gruelling. Tougher than the Undergraduate, the Masters, similar level with a PhD, but honestly, grim and tough are A Levels. I do feel sorry for people going through them.

 

Guy Windsor 

My eldest kid is just starting hers now and she’s already revising like a maniac.

 

James Dilley 

Full sympathy, honestly, they are really, really tough. But, yeah, that was a real struggle. But again, school was able to facilitate it. And then went to uni at Southampton do an undergraduate in archaeology, a BSc in archaeology.

 

Guy Windsor 

You have a kid applying to do an archaeology degree, and they got their GCSE in archaeology two years early, because the archaeology GCSE was ending, and then they got the A level the next year. It should be a two year course. And you did it in a year, like three years earlier than you should have done. I don’t think your application was one they struggled to grant.

 

James Dilley 

There was a funny story and it is a story that comes full circle. Because when I went for the interviews at Southampton, and I chose Southampton, because at the time, I was very, very interested in maritime archaeology and scuba diving to some of the lost prehistoric landscape off the coast of Britain, and less so now. Still interested in scuba diving, but at the time, that’s why Southampton was where I wanted to be. And in the open day in interviews, each of the students went in for a chat and an interview with a different member of staff. And each member of staff had an archeological object that each student then had to describe and talk about from an archaeological point of view. And I guess that was the main interview. And speaking to people afterwards, there were pieces of bone, pottery, wood, metal, you name it, and for my interviewer, Fraser, he put a stone axe in front of me. Oh my god, thank goodness. For wood it would be, yes, that that’s, that is organic, just about it. But yeah, I was able to tell him, how it was made, how long it took to make, how old it probably was, whereabouts in Britain, it probably came from etc, etc. And at the end it was a “you can come to this university, if you wish, just sign on this dotted line.” And that was that was me at Southampton. And within the first year I was helping to teach, not paid. Looking back on it I should have thought oh, yeah, actually, I should be paid for doing this. But yeah, I was thrown into it quite quickly. But yeah, and Ancient Craft sort of continued and really became more of a full time job from Masters. And doing a full time PhD alongside an emerging full-time business is not a good idea. Would not recommend.

 

Guy Windsor 

My school had been going for 16 years before I did a PhD. Everything was nicely established, didn’t have to worry about it. It’s just a huge amount of work. So, when you graduated with your MA decided you’re going to turn professional, right? Why have your own company making stuff and showing other people how to make stuff, rather than get a job in university? Because I imagine you wouldn’t have too much difficulty finding a post at a university.

 

James Dilley 

Yeah. So going through the process of university and completing the PhD. Family questions about what kind of job are you going to look for were frequently there. But in academia, and in archaeology, particularly in universities, there just aren’t many jobs out there. And they are extremely competitive and  generally offered in house, I mean, that they have to be open, just from a legal point of view, but generally just offered in house. But certainly going through the Masters and the PhD, you could see the pressure that’s put on staff and researchers these days, I do really, really feel for them, the workload that they have, and the sheer amount of students that they have to support and work with. And generally they’re providing support and assistance that goes beyond their professional duty, they’re providing emotional support that they should not have to. And whenever I’d be able to talk to them more informally, they were just constantly drained and knackered, and then to get around to the summer. And well, the university expects you to do research now and publish papers. And so you guys aren’t getting a break at all, in any way, shape, or form. And there aren’t many jobs in museums. But I did have this hobby business that was gaining a lot of traction. And using social media, when social media wasn’t quite as horrific as it is today, it was a good opportunity to engage with personnel in the heritage world or different museums to start to gain more traction. And was starting to do more TV work. Because there are so few people who do any kind of skills or demonstrations like this and far fewer, well, none really, certainly for prehistoric crafts that have an academic background.

 

Guy Windsor 

Do they these TV companies pay you?

 

James Dilley 

Oh, yeah.

 

Guy Windsor 

It’s funny because the BBC contacted me not long after I moved here, wanting my help with some program, history, military sort of stuff. I said, Yeah, certainly. And I quoted them my day rate, and I never heard back.

 

James Dilley 

Well, less so these days. But we do get the very occasional, oh, well, you know, we’d like you to do this. And there’s a lot of work and won’t talk about a fee. And you’ll go back to them. As you say, this is my day rate. And you’ll either not hear back, or even more amusingly you’ll hear about so well, we don’t actually have a budget. A good friend of mine, Graham Taylor, who does historical pottery from prehistory to later he always comes back with the line of oh, well, if you don’t pay the cameraman or the director for the day, then you can pay me. And you know, funnily enough, oh, well, we couldn’t do that. So well, what do you expect? But yeah, I’ve been pretty lucky with some of the TV stuff. I’ve never really had a problem. I’ve just been quite firm. But I know colleagues and particularly female colleagues have had real trouble before. I guess that is it’s changing and improving. And even the short time that I’ve interacted with TV and media, I’ve seen it improve. But there are still various levels that are a bit tricky.

 

Guy Windsor 

Sure. Okay, so basically, your company produces objects that people can buy, and produces experiences that people can have, like casting a bronze sword, which I did with you a few weeks ago. But you also have a sort of broader kind of educational mandate where you want people who are interested in such things to learn whatever they want to know about prehistoric stuff. So what do you wish the general public understood about prehistoric craft?

 

James Dilley 

I guess our mission is to make prehistory accessible, the headline mission statement. And that comes through a whole variety of different outlets, whether it be, as you mentioned, experience days, whether it be just owning an object that you have on your mantelpiece, whether it’s watching YouTube videos that we make, whether it’s actually doing stuff on TV, or even doing a podcast like this. Prehistory and archaeology and particularly the craft side of it, is a really good leveller. And it’s one that has so many different routes and different crafts and opportunities, that there’s almost always something to suit everyone. And regardless of what you think about I’ve got rubbish hand eye coordination, I’m not strong, I can’t break rocks, even with, you know, take flintknapping. It’s not a craft that requires strength at all. And the amount of times that people will be on a workshop and they’ll say, oh, my hand eye coordination is really poor, that’s fine. Because we’re going to just spend the first few hours just hitting the rock, I don’t want you to worry about making anything, I just want you to hit the rock continually. Because you’ll enjoy it, you’ll get more out of it. It might not seem it, breaking rocks, sort of French prison. But you’ll just start to build up that foundation layer, that will mean that the later stages will seem much more achievable. And whether it be pottery, bronze casting, basketry making, you name it, there are so many different skills out there that have a bit of something for everyone. And even if it’s not the purely practical side of it, that desire to understand where we came from and our own history is very much a romantic pursuit that is very, very human. And that’s why I suppose archaeology is so popular and so frequently appears on TV and media because people are just interested in where we came from.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, it’s super popular. And you know, Indiana Jones probably has had a hand in that too. But it’s still very difficult to get a job in. So millions of people are interested. And so you assume the market is gigantic, but it’s difficult to get work in it. There’s an economic sort of mismatch there. It’s like, with so many people interested in it, there should be many more opportunities for people to make a living in the field.

 

James Dilley 

And it’s a highly skilled job that takes years of training and experience.

 

Guy Windsor 

So why do you think with so many people interested, it’s still so hard to make a living?

 

James Dilley 

I would imagine it’s like many other skills or crafts out there that that they are fuelled by people or run by people that love it and do it for the enjoyment love of it. And that’s the currency that I suppose developers or government ministers rely on, rather than actually paying people properly.

 

Guy Windsor 

The amateurs are fucking the market, in other words. That happens in historical martial arts all the time. There are plenty of places where they’d like to have a seminar from me, when I quote them my rates, they are appalled, because they’re used to getting people coming into teach for a weekend. And, you know, they’ll cover your petrol. That’s fucking generous. This is my actual job. If I’m going to be away from home for four days, I need to come back with something to show for it, business wise, otherwise, isn’t me going on holiday. And that’s not really fair on the wife and kids. Same was also true in cabinet making back in the late 90s. Like, one thing we saw a lot was people, for example, retiring from the RAF and doing cabinet making, and because they had all the time in the world, and they had a pension, so they weren’t worried about the money. They were making amazingly good furniture, and they were selling it basically at cost. And that’s just material costs, not including any reasonable representation of their time. So it was quite hard for professional cabinet makers because all the amateurs were doing amazing work and basically giving it away.

