Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle

Discussions on other historical eras.
Post Reply
Ken S.
Member
Posts: 1372
Joined: 14 Feb 2006, 10:30
Location: Kanada
Contact:

Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle

#1

Post by Ken S. » 02 Oct 2018, 08:03

About 3200 years ago, two armies clashed at a river crossing near the Baltic Sea. The confrontation can’t be found in any history books—the written word didn’t become common in these parts for another 2000 years—but this was no skirmish between local clans. Thousands of warriors came together in a brutal struggle, perhaps fought on a single day, using weapons crafted from wood, flint, and bronze, a metal that was then the height of military technology.

Struggling to find solid footing on the banks of the Tollense River, a narrow ribbon of water that flows through the marshes of northern Germany toward the Baltic Sea, the armies fought hand-to-hand, maiming and killing with war clubs, spears, swords, and knives. Bronze- and flint-tipped arrows were loosed at close range, piercing skulls and lodging deep into the bones of young men. Horses belonging to high-ranking warriors crumpled into the muck, fatally speared. Not everyone stood their ground in the melee: Some warriors broke and ran, and were struck down from behind.

When the fighting was through, hundreds lay dead, littering the swampy valley. Some bodies were stripped of their valuables and left bobbing in shallow ponds; others sank to the bottom, protected from plundering by a meter or two of water. Peat slowly settled over the bones. Within centuries, the entire battle was forgotten.

...

But why did so much military force converge on a narrow river valley in northern Germany? Kristiansen says this period seems to have been an era of significant upheaval from the Mediterranean to the Baltic. In Greece, the sophisticated Mycenaean civilization collapsed around the time of the Tollense battle; in Egypt, pharaohs boasted of besting the “Sea People,” marauders from far-off lands who toppled the neighboring Hittites. And not long after Tollense, the scattered farmsteads of northern Europe gave way to concentrated, heavily fortified settlements, once seen only to the south. “Around 1200 B.C.E. there’s a radical change in the direction societies and cultures are heading,” Vandkilde says. “Tollense fits into a period when we have increased warfare everywhere.”

Tollense looks like a first step toward a way of life that is with us still. From the scale and brutality of the battle to the presence of a warrior class wielding sophisticated weapons, the events of that long-ago day are linked to more familiar and recent conflicts. “It could be the first evidence of a turning point in social organization and warfare in Europe,” Vandkilde says.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03 ... age-battle

User avatar
henryk
Member
Posts: 2559
Joined: 27 Jan 2004, 02:11
Location: London, Ontario

Re: Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle

#2

Post by henryk » 02 Oct 2018, 19:50

https://www.livescience.com/60739-europ ... crets.html
Europe's Oldest Battlefield Yields Clues to Fighters' Identities
By Megan Gannon, Live Science Contributor | October 23, 2017

To get a clearer picture of who fought in the battle, Terberger and his colleagues decided to do a chemical analysis of the skeletons. The researchers looked for elements like strontium, a naturally occurring mineral in food that can leave a geographically specific signature in a person's bones. (For example, someone who spent most of his or her life in Scandinavia will have a different strontium signature than a person from Spain.)

The results of the study, which were published in August in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, showed that there was a large, diverse group of nonlocals involved in the battle. Unfortunately, strontium analyses are not so exact that archaeologists "can point to a map and say, 'They came from there,'" Terberger said.

The results do at least suggest that many of these nonlocals came from the south, perhaps from southern Germany and Central Europe. This interpretation agrees with some of the archaeological finds; Central European-style arrowheads and dress pins have been found on the battlefield and nowhere else in northern Germany, Terberger said.

At least in their chemical profile, the warriors also closely resembled the slain soldiers found in a nearby mass grave at Wittstock. That grave is much younger; it was filled in 1636 during the brutal Thirty Years War. But it could have some relevant parallels for the Bronze Age, Terberger and his colleagues argued.

From historical accounts, archaeologists know there were mercenary soldiers from all over Europe fighting at Wittstock. If the fighters in the battle at Tollense likewise had multiethnic origins, Terberger said, it might mean "these were warriors who were trained as warriors." In other words, they were professionals,not simply villagers defending their farmsteads in a local dispute.


Post Reply

Return to “Other eras”