Cardiff's 5000 Year Old "Battlefield"

Who's to say what the original bronze workers in the old world used it for? If a metal is new it will be co-opted by the elite, but once it becomes more common it becomes a utilitarian item. Certainly further south it had evolved into utilitarian uses.

 

Who's to say? Well - archeologists spring to mind. That's why they do what they do. If in a society's remains they find religious and ceremonial objects in a given material but not utilitarian objects, then...

But the story of native american bronze is not simple, even in South America. Bronze still only appears very late, 5000 years later than copper for instance, and used for similar purposes to earlier metals and alloys I.E. the majority was for ornaments and adornments. It seems that there, bronze had replaced worked/polished stone for ornamentation...again, the arrival of Europeans prevented further expansion of its uses.

The thing is - none of these uses are actually "needs" or survival issues. They're wants...

 

Below are Inca maces, no different than bronze or later iron maces in the old world. I would call military technology a "need." There were also bronze axes, short swords, knives, etc.

Parallel needs, parallel development.

 

But note what I said above...

"It seems that there, bronze had replaced worked/polished stone"

The Incas had had maces - and obsidian-edged hardwood "swords". What they did was simply replace the impacting material with one that was probably easier I.E. a shorter time to shape...by casting. It wasn't true innovation.

It's also worth remembering that...

"...or later iron maces in the old world"

...maces and other "impact" weapons which came back into fashion in the Middle and Late Middle Ages did so because of the need to do injury through highly evolved armour protection. They were a "re"-innovation in reaction to an innovation on the other side of the "arms race" of offensive vs defensive technology. Also exactly the same process and progress step as larger antitank guns and improved A/P ordnance vs. increasing armour thicknesses and other defensive innovations through WW2

I.E. improving military technology is only a "need" if you have an effective enemy.

 

A mace is a good weapon against armor. Early Americans used armor of many types - bone sewed to leather just like various types of chain mail, bone and leather helmets, shields - any of which makes a mace a damned handy thing to have.

Really though, the only point is that parallel development of technology in different parts of the world is rather remarkable. Look at weaving as another example. That didn't come across the Bering Land Bridge, but when the Spanish got here people were wearing various fabrics. Mathematics was highly developed, and that didn't come from Greece or Persia. Even something as relatively simple as the calender becomes a need when agriculture replaces hunting/gathering, so these meso-Americans developed first simple calendars and then highly evolved calendars that measured lunar phases and even the return of comets hundreds of years into the future.

 

Found this, might be of interest-
[SIZE=medium]"An experimental study shows that stone-tipped spears do not penetrate as deep into prey as sharpened wooden spears, but cause more damage.[/SIZE]
Jayne Wilkins of Arizona State University and colleagues shot six stone-tipped and six sharpened wooden spears at gelatin to test whether stone-tipped weapons penetrated deeper in the gelatin. They then analyzed the penetration depth and damage each weapon caused in over 200 wound tracks. Their results demonstrated that tipped spears did not penetrate deeper into gelatin than untipped spears, but they did create a significantly larger and wider wound cavity. This cavity may have increased the relative "killing power" of the tipped spear, and they may have ultimately caused more damage."
http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/06052014/article/study-shows-advantage-of-stone-tipped-spears-for-prehistoric-humans

 

I'm not sure a gelatin test demonstrates the full superiority of an obsidian or similar tip. You first have to cut through a layer of hair, skin and sinew before reaching the meat/organs where the real damage is done. Good stone tip materials flake off into razor edges that would require a lot less force to get past that outer barrier.

 

On the contrary - and it's another experiment the "experimental archeologists" part of Time Team did - properly knapped flint (obsidian is really quite brittle in one shear direction) arrowheads were VERY hard to remove from meat carcasses (they used a butchered pig IIRC) without doing a great deal more damage...and of course an animal....or human...running off if only injured would be doing a good deal MORE damage to themselves inside as the said arrowhead...in the Late Neolithic knapped to a razor edge on the rear faces of the barbs too...fretted about...!

Yes - but the use of metal for a mace head is just a change of material to something easier to fashion than the previous stone ones It's not an actual change of offensive technology.

(only a minor quibble - but chain mail is NOT anything sewn to leather, you're thinking of "cheapo" Late Roman ring mail - in which rows of rings were sewn to a leather back, and sometimes overlapped and happened to give the visual impression of and simularity to what we know as chainmail today. Chainmail uses interlocking rings, each individual ring interlocked with four others...and five others in some mails...to not just protect...but also - something people often forget - to absorb a "dull" impact by the interlocking rings locking together and distributing the force of the blow out, ring upon ring, away from the impact site.

Why it's associated with leather...or padding of some sort like a gambeson...is that chainmail was worn over an undergarment of leather or wool-padded quilt, both to assist in absorbing impact AND to prevent fretting and a nasty rash LOL

To be fair - those "evolved" Calendars like the infamous Mayan Calendar were reckoned in millennia...by people who had watched the skies for hundreds if not thousands of years. They were able to predict....by counting the intervals between visits...the regular return of celestial objects AFTER they'd observed them returning more than once...! Same as the Chinese.