 

James Dilley 

And in the heritage sector, there is a huge, huge amount of volunteer support both in museums and in other heritage components. Field archaeology is a little bit different in that you can have organised excavations, where members of the public are either able to volunteer to be part of it or they actually pay to be part of an excavation. So the excavations at Vindolanda Roman fort, have had a long, long process of people paying to be part of a nation and they have a lottery system that the places go like that. Because so many people are keen and because they have such stunning finds from that, I mean the Roman stuff, it’s modern to me. They just came in and ruined prehistory. Came over here and took our jobs.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, and wrote Latin all over everything.

 

James Dilley 

They brought those letters. But even the excavations and archaeological field work from a professional basis, if there’s a development or a new road or new railway to be put in. A very small proportion of it is amateurs and volunteers because they’re often a site where you either need professional insurance, you need professional training, you need professional X, Y and Z. As a member of public, you cannot be in that space, let alone pick up a trowel. And excavations like that going on across the UK, and there’s a couple near here in Norfolk. And they will be strictly non-public. And that’s purely on the safety aspect, even before it comes to the correct recovery, recording of material and that sort of thing. So, amateurs, and volunteers do make up a somewhat unsustainable part, more of the museum outreach sector, but less so field archaeology. So I would say if I had to put my money on it, that it’s I get, I guess a little bit like the NHS or the National Health Service that we have here in the UK, that those practitioners and highly, highly experienced professionals are being paid very poorly for a job that is quite literally saving people’s lives, that we couldn’t really do without, but they do it. And they say they do it because they love it. And they love being able to help and save people. And that is the currency that the government or officials are relying on. So they don’t have to pay these people a proper wage to actually do what they do. And it’s such a shame when, again, particularly in the UK at the moment, we’re hearing of large amounts of money being squirreled away to government pals and officials. And it’s infuriating. And there are so many sectors out there and archaeology is almost for fun in comparison to emergency services that are vital. There is a massive amount of disparity.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, totally. Okay, so we should talk about swords, at least briefly given the title of the show. So, when I was over your workshop, we cast these bronze swords, which, lovely. I’m taking mine to a friend called Sergio Muelle who is a blacksmith who lives half an hour away. So next week, I’m going over to his place so I can polish it all up and stuff on his machines, because it’s just going to save me so much time. But so bronze swords. It is way earlier than any of the stuff we have written records for in terms of how to use and I guess most listeners have probably never handled a bronze sword and they don’t really know how bronze works as a metal to cut stuff with. So could you just kind of describe what they’re like and give us an idea into durability and cutting power, that kind of stuff.

 

James Dilley 

Sure, so I guess if I was going to give a simplistic breakdown, we’ll start with their production. Most bronze swords are an alloy of copper and tin and as we move further forward through the Bronze Age lead becomes more frequent, but it’s mostly copper. Usually around 90% with some variation, and the bronze is cast into a mould of something like clay, or stone, or as we did on the workshop sand, compacted sand. Once that cast has been made, the sword is cleaned and refined and the edges are then forged to harden them. The handle will be two handle scales that are riveted through the handle with a pommel, usually organic, something like wood that is then fitted onto the base of the handle via just a peg that has the socket for the peg actually in the pommel. So there’s very little holding it in place other than friction alone. In terms of weight, bronze swords generally weigh anywhere between 600 grams to just under a kilo. Just under a kilo for the very large swords.

 

Guy Windsor 

What is large in those contexts? How long are we talking?

 

James Dilley 

Well, length can be a tricky one because you can get some very, very thin narrow swords that we looked at on the workshop that archaeologists identified as rapiers, which was you absolutely hated.

 

Guy Windsor 

It’s a long, thin pokey stick. It’s not a rapier. They’re not even rapier length. I mean, the really long ones were what, about 30 inches, maybe, something like that?

 

James Dilley 

The really long ones can get to over 40 centimetres.

 

Guy Windsor 

40 centimetres is like this big. It’s like 15 inches more or less. Okay, our rapiers tend to be 120 centimetres. Because they’re made of steel, which has its advantages. But okay, let me just dial back to something you said earlier, you mentioned forging the edges. And I’m thinking that people who are familiar with bronze will have it in their head that you stick it in a fire, you get it red hot, you bash it, you stick it in a fire, you go red hot, you bash it, you stick it in a fire, get it red hot, and then you dunk it in water to kind of quench it and it’s not at all we’re talking about. So could you describe the process by which you’ve taken your cast bronze sword out, polish it up or whatever. And you’re going to forge the edges sharp, what is that process like?

 

James Dilley 

So instead of hot forging as you would with iron or steel, once you cast your sword into a mould, that should be the last time that any significant heat is applied to the blade. Once you’ve cleaned and polished the blade to remove any casting flash or just surface patina, the forging is done using an anvil and a hammer. But it’s very, very localised. And it’s all the way around the edge from the tip pretty much to where I guess your guard or at least the start of the handle. Whether you count them as a guard or not is another story. But that is done via cold work. You may if you have to re soften the bronze anneal it which is where you’d have to get it to a cherry red state, which is still fairly hot, but not near 1000 degrees. Once bronze starts to go to a cherry red state, which can be several hundred degrees, it gets extremely brittle and a hammer strike will break it and snap it. That’s the best way to recycle a piece of bronze is just to get it hot and bash it to bits to put it back into crucible and start again if you need to. That cold forging process around the outside to work hard on the blade breaks down and compresses the crystalline structure. So the edge is much harder because freshly cast bronze is very, very soft. And in fact, once a sword is cast in bronze from the stone, possibly the origins of the folklore myth story, it is worth flexing the blade a couple of times, almost bending it over your knee a couple of times because initially it’ll be incredibly soft and you can always bend it in your hands. But after a couple of bends and flexes it will toughen up very quickly. And that’s because the atomic lattice that if it was just copper or just tin would be a regular atomic lattice which allows the atoms to slide over each other in rows. Once that alloy has been created and tin or lead has been added it breaks up those regular rows so although it can be moved a little bit initially, those gaps that would be filled by an atom of the same size as the one that left might not be filled by an atom of the same size, it might be filled by a larger atom tin or lead, so those spaces lock up, but in bending it a few times it toughens up the blade, it’s still a soft core. And that’s why you’d need to forge the outside to harden it. So people are clearly starting to understand the value of having soft and hard parts of the blade. But when you compare that emerging understanding of what makes a good sword to the actual balance of the sword, then it shows they still have a very, very long way to go.

 

Guy Windsor 

Hang on, hang on. Okay. So just to recap, the how’d you get the edge sharp thing, you basically you stick it on an anvil and you go ding, ding, ding, ding, ding with a hammer.

 

James Dilley 

Much like you peen a sickle.

 

Guy Windsor 

Which actually, for the average listener, peening a sickle is no more familiar than forging the edge of a bronze sword. Not a helpful analogy there. So you’re going ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And it’s basically it’s just smashing the bronze into the edge shape that you want. And that process of bashing it hardens it up. Right, so you got a relatively hard, relatively sharp edge. Okay. Now, the bronze swords that I have, leave aside the monster that I made with my template, the one that came from your template, as soon as I get a bit of handle on that, which will be happening in a couple of weeks, I can feel already, that is a perfectly lively blade to swing around and hit people with, and the mass is far enough forward away from the hand, so you’re going to get plenty of presence in the blade when you smack something with it. But because the weapon is relatively short, and relatively, there’s not a lot of mass, having it further away from the hand gives you this liveliness, and this sort of striking power without actually making the weapons slow. So I think it actually handles beautifully.

 

James Dilley 

And the example you cast will be within the more acceptable grounds because it is a much shorter blade, whereas for some of the rapiers, or some of the leaf shape swords, they get much, much, much longer. And I suppose next time and perhaps with some planning or actually thinking about it, we should have looked at some of the other sword types and templates, because some of them do get much longer, and they get to sort of 60 centimetres or so. And they get very wide and very heavy. And the handles are also significantly shorter than you think would be comfortable for something like a hammer grip, and we get can get onto grips.

 

Guy Windsor 

This is the thing. I don’t think you would hold those weapons with a hammer grip.

 

James Dilley 

We can get onto that shortly. But certainly for the longer blades, they are very, very top heavy. And you can see where as swords are getting longer towards the end of the Bronze Age, how they’re trying to work out how to compensate for that. And by the end of the Bronze Age, they’re casting bronze or tin or lead pommels to try and mitigate that imbalance of these longer blades. You still get shorter blades, and you would probably get away with a fairly dense organic handle would be more than enough. But certainly for some of the very long swords, they would just be so very top heavy. And if you’re using it from horseback, again, for someone who’s not terribly experienced, I’m sure they could be used fairly effectively.

