Slaughter At The Bridge

Another one found by sheer luck.
"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.

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. "
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/slaughter-bridge-uncovering-colossal-bronze-age-battle?utm_source=sciencemagazine&utm_medium=facebook-text&utm_campaign=bronzeagebattle-3174

 

Aha.
Knew I should have opened something called 'Slaughter at the Bridge.'

This has astonished me.
It's hardly a specialist area here, but I do not associate large scale military organisation with that area in that period.
My perception is more one of the odd bit of pagga over a hillfort, with the Med & East cracking on with proper organised war.

One to watch I suspect.
Certain acquaintances with a closer interest are wetting themselves over this - looking like one of those discoveries with potential to shift what's understood by a fair amount.

 

You're not kidding. This threatens to rewrite several history/archaeology books.

 

if you can prove massed organised warfare with 'troops' travelling from 100+KM away, then everything else potentially changes doesn't it.

How did they build this or that curious monument, or organise trade, ships, whatever? Well maybe they just used the same systems that summoned the 'Army'.
Really intriguing.

 

try to imagine hundreds of hand to hand all out killing...men begging for mercy only to be put to death.....many wounded, that will be given a final stab, slash, or maybe many blows to the skull......where you can see your enemy's eyes, very close---close combat.....why are the humans doing this?

 

Aye, there's a tendency to assume modern man invented those sorts of ideas. Maybe ancient man wasn't as daft as we think.

 

Mistake number one to underestimate isn't it.
From stone age to C16th and all points between we have been a clever bugger species (especially in the field of killing each other). Too often a perception of some sort of mud people.

 

Maybe my archaeology and anthropology classes pre-date this modern theory of peaceful agriculture societies in prehistoric Europe, but in my day the prevailing opinion was that Europe, particularly central and eastern Europe, was a periodic battle zone as wave after wave of cultures flooded in from central Asia. This just seems like more of the same, as interesting as the find is. Even widely scattered agricultural communities shared a language, trade and ties between tribes. Of course they would come together to fight another group moving in from the east. And any group seeking new land to the west would arrive as a concentrated force, an army, ahead of the migration of women and children. This is likely one of those clashes. Peaceful agricultural societies, indeed...

One small detail caught my eye and made me smile - the club made of ash. Ash is still the wood used for baseball bats, a light wood with great tensile strength. That lightness enables you to swing with greater velocity than denser and heavier woods like oak, yet is still unlikely to break upon impact.

 

I was thinking the very same thing Kodiak so we must have been studying the same books. Early civilisations were not all isolated and artifacts found, show that their reach in trade was extensive. A great find none the less.

 

Trade and other sophistication, yes, but evidence for organised warfare in that part of the world at that period is almost non-existent beyond the odd forensically re-assembled small scale clash.
This is hundreds of years before the tribal disputes in the area that Rome eventually found itself between, maybe even a snapshot of the very beginning of such. The perception was one of raiding and skirmish, but this might just be a battle in the more widely understood sense.
The wide dispersion of participant origin, numbers of casualties, presence of weaponry and horses is really very interesting/unusual. Even the lightest extrapolation of potential participants from casualty numbers and comparison with likely total population points at possibly a big deal. Warfare of a seriousness only usually associated with the Med and East in that period.
We'll see, but this does appear to be causing rumbles with some good reason.

 

Only because the evidence is old and scattered. Just a glance at the genetic inheritance of Europe (which also can be roughly divided into paleolithic vs bronze age), then another glance at language changes gives you enough evidence that waves of central Asians came through again and again. Each wave would have been contested. This battlefield must be only one of many in that prehistoric contest. It continued up to the Roman era and the Goths. One might even count the Russian occupation of eastern Europe as part of that age-old contest.

That's the way they taught it in my vagrant yoot. I don't know when this 'settled' history reversed itself and became one of peaceful agriculture unconcerned with warfare or the Asian hordes pouring in every few generations.

 

*bumped* for a update-
"It was one of the biggest and most brutal battles in the Bronze Age.
Now archaeologists have shed new light on the mysterious people who fought in the Tollense Valley 3,250 years ago.
A study of the skeletons at the site in north-eastern Germany suggests that more than 2,000 people were involved in the on battle.
And while experts are yet to pinpoint exactly where the fighters were from, a DNA analysis suggests that it was a large, diverse group of non-local warriors.
The reason for the war on Europe's oldest battlefield remains unknown.
To understand more about the fighters, the researchers conducted a chemical analysis of the skeletons, looking for elements like strontium, which can leave a geographically specific signature in bones.
While the results showed that the fighters were a large, diverse group of non-locals, the archaeologists were unable to pinpoint specifically where they were from.
The analysis did suggest that many of the fighters came from the south – either southern Germany or Central Europe – a find that was in line with many pieces of evidence found at the site, including Central-European arrowheads and pins.
The fighters closely resembled the slain soldiers discovered in a nearby mass grave at Wittstock, dating back to 1636.
While this is more recent than the battle at Tollense, Professor Terberger believes it could have some important parallels for the Bronze Age.
In the battle at Wittstock, soldiers were known to come from all over Europe.
If the fighters at Tollense were also multi-ethnic, it might mean 'these were warriors who were trained as warriors', rather than locals, according to Professor Terberger."
Shedding new light on Europe's oldest battlefield | Daily Mail Online