The distant past is looking even less like the era of Conan the Corded Ware Maker as archeologists uncover a colossal Bronze Age battle:
In 1996, an amateur archaeologist found a single upper arm bone sticking out of the steep riverbank — the first clue that the Tollense Valley, about 120 kilometers north of Berlin, concealed a gruesome secret. A flint arrowhead was firmly embedded in one end of the bone, prompting archaeologists to dig a small test excavation that yielded more bones, a bashed-in skull, and a 73-centimeter club resembling a baseball bat. The artifacts all were radiocarbon-dated to about 1250 B.C.E., suggesting they stemmed from a single episode during Europe’s Bronze Age.
Now, after a series of excavations between 2009 and 2015, researchers have begun to understand the battle and its startling implications for Bronze Age society. Along a 3-kilometer stretch of the Tollense River, archaeologists from the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Department of Historic Preservation (MVDHP) and the University of Greifswald (UG) have unearthed wooden clubs, bronze spearheads, and flint and bronze arrowheads. They have also found bones in extraordinary numbers: the remains of at least five horses and more than 100 men. Bones from hundreds more may remain unexcavated, and thousands of others may have fought but survived.
“If our hypothesis is correct that all of the finds belong to the same event, we’re dealing with a conflict of a scale hitherto completely unknown north of the Alps,” says dig co-director Thomas Terberger, an archaeologist at the Lower Saxony State Service for Cultural Heritage in Hannover. “There’s nothing to compare it to.” It may even be the earliest direct evidence — with weapons and warriors together — of a battle this size anywhere in the ancient world.
The 10,000 bones in this room — what’s left of Tollense’s losers — changed all that. They were found in dense caches: In one spot, 1478 bones, among them 20 skulls, were packed into an area of just 12 square meters. Archaeologists think the bodies landed or were dumped in shallow ponds, where the motion of the water mixed up bones from different individuals. By counting specific, singular bones — skulls and femurs, for example — UG forensic anthropologists Ute Brinker and Annemarie Schramm identified a minimum of 130 individuals, almost all of them men, most between the ages of 20 and 30.
The number suggests the scale of the battle. “We have 130 people, minimum, and five horses. And we’ve only opened 450 square meters. That’s 10% of the find layer, at most, maybe just 3% or 4%,” says Detlef Jantzen, chief archaeologist at MVDHP. “If we excavated the whole area, we might have 750 people. That’s incredible for the Bronze Age.” In what they admit are back-of-the-envelope estimates, he and Terberger argue that if one in five of the battle’s participants was killed and left on the battlefield, that could mean almost 4000 warriors took part in the fighting.
Only an academic or an idiot… But, I repeat myself. Let me shorten that: Only an academic would have come up with the theory that the Bronze Age was some paradise of mutual cooperation and collaboration between like-minded men of good will, who willingly traded in goods and chattels with each other in a state of wholesome amity.
What I await is the isotope testing that reveals just where these men grew up, and what we can learn from that. My guess is that there’s going to be a lot of surprises, just as with Otzi.
I don’t think we even know what we don’t know. The evidence of things like Gobekli Tepe, which throws everything we thought we knew about the era it was built during out on their ears, tends to make me think that there are a lot of things lurking out there for us to trip over, some of which we likely are already aware of and don’t recognize. I would speculate that our ancestors were a hell of a lot more sophisticated and much more “civilized” than we credit them. After all, how the hell did they accomplish things like all the dolmens, henges, and other lithic structures without large, sophisticated societies? Look at the scale of the things, for the love of God: They’re all over the damn place, in Europe, and that’s just what was in stone. How much more was wood, and now lost to the ages? What is lurking out there on the continental shelf, from when the ocean levels were far below what they are now, during the last Ice Age? Hell, for that matter, what the hell got ground under the damn ice sheets?
You tell me our ancestors were primitive and unsophisticated, and I’m going to point at you and laugh: The little evidence we have points to us being a bunch of credulous dolts, when it comes to a lot of this stuff. I would not be a bit surprised to find extensive signs of settlement and large populations, were someone to go out looking at the likely spots along the coastlines where the river deltas would have been, back before the ice melted. Likewise, what’s waiting for us to notice, with regards to things out in the Dogger Banks? Or, the Indian Ocean?