 

Guy Windsor 

But do you think they were using them actually fighting from horseback?

 

James Dilley 

Yes.

 

Guy Windsor 

They didn’t have stirrups yet.

 

James Dilley 

We didn’t have stirrups yet. But people were fighting from horseback prior to stirrups.

 

Guy Windsor 

Sure, it strikes me if you’ve got a big heavy sword you really, really want a stirrup under that foot on your sword side.

 

James Dilley 

Definitely.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, fine. How do we know about the mounted combat in the Bronze Age? Most of the Trojan War stuff, that’s on foot.

 

James Dilley 

It is. But we do get certainly very, very, very solid evidence of bridle furniture. And we do get evidence of impact damage to skulls and upper body elements that are almost certainly either from a consistently elevated position, which if both fighters happen to be on foot and one elevated and it would be unusually consistent, or someone’s on some kind of mount.

 

Guy Windsor 

What about like drawings? Like drawing from the Grecian urns, that kind of thing?

 

James Dilley 

Well, so, yeah, certainly for more into the classical world, you do get a much greater spectrum of daily life as well as fighting. For Western Europe, we generally have to rely on rock art, from places like Scandinavia, and you’re relying on cultural groups that have a real flair for showing off rock art. Bronze Age rock art in Britain is generally only restricted to the early Bronze Age, and it’s very geographically restricted. Whereas as I said, in somewhere like Scandinavia, they have consistent rock art, from the Neolithic, all the way through. With images of people fighting, holding shields and spears, on boats. In fact, boats are some of the most common thing that you see. So you get a much better indication, but it’s still relatively simplistic. It’s quite hard to pick out the detail that, with understanding swordsmanship from a few 100 years ago, that you can look at the images and draw and debate exactly how they’re holding a weapon or how their stance sits.

 

Guy Windsor 

Also we have endless textual authorities. The reason my period, going backwards, my period ends in around 1350 is because that’s when our earliest sources are, and before that it’s all living history and experimental archaeology. And that’s great. But my focus is on the texts. Because yeah, it’s honestly, it’s just easier to have an authoritative opinion, when you can point to the book and say, look, he says, put your left foot forward.

 

James Dilley 

And we just don’t have that. We’re relying on very, very, very basic outlines that, from an artistic perspective are executed really well with the methods they’re using. But for the high detail are very, very tricky to pick out. But we do have a fantastic battlefield site in northern Germany on the Tollense River, that dates from the later end of the Middle Bronze Age, which has a whole variety of weapons.

 

Guy Windsor 

Could you put a year number on that? Because again, most listeners probably don’t have a clear sense of early Bronze Age, middle Bronze Age, late Bronze Age.

 

James Dilley 

The Tollense battlefield site’s around about 1300 BC. So I mean, it’s, I guess, for Britain and this side of Europe, the Bronze Age, to put it on a timeline, starts about 4500 years ago, and ends about 2700 years ago. So it’s sort of slap bang within the middle of that, but slightly towards the later end. But within this site that was discovered by a farmer ploughing his field at the edge of the river, a vast amount of human bones were suddenly found, an archaeologist realized they’d found the rarest of archaeology, a battlefield site. Made even rarer because it’s a prehistoric battlefield from the Bronze Age, where a huge amount of the remains were left as well as many of the objects.

 

Guy Windsor 

That’s kind of weird, because normally people clear up after battles. Because either it’s like these bodies need to be buried or whatever. And there’s all that loot that you can pick up and take home.

 

James Dilley 

Exactly yeah, it’s quite unusual. But the way the remains a scattered suggests that many were just left or fell into the river. And certainly for the heavy weaponry and equipment, you could understand how that may sink, but for human remains, they would stay on the surface for some time. But they were left and whether that was for cultural reasons, very hard to say. But the weaponry ranged from wooden clubs all the way through to copper alloy arrows, spears and swords, and people who were clearly at least at some point on a mount and were attempting to use weaponry. An awful lot of spears being used, but alongside wooden clubs and projectiles. But I try to liken it I suppose to the Western European equivalent of, without a city state next to it, one of the major conflicts in the Aegean because it has all of the ingredients there. It’s just missing the Iliad, unfortunately to give us all of that extra information, those names.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, the story of who was doing what.

 

James Dilley 

But the breadth of objects and the fact that people had come from a great distance to be part of this fight.

 

Guy Windsor 

How do we know they came from a great distance?

 

James Dilley 

So for the actual battle. Prehistoric communities at this time, each settlement may have had a couple of hundred people, tops, for a large settlement. And the estimates for the amount of people involved in this battle are around 5000, which is a massive number for prehistory. And we want to go beyond prehistory, you get into numbers that are quoting to sort of 10s of 1000s, even in the classical world, but 5000 in prehistory, in the middle of Bronze Age, is a big number. Once this site was identified, it was suggested that people were travelled from a great distance. And they found that out by looking at the radioactive isotopes in people’s teeth, similar isotopes that we all carry today that will be picked up as your teeth replenish themselves by the water that we drink, that can tell you where people came from. So my teeth, for example, will give a very strong indication that I’ve spent most of my life living on the chalk in the South East and would probably be fairly good at picking out exactly where, and it’s because those isotopes that will be within the chalk filtered water, that as I’ve drunk large amounts of that water over my life have ended up in my teeth. And those hard organic parts being often the best thing to be preserved, even though the bone has this long timescale of where people have come from. And if they’re really well preserved, it’s not just a case, oh, they came from there. They can, in many cases from prehistory, actually tell you where people have moved throughout their lives, which is really amazing, if the teeth are in good condition.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, so we have a pretty good picture that people came from quite far away to have this gigantic barney. And how many you said that about 5000 people there, is that 5000 bodies? Or is that 5000?

 

James Dilley 

That’s just an estimate. They’ve identified a minimum number of 250 individuals, but they think they’ve only excavated a very small percentage of the site.

 

Guy Windsor 

Battles are not normally massacres. If you’ve got 2000 people on each side, at the beginning of the battle, at the end of the battle, you’ve probably got 1500 on each side, at least. A really high mortality rate will be about 10%, I think. But that’s based on sort of more modern stuff that maybe they were a bit more, a bit more enthusiastic back in the day.

 

James Dilley 

Maybe. And we don’t know how the sides were organised. It may have simply been that people turned up on one side of the river, other people turned up on the other side of the river, and they were purely there just to demonstrate the martial prowess. And little more, they had no real skin in defending one side of the of the river other than just being able to knock someone over with whatever object they had to hand, we just don’t know. It may have been incredibly organised. And there may have been very close political ties and alliances that pulled people in from a distance to fight over this causeway or bridge, but we just don’t know, sadly.

 

Guy Windsor 

Interesting. Okay, but it’s given us all sorts of information about how people got murdered with Bronze Age stuff. And at this battle, do you see evidence of people striking downwards from above as if on horseback?

 

James Dilley 

Yeah, a lot of shoulder damage, in particular on the tops of shoulders.

 

Guy Windsor 

That would definitely indicate either projectile weapons or, yeah, people could be standing on a wall. More likely, if there’s lots of them spread out then it’s going to be horses.

 

James Dilley 

It could be and I guess that would rely on a wall or evidence of a wall being found but as I understand it, that there isn’t there’s even pretty scanty evidence of a bridge or causeway let alone a wall or fortification.

 

Guy Windsor 

Ah, they have drones. They were dropping bronze swords from drones on people’s head.

 

James Dilley 

I did wonder why my sword orders had gone up so dramatically in the last year or so.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, tell us a little bit about the armour. What sort of armour would you expect to find in this period?

 

James Dilley 

So armour in the bronze age ranges depending on where you are, but in Britain, we have no bronze armour and no evidence of Bronze Age armour. There may have been organic armour. We’ve just not found it yet. There are plenty of components that may have been used to attach armour or tie or armour together. But we’ve just not found enough evidence. However, if you cross the channel, there is plenty of stunning sheet bronze cuirasses, helmets, greaves and they are beautifully made.

 

Guy Windsor 

What you’re saying is we had amazing armour in Britain and the French came over nicked it all and took it back to France. That’s the most logical explanation. That’s what I thought you were trying to say. You were being very polite to our French listeners. So why? And again, this is just across the channel and people have been crossing the Channel for 1000s of years. So why do they have fancy armour across the channel and we don’t have it in Britain?

