The Multivocality of Weapons

Late Iron Age research published to date deals with two main types of archaeological contexts: settlements and burials. Research on La Tène is distinct because it analyzes a votive deposit complex on the shore of a lake where vast quantities of ironwork, e.g. tools and weapons have been found along with human and faunal remains.This work presents an analysis of materials from the site of La Tène on Lake Neuchâtel, Switzerland.Comparing the La Tène weapons, to those from two other contemporary contexts, Münsingen-Rain and Gournay- sur-Aronde provides a methodology to theoretically interpret the meaning of weapons in late Iron Age society, especially their link with elite male power. This work further investigates through the use of archaeological evidence and literary text from three cultural groups,Irish/Welsh, Classical, and Germanic, the meaning ascribed to objects in the past and the present. It contributes to the archaeological literature on topics such as the transformative impact of archaeological contexts relating to context–dependent multivocality of symbolically charged object categories such as weapons, and provides an analysis of votive deposits.