Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle

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.

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.

The bone scans have also sharpened the picture of how the battle unfolded.. In x-rays, the upper arm bone with an embedded arrowhead—the one that triggered the discovery of the battlefield—seemed to show signs of healing. In a 2011 paper in Antiquity, the team suggested that the man sustained a wound early in the battle but was able to fight on for days or weeks before dying, which could mean that the conflict wasn’t a single clash but a series of skirmishes that dragged out for several weeks.

Microscopic inspection of that wound told a different story: What initially looked like healing—an opaque lining around the arrowhead on an x-ray—was, in fact, a layer of shattered bone, compressed by a single impact that was probably fatal. “That let us revise the idea that this took place over weeks,” Terberger says. So far no bodies show healed wounds, making it likely the battle happened in just a day, or a few at most. “If we are dealing with a single event rather than skirmishes over several weeks, it has a great impact on our interpretation of the scale of the conflict.”

The excavations has provided extensive information about the warriors, that participated in this battle. There were different kings of warriors in this battle: spearmen, swordmen and bow and arrow users. Knowledge can be extracted from examinations of their bones but also from the artifacts that were found with them.

Infographic showing some of the different kinds of artefacts found among the warroirs.

A deadly wound to the head.

Why the men gathered in this spot to fight and die is another mystery that archaeological evidence is helping unravel. The Tollense Valley here is narrow, just 50 meters wide in some spots. Parts are swampy, whereas others offer firm ground and solid footing. The spot may have been a sort of choke point for travelers journeying across the northern European plain.

In 2013, geomagnetic surveys revealed evidence of a 120-meter-long bridge or causeway stretching across the valley. Excavated over two dig seasons, the submerged structure turned out to be made of wooden posts and stone. Radiocarbon dating showed that although much of the structure predated the battle by more than 500 years, parts of it may have been built or restored around the time of the battle, suggesting the causeway might have been in continuous use for centuries—a well-known landmark.

In the aftermath, the victors may have stripped valuables from the bodies they could reach, then tossed the corpses into shallow water, which protected them from carnivores and birds. The bones lack the gnawing and dragging marks typically left by such scavengers.

Elsewhere, the team found human and horse remains buried a meter or two lower, about where the Bronze Age riverbed might have been. Mixed with these remains were gold rings likely worn on the hair, spiral rings of tin perhaps worn on the fingers, and tiny bronze spirals likely used as decorations. These dead must have fallen or been dumped into the deeper parts of the river, sinking quickly to the bottom, where their valuables were out of the grasp of looters.

Sauce: 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

Cat tax