 

James Dilley 

That is a very good question. It’s one that’s very hard to answer with any solid conviction simply.

 

Guy Windsor 

This is not an this is not an academic paper, so you can speculate freely. And I’m going to flag it as speculation. So what do you think happened?

 

James Dilley 

So what we do see not just with armour in Britain, but with finished objects and products that are made from bronze and made from metal, is a very large quantity of material from an island that has very large and wealthy raw material resources for copper, tin, gold, and lead, almost all the metals, you need to fuel the Bronze Age. As you cross the channel, those resources become far fewer and far between and far poorer. You do get copper in certain areas, and you get tin in others, but they’re spread over a much wider area that would be within different cultural, or tribal territories if you like. Whereas in Britain, there are a lot more copper sources or tin sources that are almost within the same area and certainly with copper and tin and lead in places like Cornwall or Devon, they can be within a few kilometres of each other.

 

Guy Windsor 

So you have everything you need to make all the bronze. So why is the fancy armour ending up in France?

 

James Dilley 

I think the reason why we don’t get as many stunningly finished items, whether it be swords, or cauldrons, or armour, is because the raw material that we have or had in Britain, is being used to manufacture quantity rather than quality. Whereas as soon as that material moves further away from source, there’s more time invested into making or using the material to its highest value level.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, so if you’re close to the supply of the raw material, or you just mass produce a bunch of stuff, because it’s cheap to do so and you can basically get all of your mining and smelting expenses back. But if you have only a small quantity of the material available, you need to make that into an object that you can get maximum money for.

 

James Dilley 

It’s not necessarily the right answer.

 

Guy Windsor 

I never even thought of it. Basically, raw economics, we’re talking.

 

James Dilley 

Yeah, I think for lack of wide geographic organisation, that if you had the miners and the smelters, and the casters and the finishers and the fitters, that’s quite a long chain of sequence that if you happen to have all of those particular crafting levels or within one very, very localized area, then that’s great. But that takes a huge amount of material to support and cost to support. And although there are those material values and wealth within those regions, is it enough to support all of those craftspeople. Whereas if you’re in a much wider area, regionally, you can start to I suppose, to have that special specialisation.

 

Guy Windsor 

But let’s say I’m a Middle Bronze Age warrior in Britain. And I know that as a regular part of my job, people are going to be trying to take my head off the bronze swords and whatnot. Okay, I am going to want a helmet, I am going to want a cuirass, I’m going to want all sorts of stuff that makes it harder for my opponent to do their job. So the question is, why do you think people in Britain weren’t armouring up?

 

James Dilley 

I suppose that the question of why do we not see as much armour in Iron Age communities in Britain could be added on to that, and whether it’s purely down to wealth or perceived wealth and being able to produce a mail shirt, because that’s an expensive product to make, but you know, even a thick piece of leather, it’s not great, but it provides something. But then on the other hand, you’ve potentially got the cultural aspects of what it means to not to wear armour. And that may be part of it. That’s a big old maybe.

 

Guy Windsor 

It reminds me of like, if you look at infantry tactics in the American Civil War, an awful lot of what you did was walked slowly towards people who were shooting at you. Which seems absolutely insane from a modern perspective. But I mean, it could be that the cultural ideal of a warrior was bravery and putting on a helmet was clearly an act of cowardice, potentially. I mean, that would also maybe explain why in France, they just had a different cultural setup. And so it was considered noble to wear armour, whereas in Britain, perhaps it’s considered ignoble. Possibly, that’s a possibility. Because people are weird, I mean, study history long enough you learn that people are absolutely fucking weird, and they come to some very, very strange conclusions about how they ought to be behaving.

 

James Dilley 

Yeah, totally. And the Bronze Age is no exception to that. I mean, for an island nation that in the Middle Ages, relying on fish and fishing was such an important part of the economy. In Bronze Age, Britain, people did not eat fish, or anything that came from the water. Why? We don’t know. It may have been because they were disposing their dead there.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, that again, that is absolutely freaking weird, because there’s all this not free, but easily accessible protein. And in other bits, other parts of Europe at the same time, people were living off fish.

 

James Dilley 

Yeah, I mean, as you go across into Europe, that it starts to become quite a mixed palette for what people are doing with things from the sea. But just they are just weird.

 

Guy Windsor 

In Britain we’re just weird. Yeah, I think we found a strap line for the episode. Okay, I was there when you gave this talk at the beginning of the bronze casting thing. So I’m asking you a lot of questions. I know your answers to. But I am guessing that the average non archaeologically trained listener is wondering how the hell you know they didn’t eat fish because you eat a fish and then the fish is gone. So how do you know?

 

James Dilley 

The bones. The lack of the flora and fauna remains for lack of fish bones. And although fish bones are very small and fragile, and would disappear much quicker than a thick old cow bone, where you do get really well preserved sites, where even the finest of organic remains are found, you still don’t get fish bones. And if you broaden the plate, the potential plate of food that comes from the sea, even shellfish are very much limited, and they have hard invertebrate components that are much tougher and survive much better than tiny fish bones, and they just do not appear. One of the very rare sites that we do have, that does have evidence of eating fish comes from Must Farm near Peterborough, which is a very late bronze age site with clear evidence of continental influence and exchange of goods. And via the coprolites, the poos, that dropped into the waters below. There is evidence of parasites, gut parasites that people would have picked up by eating raw fish. So where they were eating fish, this one example, they were not cooking the fish, which for very muddy fish, I mean, I’m not a fisherman, and we eat some fish, but not a great deal, but we certainly don’t eat real murky water bottom feeder fish, which I would imagine are very earthy and perhaps not particularly tasteful.

 

Guy Windsor 

So they were eating these things raw, because they had fancy European guests who liked eating fish. Okay. So you’re always going to come across this absence of evidence is not evidence of absence problem. But if you’re not finding fish bones, then the chances are there weren’t any fish bones if you are finding everything else.

 

James Dilley 

There’s definitely something missing there. But the other thing that we have that’s missing are other bones, and it’s human bones. We’re not sure what people were doing with their dead after the Early Bronze Age.

 

Guy Windsor 

I’m wandering around my study. I have a book. I was trying to find it. It’s by Timothy Taylor, who basically posits that the reason all these bones are missing is because people were being eaten by people.

 

James Dilley 

Wow, that’s a big claim.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah. So okay, so where were all these human remains, if they haven’t been sort of butchered and eaten they would have been buried.

 

James Dilley 

Well, you said it. If they had been butchered, we’d expect to see butchery marks even if they were cooking and trying to render the bones down as much as they could.

 

Guy Windsor 

And his book does have pictures of human bones with butchering marks on them. So obviously, occasionally some people work definitely being eaten.

 

James Dilley 

Oh yeah. And there was even ritualized flesh removal, not necessarily butchery, but just to expose the bones to expose the hard organic parts before those bones were then moved and dealt with in a very different way. But that’s a different story.

 

Guy Windsor 

You’re going to have to tell us that story.

 

James Dilley 

Well, let’s finish this first one. So, for the Bronze Age, human remains once the person had passed, they seem to be cremating them, that becomes very popular. And once those people have been cremated, the remains of that cremation disappear archaeologically. Whereas earlier in the Bronze Age, they were putting cremations into cremation urns and they were putting those cremation urns in the ground in a pit that archaeologically they survived really well. Middle Bronze age onwards cremations disappear.

 

Guy Windsor 

So maybe they’re scattering the ashes.

 

James Dilley 

Yeah. And either they’re scattering them into the landscape, or I tend to think they were scattering them or placing the remains into water and watery places. And we know watery places are a special part of the Bronze Age world, because as well as possibly human remains as ashes that have been deposited into water. They are also depositing metalwork and weapons in particular, and many of those weapons and objects are intentionally destroyed, damaged or killed, either by bending them, breaking them, or intentionally heavily notching them before placing them in the water. So water seems to be this very special place that is really another world, one of those liminal spaces.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, so that’s what’s and perhaps feeding the prohibition against eating fish, because you could be eating granny who has come back as a fish. Okay, so tell us about the ritual flensing.

 

James Dilley 

Yeah, so the ritual removal of flesh is more of a Neolithic activity. So prior to the Bronze Age, when, around 6000 years ago, we have the arrival of the first farmers to Britain, and they changed the landscape of Britain dramatically. We have no genetic link, apart from evolutionary link, we have no direct genetic link to hunter gatherers. They were wiped out genetically within 200 years, as soon as Neolithic farmers got here. Yeah, that’s quick.