Historians and archeologists are not exactly sure yet HOW many separate migrations via that route there were....or when or what specific level of technology accompanied them. They're closing in...but only as recently as yesterday for example did they announce that the proto-Eskimos that died out some 900 years ago were a wholly different migration to the Inuit and others...

ADDING another migration wave to the count!

 

I think we can logically assume that nobody migrated 4000 or 5000 miles south to start weaving again in the SW US and points further south. Nobody north of that point was weaving clothing, so it would seem the skill was developed in that region rather than brought from elsewhere.

Not sure what you're contrary(ing) about. The first stone points of any kind would be on spears, and for the most part would have been thrusting rather than throwing weapons. Obsidian, flint and a number of other minerals would be used depending on the geology of the area. All of them would penetrate better than a wood tip. I was just making the point that pure gelatin is not an ideal test for this. Today, when they test various ammunition to see how well it expands or penetrates, they cover the gelatin with clothing and materials to simulate that initial barrier. They should have done something similar with the stone vs wood test.

 

I'm not sure this would be the case; spears were the first projectile weapon for hunting...apart from a gurt big stone ...the bow came remarkably late in human history. Thrusting sort of assumes you can run as fast as your hunting prey...and WANT to get inside the reach of an auroch's horns or elk's antlers...!

And throwing spears mean you can sit in a hide and wait for passing animals - or attack at a slight distance from up-wind Remember, these guys are going to PONG!

Don't forget the rising coastal sea waters - and the human-worked remains that have been brought up by suction from several miles off shore up and down the north-western coast of North America...including some shaped stone bobweights that look suspiciously like weights for handspinning wool...it's been posited that the first migrations would have been down the coastal strip - a littoral that's now lost under the North Pacific!

 

It's a fascinating subject isn't it? When you get into the bigger animals, it's really quite difficult, nearly impossible, to bring them down with a thrown spear. You might get lucky once in a while, but you couldn't rely on such a technique. There's just too much skin, fat, bone and muscle to reliably penetrate into the the lungs or whatever even if you were skilled enough to stalk to within ten yards of such an animal. It doesn't matter though, because it's our brain and cooperative nature that is the real weapon. What they did with bison, elk, aurochs, is to use various stratagems to surround them or drive them into a bog or an arroyo where they could be speared safely - killed with a thrust. Before the horse came into the Americas with the Spanish, the people on the plains stampeded bison into what are know as "buffalo jumps." Basically, they'd drive them off a cliff and them kill any injured ones that couldn't go on. There's a very high one near Longmont, Colorado, that I visited many years ago that killed every buffalo ever driven off it. In talking to some university people digging there, they wouldn't even estimate how many animals had been killed there - they hadn't even reached the bottom of the pile in several summers of digging. When they got 15 or 20 feet down, the bones were just crushed fragments, dust, and they had gone down much further than that without hitting bottom.

The Eskimos north of here killed walrus with a thrown spear attached to an air filled float. They couldn't kill it with one throw, but once that float was attached they could follow it for hours and keep inflicting wounds until it just bled out. Strategy, patience, intelligence...

Perhaps, but... Those people with weaving skills would have imparted that info to everyone they came in contact with. It would have taken many years, perhaps generations, to move down that coast and they would have had to winter in contact with many different tribes, any of whom would have appropriated such a valuable thing.

 

Well, more likely with a throw - the LAST thing you'd want to do is get in close to an injured animal....or herd of animals that had been driven into/over such a feature! And you wouldn't want to wait for it to die - not with broken bones rupturing internal organs etc., and contaminating the meat badly - just as hunters can do accidently if they don't manage to strip the lights out of a carcass without slicing into the bowels.

Which is probably why there are so many bones left in the "traps" - these are the carcasses that WEREN'T killed and dragged out and butchered, but were allowed to die there as the hunters couldn't handle so much...

But think of the situation You're a late migrating people moving down the north-west littoral, with the secret of weaving - but you're passing through or easing alongside and onwards past peoples/migrations that preceeded you and are quite happy with using the fruits of nature - rawhide, cured skins etc...

1/ there's pressure from a quite full environment to keep on going without much time for skills tranfer...

2/ your secret is having to compete with an overabundance of the fruits of nature in the several millennia after the retreat of the ice...the locals don't need what you've got, and wouldn't for some time.

 

I need to urgently return to the OP after tonight's "Operation Stonehenge" on BBC2 in the UK - soon to appear on BBC America if it didn't do so tonight!

It IS in fact definitely warfare!

