Following on from this, the battlefield itself provides, when it survives, possibly the best evidence for warfare. Not only may the later battlefields preserve the memory of fighting men, such as the Thermopylae mound memorial (although archaeologists are not allowed to excavate this heritage site), but solid evidence of a battle may be present in small finds littered around the site, or in mass graves for the deceased. It must be noted that mass graves are not always created by warfare, ritual or disease being two other possible causes, although usually these are easy to distinguish in the skeletal examination. One theory for a collection of skeletons at Maiden Castle Hill Fort is a mass grave after a battle, whilst there is an undisputed later one from the 14th century Battle of Towton, or from Napoleon's great Russian retreats via Vilnius. These sites are very interesting from a number of angles. First, Maiden Castle yielded a skeleton with a Roman scorpio bolt lodged in his spine, now in Dorchester Museum, a fine example of skeletal trauma where the offending implement was still in position.

At Towton, forensic pathology could do a great deal to reveal the nature and technology of warfare and medicine at the time, with the skull-shattering head wounds alluding to close-quartered fighting or the upper body deformations showing certain skeletons to belong to long-bowmen, Forensic anthropology also revealed the type of people within a society fought in battle. Also at Towton the archaeological evidence complemented the textual evidence, in that for example the wounds tied up with the knowledge that the Lancastrians were slaughtered when fleeing at the end of the war. Distribution mapping from extensive fieldwalking and metal-detecting has also supported the evidence for the exact location of the battle with the discovery many personal finds lost in battle. However, from the archaeological record even at somewhere as extensively researched as Towton, it would be very hard to ascertain the number of people involved in the battle, information which has broader implications also, and the figure of 28,000 dead is only known from the textual record, or even as a rumour passed down through generations of historians or local residents.