 

Guy Windsor 

That’s quick. So they were probably hunted then, very liberally genocidal. Okay, wow, you’ve got a population of hunter gatherers. And then a bunch of settlers move in, and you’re saying there’s no genetic connection, the descendants hundreds of years later are shown that they all descend from this settler group, not from the hunter gatherer group, then these hunter gatherers, like, where did they go? And the obvious thing would be, well, just like the Europeans did in what became the United States, oh, you’ve got all these people running around living tribal lifestyles. Let’s slaughter them.

 

James Dilley 

And elsewhere in Europe, I do you see evidence of clear violence, but it isn’t clear evidence of a farmer versus hunter gatherer. It’s often farmer against farmer with the occasional hunter gatherer thrown in. We don’t know, unfortunately. And that that may be partly because the study of ancient genetics is improving. And the refinement and the definition of picking out what happened to some of those genetic sequences will become clearer over time. But as the Bronze Age appears in Europe, and in Britain, Neolithic people disappear completely.

 

Guy Windsor 

They are different people. So basically Bronze Age technology comes into Europe with a culture. It’s not just the techniques that are being transferred, its people with these techniques are emigrating in and getting rid of, or pushing out the people that were living there. Because my imagination of how the Bronze Age spread is some people have some great ideas about casting bronze and those ideas spread. It didn’t occur to me that it was a culture that spread.

 

James Dilley 

It’s very much the movement of people over ideas.

 

Guy Windsor 

I had this brilliant idea for a movie, by the way, right? Okay, picture the scene, Stone Age Britain, you know, these hunter gatherers running around doing very like photogenic things with bows and arrows and stuff. And then you get these settlers coming in and doing their farming, whatever. And of course, the settlers hate the hunter gatherers. And they go hunting the hunter gatherers and the hunter gatherers are actually very good at hunting, so they shoot back. And then of course, you have a young lady from one group and a young man from another group who meet and fall in love and don’t kill each other and all sorts of Romeo and Juliet stuff happens. And it will be a blockbuster, I tell you, it’ll be brilliant. And there’ll be so much work for archaeologists and Ancient Craft people.

 

James Dilley 

Yes. That sounds like it’s got legs. There is a prehistoric horror movie that I think is coming out soon, which is set in the Paleolithic. I forget the name of it. But that is coming out soon, I think. But yeah, from a people and ideas and genetic point of view, people are being replaced and replaced and replaced. I mean, from an individual point of view, Otzi the Iceman, the frozen mummy that was found in the Italian Alps in ‘91. He lived about 5350 years ago, his only genetic descendants live in extremely isolated places, in islands, like Sardinia and Corsica. He has no descendants on the mainland at all.

 

Guy Windsor 

Hmm. So his culture got displaced at some point.

 

James Dilley 

Yeah, displaced, destroyed, assimilated you name it.

 

Guy Windsor 

But if it’s assimilated, the genetics would be incorporated.

 

James Dilley 

In theory, but watered down I suppose so much whether they are appearing or not, I’m not a geneticist at all. But for them to disappear quite so firmly and with such a hard line of disappearance is very strange. I agree.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, it must be genocide. I mean, it’s what people tend to do. There are so many examples of genocides occurring when one powerful group moves into an area occupied by a less powerful group. And the big powerful group just obliterates the original inhabitants. I mean, that’s like a really common human pattern. What would constitute evidence for or against that theory?

 

James Dilley 

Well, for, I suppose the evidence we just talked about, I suppose could be for. There is this very hard disappearance and not a gentle disappearance. So I would argue that that’s probably for based on the evidence we have, and the techniques we have, that may change over time. But we would also need far, far more evidence of violence. There’s just not enough.

 

Guy Windsor 

We’re looking for a grave of a stone age hunter gatherer, who’s got a bronze arrowhead in his skull.

 

James Dilley 

And there’s just not enough.

 

Guy Windsor 

Interesting. Okay. So you spend a lot of your time actually making stuff. And there’s nothing like interacting with the artifacts and actually with your hands and making these things or making the tool and then using the tool to give you an insight into how things work. So what have you changed your mind on in the last 10 years or so? And there’s probably lots of things, so just pick one or two.

 

James Dilley 

So the thing I supposes change my mind is actually what I was looking at, in my PhD. And rather than weaponry, I was looking at hunting equipment. And I was looking at the hunting equipment tips in particular, because in archaeology, generally, a lot of the research focuses on the actual objects that are there. And what you can tell about the objects and how they were made, how they might have been used, and what that might have meant. I was interested in these particular hunting objects, the tips of these spears that would have been made by the first modern humans Homo Sapiens into Europe about 40,000 years ago, because they were made of antler instead of sharp stone tips that can be made, even very simple ones, in a matter of moments. Antler would take a very long time to carve. And these are particularly interesting because it wasn’t just a shaped piece of pointed antler. It actually had a split in the base, something you can’t do with stone and maintain. You can split a stone but it will split right through like a piece of slate or even if you have a partial split it won’t be very strong. Whereas with a piece of antler because it’s quite flexible, even more flexible than bone which is quite brittle by comparison. You can carve this very pointed tip from antler whilst still maintaining this split base, and someone, again, who’s so used to seeing stone tools and using them and making, it’s why would you make these because they take so much time? With stone tips or even solid base tips, the actual arrow or projectile shaft, the wood, has to facilitate the tip. So the tip of the object fits into the slot or notch, whatever you call it, because socketed arrowheads or spear heads hadn’t been created yet. That’s something we’re so used to today, but in stone is very hard to do. So I wondered if there was something a bit different, they were thinking about materials in a different way. So to test whether they were actually spear tips at all, because we haven’t got any spear shafts or parts of spear shafts that have been found, I needed to make a load of replicas and fire them into ballistics gel at high speed to see if they would actually be lethal enough. I also made some full spears that I had thrown by inexperienced throwers and more experienced Javelin throwers, just to see how they move through the air. Unsurprisingly, because it was a straight stick, somebody knows what they’re doing can throw a stick in reasonable straight line and keeping it somewhat stable in the air, which fine, it’s a stick, it should be able to do that if you know what you’re doing, but for the lethality tests, with just a sharpened pieces of antler in a drop tower, which was calibrated, they were penetrating to over 20 centimetres quite consistently.

 

Guy Windsor 

That is a long way in.

 

James Dilley 

That’s a long way. And this is 20% ballistics gel, which is NATO level.

 

Guy Windsor 

So just to clarify, to standardise the forces involved, instead of throwing them into a target, which can vary, you took them into a drop tower and just drop the spear or arrows straight down into the ballistics gel.

 

James Dilley 

With a calibrated weight and speed, but it can be gas fired if it needs to be, because the beauty of having them thrown first and recorded them recording and being thrown is that we could get the actual speed data.

 

Guy Windsor 

So you throw them by hand to get an idea of how fast these things should be moving. And then you put them in a drop tower so you’re simulating the same forces that they would have when they were thrown. But you can do it consistently. And so you by making variations to the arrowhead itself, any changes in penetration are caused by the arrowhead, not by other factors like my arm is getting tired.

 

James Dilley 

I mean, it would have been interesting to have a ballistics target at the spear throwing range just as a point of interest. But there’s just so many variables involved. And there could be the animal moving or you name it, it would be more from interest rather than being from a controlled point of view. So we’re finding that they were penetrating around 20 centimetres, which is a very, very lethal for a large mammal, even if it doesn’t penetrate a vital organ, that’s more than enough trauma to eventually cause them to die. So that proved that they were lethal enough. The next thing I had to work out was if there was anything special about the spear tips if they missed the target and hit something hard, because I wondered if they were using this material, because they could split it and they could make a split, because remember with the stone tips, it’s the shaft that facilitates the tip. But with antler with a split base, it’s the tip that facilitates the shaft. So the weakness, instead of being this way round is now this way round. So the weakness is now in the tip.

 

Guy Windsor 

The weakness is in the tip, not in the shaft.

