Weapons of Bronze Age Scotland

The Scottish National Museum is putting on an exhibit called Scotland's First Warriors featuring weapons and shields from the Bronze Age. Personally I think there was already war in the Neolithic, if not earlier, but this stuff is cool so we'll let that slide. Above is a sword from the Carnoustie Hoard.

Sword from the same hoard. This stuff was deliberately buried just outside a large wooden hall. A fragmentary wooden scabbard was found with the sword, radiocarbon dated to around 1000 BC.

But the best thing in the exhibit is these six shields. Wow.

With a curator for scale. Twenty-two similar shields are known, all but one found in Britain. The metal is quite thin, so they were probably for show rather than combat. Most of them were found in bogs, so they were ritually deposited; I wonder if they were made specifically for an elaborate ritual that ended with their being offered to the gods.