Across that time period it turns out there was a whole series of similar battles - all of them attacks on causewayed enclosures and villages! Crickley Hill near Bath, and one at "Robin Hood's Ball"...ahem...at Amesbury and only two and a half miles from what would centuries later become Stonehenge have now been excavated in detail - and they ALL show very similar archeological evidence!

It is ALSO now directly associated by archeoloigists with a 300- year hiatus in the development of neolithic monuments all across Southern England...

Whatever began this series of attacks on "causewayed enclosures", all other communal activities such as the coming-together of communities to provide the labour to construct henges and other ceremonial features STOPPED while people went to war!!!

Another finding is that the "attackers" remains are 99% male - but the defenders of these causewayed enclosure settlements were male, female and children...

I have to say - whatever was going on, it reads like an extermination! As if the latest influx of migrants/settlers to England, with this particular way of living, were not welcomed by those who were there first...

 

Not so much... The Athabascans in Alaska speak the same language group as the Navajo, Apache and other groups of weaving peoples in the SW US and Mexico. Yet, Athabascans didn't weave until the Russians taught them. Since then, they make the most gorgeous (and warmest) cloaks and shawls you've ever seen, using musk ox wool. Google qiviut to see examples.

The oldest woven materials in the Americas come from Peru, so it is generally believed that the art spread north from there.

I read an article on this just today. That's interesting stuff!

 

One answer could be that it's late hunter gatherers vs. the first "settled" farmers...it fits in the very early Neolithic that's also seeing the ending of old religious practices - the exposure of bodies, outdoor flensing, periodic gathering on high places (as discussed before)...and the arrival of new, season-driven ones - monuments oriented with seasonal equinoxes etc. The majority of monuments in the Stonehenge era begin dating from after the "warfare" period...

Now - THAT argues that the "new" population, with its new religious practices, actually won...

OR....

One of the comments made in the programme was that given the very small size of communities at that point, it would have taken a very considerable time to arrange the war parties that the evidence shows....the size of them, I mean. Crickley Hill was at least 400 strong... Hence the stopping of the physical development of monuments; the effort required to organise the labour and planning etc. necessary was put into organising the attacks!

Now - although they did indeed use the word "tribal" to describe the warfare...it comes some time before tribalism was generally regarded as having developed in the British Isles - so did the process of gathering communites together for attacks on others actually accelerate this social evolution???

I.E. when it was all done - did the "attackers" suddenly discover that the sense of community fostered among themselves by having to periodically organise/muster for war had turned them into the sort of "settled" communities they had been attacking?

 

If you really look at the history of warfare/occupation, you generally see a melding of cultures rather than a replacement by the new culture. The Romans became Britons, the Vikings became Britons, the French and Normans became Britons. Each of those people left an imprint, but the people already there swallowed them within a number of generations and remained the dominant culture. That's the story across Europe (and the whole world, really). Britain is in some ways anomalous because it's an island and one would expect it to be less influenced by invaders, but if you look at nations on the continent - say, Belgium - the Romans used to tell horror stories about how tough and cruel the Belgians were and how they had to lay waste to every village and tribe. Yet, those people kept their identity through that and a dozen other occupations. They are still Belgians.

And this earlier clash in the UK, whether it was with native hillbilly/hunter-gatherers or foreigners, no doubt had the same outcome. Whether the people in the henges won or lost the actual battle hardly matters. A hundred years later they were still the same people.

 

Yep. Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump. 30 minutes away.
http://history.alberta.ca/headsmashedin/

 

Need to catch that on iplayer or summat.
Meanwhile, I found this which is probably germane to the discussion-



"Archaeologists in Siberia have discovered a suit of armour made of animal bones which they believe could be aged between 3,500 and 3,900 years old.



The sheath, found in "perfect condition", is made of the bones of an unidentified animal. Experts believe that the armour may have been built for an elite warrior, the Siberian Times reported.
Archaeologists say the garment would have successfully protected the warrior against weapons used at the time, including bone and stone arrowheads, bronze knives, spears tipped with bronze and bronze axes.
At the site near the Siberian city of Omsk, the armour was buried separately from its OWNER around 1.5 metres below ground. No other similar battle garments have been found at the site."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/news/elite-warrior-armour-which-could-date-back-3900-years-found-in-siberia-9727877.html

 

Armour made from bones???

Why am I reminded of The Kurgan???



Anyway...Gordon, not too germane - 3,500 to 3,900 years ago make it only 1,500 to 1,900 years BCE. The "warfare" at Cardiff, Crickley Hill etc. was at least another 2, maybe 3 thousand years before that. The bone armour would be early Bronze Age in British terms, well into the "tribal" period...as opposed to this strange 300-year Neolithic "crusade" event...

 

K-B...all the invaders you're talking about above were invading Britain as a "going concern" - I.E. invasion as acquisition All Britain's invaders have wanted Britain. This seems to be something else - more akin to Alfred the Great's long resistance campaign than anything else....

Or the Irish legendary "three waves of invasion" that seem to have been fought out to a genocidal conclusion...