 

James Dilley 

Exactly. So I wondered whether they had changed traditional thinking of hunting technology, because there’s something going on in the wider landscape. And actually, if you look at Northwestern Europe at this time during the time period, in geological geographic archaeological fields, it is called marine isotope stage three, which is about 40 odd thousand years ago, up until about 28,000 years ago, Europe would have been very, very cold during this time, an average July temperature in central France would have been around five degrees. So Britain would have been very cold in the peak seasons, but to an extent that Britain wouldn’t have had many occupants, human or not because it was so cold. But there were stages during this period that people were getting as far north as Northern Wales. So they were still coming into Britain and still going quite far north and Britain was connected to the mainland at this point. So moving back and forth was very easy. But it would have been like an Arctic, or maybe boreal tundra. So very open, lots of permafrost. And if there was any non-icy areas, it just would have been a steppe grassland. So like Mongolia, or Siberia, very few trees. And the trees that would have been there would have been only in very sheltered south facing valleys, where there would have been quite cold adapted species like pine, or larch or silver birch very slow growing trees.

 

Guy Windsor 

So what you’re saying is where you’re heading towards is the economic value, or the replacement cost of the spear shaft, or the arrow shaft was much, much higher than you would expect living in a kind of wooded area.

 

James Dilley 

Correct. The traditional woods that you would have thought of for something like an arrow shaft, or projectile shaft, your hazel, or ash, just would not come in for 1000s of years, because they are quite late on the tree occupation list. The first ones are things like silver birch.

 

Guy Windsor 

Tree occupation list, there’s actually a list of when tree species came into Britain? It’s called the tree occupation list.

 

James Dilley 

Well, that’s me isn’t that term, but you get your pioneer species. So these will be the first species that will come in after it’s been barren, for whatever reason, usually climatic and it will be things like silver birch, which is why when you get woodland that is starting to become dominated, as is much of Britain today, mainly in the south, you’ll see very few silver birches, and they generally only live to 30 or 40 years before they fall over and die. And they just get overtaken by the species that we’re a lot more used to.

 

Guy Windsor 

If you go to Finland is all conifers and birch trees. The one thing I really missed when I lived in Finland was oak trees and ash trees, like the proper deciduous forest, you just don’t get them there.

 

James Dilley 

Yeah, it’s just the latitude, you’re going further north.

 

Guy Windsor 

So in your PhD, you’re basically coming around to the idea that the reason for this choice of material in the head is because it was more elastic, so that they can make the heads sort of, if you throw your spear and accidentally hits a rock instead of the animal, it’s going to be the spear head that is easily replaced, that’s breaking rather than the shaft itself.

 

James Dilley 

So that was my thinking. And via doing a survey into some more higher latitude regions, it was quite clear that if you wanted a straight, flexible piece of wood, they’re really hard to find in that kind of area. And if you do find some kind of piece of wood, it takes a lot of work or a lot of luck to find it to actually work it into something usable. And actually ethnographically, you see that in areas where there are far greater opportunities for useful species that people are conserving and trade in particular, well-made spear shafts or hunting shafts from certain trees in certain areas for different weights and different qualities to them. And there’s no reason that was any different in Europe during the ice age. So to prove my theory, now that I’ve proved the lethality and that they could actually be thrown or used as a lance was that if it hit a hard target for the spear head needed to break every single time, or almost every single time, with no clear damage to the spear shaft. And once the experiments were done, each and every time the spearhead broke very consistently in a way that matched archaeological examples.

 

Guy Windsor 

Very satisfying.

 

James Dilley 

It was very satisfying. But even more interestingly was something I didn’t anticipate at all was how the spear heads were attached to the shaft, because although they fit over a bevelled sort of wedge shaped spear shaft. There’s no evidence of glue been used because it’s actually a split piece of antler, you’d have marrow on the inside, where you should be able to see little bits of evidence of glue and there’s none archaeologically, so they weren’t gluing them. And as we found through the throwing experiments, binding was unnecessary, because once it hit the ground even with binding the spear tip became dislodged anyway, so it was a pointless activity to do that. And once the lethality test was being conducted, the spear shaft would make contact and leave the spear head in the ballistics gel and the actual spear shaft could be retrieved. So if you were hunting reindeer in more of a corral or interception strategy, as they were coming past, you could poke, put the next tip on poke, put the next tip on, but that becomes even more valuable when you understand what the tip is doing because for its split the based is keeping the wound channel open.

 

Guy Windsor 

Wow, I see that reminds me a little bit of the San people, the Bushman in the Kalahari, their arrows, they have a kind of long reed, which is the arrow shaft, and then they have an iron point, which is attached to a wooden stick. And those iron points are poisoned. And the tapered end of the wooden stick is slotted into the end of the reed. And that’s the arrow. So what happens is, when you shoot a giraffe, the arrowhead pierces the giraffe’s skin, giraffe goes, oh, that’s not very nice and starts running away. And the arrow shaft itself gets knocked off onto the ground, but the head stays in the animal. And so the poison goes through and then the animal falls over quickly, because the poison is really effective.

 

James Dilley 

And we see with arrows in Europe as well, where they have detachable fore shafts.

 

Guy Windsor 

So, it’s almost like, load and shoot, load and shoot.

 

James Dilley 

So what that taught me was that rather than just looking at the object, and the object does this, and look, it’s a similar shape to this object blah blah blah, the object, the object, the object, actually looking at the broader picture of what’s going on why decisions were being made. And things like resource management actually have a greater impact on the object and try doing it the other way around looking at the world and then the object rather than the object and then the world around it.

 

Guy Windsor 

It is interesting that you would just assume that the spear head will be tied on because that’s how it’s always illustrated in cartoons.

 

James Dilley 

Exactly. Yeah.

 

Guy Windsor 

But the notion of it being just friction fit. That’s genius.

 

James Dilley 

It’s the same with a stone axe. A stone axe just fits into a wooden handle, which, if you’ve got a length of wood, it’s just got a socket cut out of it and the stone axe fits into the socket, you don’t need to glue it, you don’t need to bind it because the glue is not araldite, it won’t hold it, and the binding does nothing. So it’s as long as it’s a well fitted socket, reverse momentum from hitting the tree keeps it in place.

 

Guy Windsor 

It’s the same with hammer handles, and not the crap you get out of B&Q, it’s different, but a properly made hammerhead with a properly made hammer shaft, it’s just friction. It’s just the shape, the tapering of the hole in the head. And the tapering of the shaft means that the head’s got nowhere to go.

 

James Dilley 

And that kind of design and thinking was starting to be explored about 40,000 years ago, because what they had essentially come up with was coming up with a component with a design weakness to protect the valuable parts which we have in our households today in the form of the fuse, but they thought about that 40,000 years ago.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, or the crumple zone in a car. That is fascinating. Okay, so, questions I asked most of my guests. You’ve already acted on a lot of your ideas. But what is the best idea you haven’t acted on yet?

 

James Dilley 

So the best idea is at some point, I mean, I’m starting the process of writing that book, or the idea towards a book and the ideas, because we talked about it in the workshop around it, that’s starting to happen.

 

Guy Windsor 

There listeners weren’t there. So what’s the book about?

 

James Dilley 

I have been thinking about writing a book about flintknapping and the how flintknapping how you could do it at home, using the book as a bit of a tutorial and more about the world around flintknapping. So that it’s more than just a ‘you do this and you can do this’, it’s the ‘this is what was going on at the same time as people were learning how to do this and how archaeologists interpret that’. So I guess I’m acting on that at the moment. So that one doesn’t count. But the one I would like to act on in the future is to start to do larger documentaries because I’ve done enough TV stuff now either from consultation or props and all the rest of it and on-screen expert stuff to actually have more control in the creation, the producing of the documentary. Because we’ve all seen documentaries that cover the Stone Age and prehistory and the presenter walks around Stonehenge and says oh isn’t it big, and etc, with sort of drone shots and music and that’s great. But it just sort of skims the surface, whereas, you know what I’ve told you about the spear making and resource management that is just a little drop in the ocean. But those individual little stories that are brought together and used in an interesting way. I would love to do the Bronze Age because people know about Stone Age, they know about the Celts. And they know about the Romans and that sort of funny period that people thought of metal is just sort of, well, it happened. And that was kind of it. It’s always glossed over. And actually, there are components of that technology that we very much rely on today. It is such a big part of our world. So we are essentially Bronze Age people to begin with, our genetic sequence, the reason we are light skinned. I say ‘we’ as in the two of us, is because of that Yamanara genetic group from the eastern steppe that came into Britain. There is technology in the form of casting that we still do today. Even agriculture reappeared in the Bronze Age and I say reappeared, because the first farmers that came into Britain came in in the Neolithic, we know that. They built their stone circles, stone tombs, etc. But they gave up with agriculture and moved over to pastoralism quite quickly because agriculture with stone tools is blooming hard. But in the Bronze Age, the Middle Bronze Age, we see a massive resurgence in agriculture, which is again just totally just like oh, well agriculture appeared and it was here to stay. Nope, not true at all.

