Deal Warrior
iron age burial site
The Deal Warrior, also known as the Mill Hill Warrior, is an Iron Age burial uncovered in Grave 112 at Mill Hill near Deal, Kent in 1988 by Dover Archaeological Group. It is well known for being suggested as the grave of a druid due to containing an almost-unique bronze headdress.
Background
The grave, dated to around 250 to 150 BCE, contained the skeleton of a man in his thirties, short and slightly built. With the skeleton was a long iron sword, bronze fittings for a scabbard and belt, a bronze brooch studded with coral, and bronze fittings for a large shield. The quality of these finds suggests the grave was a high status burial, as swords were an expensive item available only to the aristocracy and their retainers, and the wealthier freemen.
The crown
On the skull was a bronze headband, with the remains of another band that would have gone over the top. Both the skull and the "crown", as it came to be named, were badly damaged, thought by the archaeologists who discovered it to be the result of ploughing. Closer inspection after cleaning revealed it to be intricately decorated in the La Tène style. The bronze, now dull, would once have been burnished till it shone. Examination also revealed imprints of hair on the inside of the crown, indicating it was worn without a liner, also proving it was not worn over a leather helmet, as some had suggested.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q22000914. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1988.
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This entry incorporates text from “Deal Warrior” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.