For a long time, his notion of ‘heroic societies’ fell into a certain disfavour: there was a widespread assumption that such societies did not really exist but were, like the society represented in Homer’s Iliad, retroactively reconstructed in epic literature. But as archaeologists have more recently discovered, there is a very real pattern of heroic burials, indicating in turn an emerging cultural emphasis on feasting, drinking, the beauty and fame of the individual male warrior.