 

Guy Windsor 

Could you just define pastoralism for the layperson?

 

James Dilley 

So agriculture, growing cereals and crops, wheat and barley. Pastoralism keeping animals like pigs and goats, and you name it.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, so they went from, from arable farming to animal husbandry.

 

James Dilley 

And they’re two very different lifestyles, because agriculture ties you to an area of land that you have to invest into. And if the crops fail, then you’re in trouble. But with pastoralism and horticulture, you can move with your animals if you need to. And we see that in the archaeological record, again, through those teeth, showing that people are moving around a lot. But that’s what they went over to quite quickly. But in the Bronze Age they went back to agriculture.

 

Guy Windsor 

So your documentary, you need a script, you need a production budget, you need a camera people. What’s actually stopping you from producing it?

 

James Dilley 

Me to sit down and write it.

 

Guy Windsor 

Ah, okay. So maybe get the book out first.

 

James Dilley 

Yeah, I mean, I’ve got the got the ideas, got the case studies laid out, it’s all there. I’ve even got the people lined up that know about it, and so it’s the acting on that I still need to do.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, so you just need to write it and then raise the money and get it done.

 

James Dilley 

Yeah, essentially. Okay.

 

Guy Windsor 

So like, when either the book comes out or the documentary comes out, you’ll come back on the show and tell us all about it. When should we expect you back?

 

James Dilley 

Well, this winter was going to be the big book writing stage. But for various reasons, spare time is becoming extremely limited for life stuff that is going on, all good stuff. But life stuff going on that has limited that time. But certainly next year, I hope to have a good old dent made into it. And then it you know, it’s a case of how long it takes to get things moved along in the book world, which I’m just dipping my toes into.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, so you’re thinking of getting somebody else to publish it?

 

James Dilley 

I don’t know at the moment. I don’t know. I just need to make the thing first.

 

Guy Windsor 

We’ve been chatting for quite a while. We can very easily add like half an hour to this episode, by me banging on about how the mechanics of self-publishing. There are plenty of other episodes where I’ve done that, so let’s just skip it for the sake of the listeners’ endurance. But obviously, I’ve had books published and I’ve published books. And if you want any help in doing any of that, you just let me know right? If I need a bronze sword cast, I will be coming to you. You need a book done, you come to me.

 

James Dilley 

The most unusual of prehistoric changes from the time of no letters to a thing of letters.

 

Guy Windsor 

Excellent. Okay, so my last question, somebody gives you this huge sum of money to spend improving prehistoric crafts worldwide. I’m guessing you would spend it on your documentary. Is that right?

 

James Dilley 

No, because I would try to get that money commissioned by a channel. That’s that that will be for them to invest into. Ideally, for a large sum of money, there are centres out there that do experimental archaeology have replica round houses. It was sites like that, that I loved as a kid. And they do a fantastic job of maintaining, running excellent sites like that. On the European continent, they have loads and loads and loads. In Britain, we have very few. One of the really good sites is Butser Ancient Farm down in Petersfield, which is near the south coast, to the north of Portsmouth and that sort of area. But I would really like to have my own. There used to be one in Norfolk, but it closed down years ago, as many often do, they had that real sort of buzz in the late 90s, early noughties. Building round houses and having volunteers build them and that sort of thing. But I’d really like to have an active centre that falls into our mission statement of making prehistory accessible, so that people can come and learn how to make things, they can build a structure, they can go in a Bronze Age boat, they can do that sort of thing. And universities can come there to do research. So that that would be where I’d put that money. I think that’d be the best way that it could be used efficiently.

 

Guy Windsor 

So you’d set up a prehistoric living history experience centre?

 

James Dilley 

Yeah. Living Museum, I guess.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah. And I guess the trick is making it solvent. And that’s where the money comes in. Because if you have enough money behind you, you don’t need to make it solvent.

 

James Dilley 

Yeah, I mean, as you’ve experienced, prehistoric experiences and coming to make something and experience something is very much, certainly just experiences as a present or a gift, or just a self present is very much in vogue. But people want to spend money to come and do something interesting and fun that they can learn about. And as we talked about earlier, archaeology is so popular. So there is the potential market out there, if it can be marketed correctly, and run effectively. And ideally, not run on the business side by someone who really, really loves it. So it shouldn’t be me running it from the business side, you need the admin, the numbers person. Someone like me would do the day-to-day live in, let’s do this. Let’s build on that today. Because otherwise, it just wouldn’t, you know, like so many sites, they’ve just become insolvent.

 

Guy Windsor 

I mean, the one thing that I like really springs to mind is it’s going to be fairly out of the way. So you probably want to have some kind of accommodation. But you definitely want nice modern plumbing ensuite accommodation, totally for some people, but you also want the have the full immersion experience spend a week as a stone age person experience also.

 

James Dilley 

It’d be interesting from just an insurance point of view just for these people turn up, they’re going to cook their food and possibly poison themselves. How’s that?

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, insurance are the new fucking mafia. You can’t bloody do anything without getting permission from the don. It is ridiculous. I ran my school in Finland for 16 years with no insurance whatsoever. Because I asked around at the very beginning, the fellow martial arts instructors who had their own schools and whatnot. And they were like, well, we don’t have any juries in Finland. So if someone gets injured, you just have a judge. You’re talking to a judge. And if you explained to the judge that accidents happen, but you took all these reasonable safety precautions, but this accident happened, the judge is going to look at the person and say, you got hit on the head with a sword doing sword fighting and you’re complaining to me why? So I was actually advised by people who know about these things to not bother with insurance because it was a waste of time and money. But here, you can’t leave the house without getting 27 different kinds of insurance. And as we saw on that very excellent bronze casting workshop, we were handling molten bronze. All very safe and very sensitively done and blah blah blah. But if I wanted to drill holes in the handle bit to put the handle on, I wouldn’t be allowed to use your pillar drill because I might injure myself. It’s fucking ridiculous. Yeah, this this country is insane. America isn’t much better, but this country is bad.

 

James Dilley 

It is mad. And it’s the legal requirement to have insurance for so many things. And they’re making a huge amount of money out of this because it’s we can’t do anything else.

 

Guy Windsor 

Also honestly, it’s one of the reasons why I haven’t started anything formally here myself. Because the kind of training I want to do, I do not ever want to have to check an insurance document to see whether we’re covered to do this particular thing. That’s just not how good work gets done. You have to be free to experiment and fiddle about stuff and do things which aren’t on this particular list of permitted activities. This place is a madhouse. And before we finish, I forgot to ask Roland’s question. I’m not going to edit this back in because this is not one of these highly polished edited shows We’re going to go back to the middle, we can do that. Okay, my friend, Roland Warzecha, massively into living history, experimental archaeology, or whatever. And he has a theory about sword hilts, that if you look at historical examples, sword hilts are usually not perfectly straight. So if you’ve got like a big disc pommel, for instance, it’s not normally perfectly lined up with the crossguard, it’s normally slightly at an angle. And that angle is usually makes it more comfortable for a right hander to hold it. But sometimes it’s twisted the other way, it makes it more comfortable for a left hander to hold it. It’s one of those theories where it’s a reasonable explanation for the available evidence, but there isn’t enough evidence to state conclusively that this is the case. So his question is basically, in Bronze Age swords, do you see asymmetries in the hilt that make the hilt fit a right-handed or left-handed person better?

 

James Dilley 

So with the kinds of swords that we looked at the workshop, they were flat cast. And as I said before, we’ve got our two handle scales riveted together, and then the pommel fits on the end. And the pommel was always symmetrical, round pommels. So from an asymmetry side, that would be quite hard to spot if those handle components, the furniture, actually survive, which they very, very, very rarely do. We’ve got very small handful of bits of Bronze Age sword handle furniture that survives. So we have a very poor data set. What you could look for, is potentially where the bronze handle through to where the pommel will be may have been slightly twisted.

 

Guy Windsor 

I’m thinking it’s twisted in the tang itself.

 

James Dilley 

Yeah, we don’t see that.

 

Guy Windsor 

You don’t see that. Care to speculate why?

