Moreover, archaeological sources fail to provide evidence for the large number of men lost in battle, and of the other war casualties that could not be buried. This has considerably reduced the number of weapon injuries which have survived in the archaeological record, while making indistinguishable the motives behind the killing, whether religious (Numbers 25, 9, Deuteronomy 13, 13-17, 2 Kings 18, 27), political slaves, war prisoners) or for other reasons (only written records can attest to mass acts of suicide committed by defeated soldiers: Tacitus, Annals 4, 50, 73). Consequently, injuries which are archaeologically recognisable as having been inflicted by a weapon are but a fraction of all the injuries that may have resulted from military actions, and these must also include an undetectable (probably relatively small) proportion of injuries which were not inflicted in fighting. Although not all these injuries are unambiguously interpretable, the archaeological context of most of them is distinctly military.