The trappings of warfare are much easier to recognise during the metal-using periods, when slashing and thrusting weapons like swords and daggers were made in numbers.There is, however, some evidence from the Neolithic that people did come into conflict with each other.

Perhaps the most obvious weapon is the bow and arrow, but this was equally a hunting tool. A handful of enclosed sites seem to have come to a violent end, including Hembury in Devon and Carn Brea in Cornwall. At these sites, concentrations of arrowheads at an entranceway and across the area of a defensive bank suggest that they had come under attack and were fortified for good reason.

Sometimes there is more direct evidence of Neolithic conflict. For example at the causewayed enclosure site of Hambledon Hill, Dorset, an outwork was abandoned incomplete and there is evidence for burning. The skeleton of a youth was also discovered in a ditch. He had been shot with an arrow, and his body covered by the collapse of a burning palisade.