 

James Dilley 

I would imagine this come potentially comes down to grip, or how because if you’ve got a big rounded pommel, if the handle is slightly twisted, it’s not going to make a great deal of difference instead of it being as a disc pommel, although clearly that makes a massive difference. And some fantastic research that was done into looking at some different Bronze Age weaponry, and particularly for the handle grip for swords, tested a hammer grip, sabre grip, thumb grip, and they found that Bronze Age swords can be used very effectively, with pros and cons for various grips.

 

Guy Windsor 

It’s a tool. You hold it the way you need to hold it to do exactly what you’re about to do.

 

James Dilley 

Yeah. And they fairly confidently concluded that it could be about the case that the fighter had a personal preference or grip or that fighters changed grip.

 

Guy Windsor 

That’s a foregone conclusion. You don’t see any artisan holding a tool, and it’s always held in exactly the same grip all the time.

 

James Dilley 

I mean, it’s a very logical conclusion. Again, it’s just the view we have to sit on the fence with archeology. But we do see evidence particularly with swords, I guess it’s something we didn’t really look at so much is because for a lot of iron and steel swords. They generally have a fair amount of longevity. It’s something that can be passed on, as it were, unless it has like really severe, severe, severe damage.

 

Guy Windsor 

We do see swords that have broken in the blade and been forged welded back together and then gone back out again to be reused so. We see older blades on newer hilts, for example. And so hundreds of thousands of these swords survive hundreds and hundreds of years.

 

James Dilley 

So you have a difference with bronze swords in that they clearly don’t seem to last when they’re being used in any kind of engagement. And they’re being recycled frequently. And that’s one advantage you have with bronze and bronze swords that are cast is that if they’ve become bent, buckled, or they’ve become too heavily notched, or even fall out of fashion, you can get them hot, break them up into sections, pop them back in the crucible pot and pour them out again. And it’s recycled, simple as that.

 

Guy Windsor 

That also may be why the pommel was just friction fit. Because if you are going to use it once or twice, you then knock your hilt furniture off, melt it, maybe add a little bit of bronze, there’s always a bit gets lost. Get a new sword out this the same shape as the old sword, slap the old handle back on it.

 

James Dilley 

It’s very possible. These are not objects that if they were used, so there is no way that they’d be passed on or this is your grandfather’s sword that was used at the Battle of so and so and their great grandfather used in the Battle of So and So because they just did not last that long. And actually, there’s reasonably clear evidence that people were fighting in a way where they were very aware of the limitations of how long these swords were going to last. So they were actively avoiding blade contact. So there’s quite a lot of contacts that would come in from contact with a shield that might leave a U-shaped profile. But less contacts, sort of V shaped blade on blade.

 

Guy Windsor 

You avoid that with steel swords too.

 

James Dilley 

Yeah, of course. Yeah. I mean, I would imagine with any blade at all, you would try and avoid heavy damage. But at least with a steel sword, it’s going to flex back, or it should do, whereas with a bronze sword it will stay bent.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, yeah, a steel sword will take more abuse, but then the edge is quite brittle.

 

James Dilley 

The edge is reasonably brittle. Yeah. So it won’t be able to stand up to anywhere near the same kind of damage that you could stand up to with iron or steel swords. And for the amount of joules of force that they’re using, they’re very conservative. Comparing the damage, so for prehistoric swords, that have notch depths, we know that we’ve got our data set of this is what we’re going to try and replicate, how much force will it be required to create a notch of that depth in replicas. And that’s it. It will give you a rough sort of this is how much force is being applied. And they range sort of around 11, 15 joules, which isn’t, you know, there’s a medium strike, nothing really heavy. Whereas, actually, what was being found was that to actually do heavy penetration strikes, you needed well in excess of 20 or 25 joules. So these are very light contact hits.

 

Guy Windsor 

So basically, they’re using them for slicing and stabbing. They’re not using them for hacking.

 

James Dilley 

Yeah, not using them for hacking, I guess, unless you get that opportunity. And there’s quite clear evidence that they’re using it for Versetzen, the German stuff. They’re using methods that will be very, very familiar in modern fencing, to take an opportunity and turn it back in even bronze swords, and it seems to be an awful lot on the flats of the blades. They’re intentionally preserving the cutting edge.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, my feeling is they’re mostly using the weapon with the thumb on the flat, which allows you to kind of slap incoming strikes away, and when you have such a thick blade, and it isn’t wobbly like a steel sword. Most steel swords, they vary if you slap the flat of the blade, the whole sword wobbles, but the bronze sword is shorter and thicker and stiffer. So it’s behaving more like a stick in that sense, so you can plausibly use it to beat incoming weapons away with a flat and then returned with a slice or a thrust.

 

James Dilley 

Okay, yeah. So for where they are being used by very experienced fighters, they’re using them effectively and understandably using them to the characteristics and traits of the material that they have in front of them. That shows that they’re using a lot of swords to get to that level of skill.

 

Guy Windsor 

Sure, although they probably did a lot of the practice with wooden weapons, I would guess.

 

James Dilley 

We do have a wooden sword from Orkney as well. From research we do. We have a Bronze Age wooden sword, maybe a toy? Or it may be a practice sword.

 

Guy Windsor 

Where is it held?

 

James Dilley 

National Museum Scotland, I think,

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay. Could you find it and send pictures, because then we will stick that in the show notes. Because,  as practicing historical martial artists, the thing that we are most lacking is practice weapons from periods. Until the 18th century we just don’t find much in the way of practice rapiers, practice longswords. I mean, they do exist. And we there are a few and we have illustrations of them. And we have some examples. But compared to the real thing, they are rarer than hen’s teeth. But a wooden sword, thing is in a warrior culture. When a kid is playing with a wooden sword, they are practicing with probably with the proper training weapon that the professionals are using, the grownups are using. Because kids can fight with wooden swords and is reasonably safe, it’s the same tool. It is the exact same tool that the grownups will be using only the grownup one might be a bit bigger. So there isn’t even necessarily a distinction between a play sword and a practice sword in this context.

 

James Dilley 

The Tankerness Sword does look clearly as if it is following the Ewart Park style of the sword that you made. With pommel as one piece of wood. And there were suggestions it may have been a casting template, but it’s not accurate enough for the casting. But it’s more than accurate enough for a practice sword.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, and if it’s a practice sword, you’d want much thicker edges.

 

James Dilley 

Yeah, most definitely.

 

Guy Windsor 

Definitely not a casting template then. Interesting. I do have one question. A bronze sword is basically a disposable item, or recyclable item. How expensive do you think it was sort of in this period? Was it a massively aspirational Ferrari type thing, or is it more like a Ford?

 

James Dilley 

Yeah, that is a good question. And understandably, at the start, when we get the first swords coming in, and metal is still valuable it is the real showpiece and you might know of someone that owns one, but as bronze and metal and the understanding of how to make swords becomes more widely accessible, they become better quality, they become larger, they become heavier, more metal involved, they become more ornate, but they also become more numerous, more accessible. So to own a sword, even by the end of the Bronze Age, a reasonable quality would still be like owning the equivalent of a fairly decent sports car, not a supercar, but fairly decent sports car.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay. And so do you think that they would have their sword and then when it needed remaking, they would just take it back to the foundry and maybe exchange this much weight of old bronze sword for a fresh one? And how much of the how much of the cost, do you think, is in the material? Or in the labour?

 

James Dilley 

In the labour, definitely, because once you’ve got the bronze, you’re only going to lose a relatively limited amount of it. And by the end of the Bronze Age, there’s a huge amount of bronze in circulation anyway. So that’s where the cost declines. Whereas the Early Bronze Age there was far less than bronze in circulation.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay. It’s nice to think of the craftspeople being paid properly. To bring it back to where we started this.

 

James Dilley 

But we know unfortunately know so little about the Bronze Age craftsperson. They leave almost nothing, archaeologically, they may leave many 1000s of examples of their products. But in terms of them the grave of a craftsperson or their actual work space, we have almost nothing.

 

Guy Windsor 

Do you think they were specialists?

 

James Dilley 

Yes, most definitely. By this time you have to go right back to the time of hunter gatherers to find total generalists even by the Neolithic that there was specialists.

 

Guy Windsor 

Interesting. Okay. Well, okay, I’ve kept you for a very long time. I think we better wind this up, or we’re going to end up still be talking here two hours later. So, thank you so much for joining us today, James. It’s lovely to see you.

 

James Dilley 

Likewise.