Slaughter At The Bridge: Uncovering A Colossal Bronze Age Battle (sciencemag.org)

schwit1 quotes a report from the American Association for the Advancement of Science via Sciencemag.org: 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. "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.

Comments

That's actually really surprising...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The 'bloody scrum of europeans killing each other over something cryptic' bit isn't exactly news; but TFA describes a relatively massive number of combatants, with isotopic signatures suggesting they came a considerable distance to reach the site and with equipment and healed wounds suggesting that they were comparatively experienced rather than just the local peasant militia(which, given the low population density of the place at the time, wouldn't have amounted to much).

I have to wonder how this all worked logistically: ~1,200BC wasn't exactly renowned for its medical technology, regular agricultural surpluses, or food storage capabilities. Aside from motivating this many guys to slog all the way to this site, simply keeping them healthy and fed long enough so they could kill one another before disease or starvation got them must have been a real trick.

Re:That's actually really surprising...

[tomhath]

An army of a couple thousand men isn't all that difficult to provide for. The Sioux nation didn't have much in the way of medical technology or food surpluses, but they brought together an army of several thousand to fight Custer at Little Bighorn. The battle that happened at the Tollense River could well have been something similar. Either two large forces came together, or a few hundred men were surrounded and annihilated by a much larger force.

Re:That's actually really surprising...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The archeological record is never as good as we'd want it to be; but it is there and it can definitely tell you a fair bit about what people were growing, how long they were living and what sorts of things they were dying of; what sort of structures they were building, and so on. Aside from written records being one of the specific technologies that tends to show up when agricultural surpluses allow a bureaucracy/priesthood/whatever to dedicate themselves to pushing paper(obviously, logistics on a small scale can be done by the wholly illiterate; but the more you are doing the more likely it is that you'll at least have some sort of accounting system and some pictographs of common commodities).

You don't need a written record to know approximately how densely populated an area was, what sorts of things they died of, and whether they constructed granaries and similar storage structures.

Re:That's actually really surprising...

[Feral Nerd]

An army of a couple thousand men isn't all that difficult to provide for. The Sioux nation didn't have much in the way of medical technology or food surpluses, but they brought together an army of several thousand to fight Custer at Little Bighorn. The battle that happened at the Tollense River could well have been something similar. Either two large forces came together, or a few hundred men were surrounded and annihilated by a much larger force.

I always imagined neolithic and early bronze age Northern-Europe cultures as being similar to the woodland Indians in many ways when it came to raiding-for-cattle-and-women type warfare. There is some evidence of that from Germany ranging back into the Neolithic. In one site DNA analysis revealed that out of a couple or so families massacred by unknown assailants the men were local but the women were from a neighbouring region and were possibly kidnapped in a raid and force married to the men they were buried with. The interesting thing is that the arrowheads that killed them were pretty distinctive for the region from which the women originally came from so it did not help them that the raiders may have been from the tribes these women originally belonged to. They were still killed in cold blood rather than rescued by their own people. When you get to the late bronze age and early iron age there may have been some parallels to the five nations of the Iroquois Confederacy in terms of social organization and military organization. So as early as the bronze age one was perhaps seeing the level of social organization beginning to emerge in N-Europe that you have in the region during Roman times when local chieftains and petty kings there seem to have been able to put together armies big enough that it required multiple Roman legions to deal with them. Even drumming together 2000 men, making them into an army and keeping them under control requires a pretty high level of organization.

Re:Perhaps The Acheans?

[Feral Nerd]

Iman Wilkens makes a case for the Trojan War not occuring in the Mediteranean and tries to map it to England. http://www.troy-in-england.com... Perhaps this is another candidate location for the war.

I rather doubt it. If this really is the remains of a major battle it could have been fought for a number of reasons. Firstly, in view of the diverse origins of the fallen, it could have been part of some major trans-European migration like the one that brought down the Roman empire. Secondly it could have been a large scale raid like the armies that raided Britain and France during the peak of the Viking age. This hypothesis can also be supported by the DNA results pertaining to the ethnic diversity of the dead. These Viking raids were conducted by armies that consisted of everything from small war-bands led by independent chieftains to large-ish armies led by petty kings that had organized themselves into a properly big army that was led by whoever contributed the largest force or who had the most battle experience and prestige. Thirdly, and this is the most interesting option, this battle was perhaps actually a part of an organized attempt to go beyond the 'seizing cattle, looting farmsteads and abducting women' type of raiding warfare thought to be the norm in Europe at the time. In this case whoever organized the army perhaps lured 'mercenaries' into his service with promises of plunder, cattle, slaves and even land grants of conquered territory much like William the Bastard did in the run-up to is 1066 invasion of England to bolster his army. In this case this battle may represent a well thought out and planned attempt by somebody to conquer land and thereby control the north-south/east trade route through which flowed all the amber, furs, slaves, and whatever other northern goods were consumed by the great Mediterranean cultures at the time. In any case we will have to seriously re-assess the level of social organization and industrial ability of European bronze age cultures. This is a pretty interesting and potentially very significant discovery that puts another dent into the 'ex oriente lux' cliché (which, to be fair, has been steadily dismantled over the last few decades). This is not to say that Oriental influence on European culture was non-existent or insignificant but Northern Europeans of the bronze age were nor a bunch of disorganized, louse ridden, loincloth wearing barbarians who only washed when they were caught out in the rain or fell into a river and who needed to import oriental ideas before they could organize themselves into sophisticated cultures because they were to dull to devise such concepts by themselves.

Lack of marketing.

[jellomizer]

Chances are this didn't get recorded in history due to lack of marketing.
Probably due to the fact neither side had gained an advantage they needed so no victor to make the history.

I mean just think of the Korean war? If it weren't for the popular TV show M.A.S.H it probably would be really the forgotten war. And that is something that happened within people's lifetimes.

Re:Dagorlad

[Nidi62]

Dead marshes. How did you know, J.R.R.?

Because there was an actual place like that in World War I. According to the book A Yankee in the Trenches by Robert Derby Holmes (an American who enlisted in the British Army in WWI), at the Souchez River near Vimy Ridge was a swampy section where thousands of French soldiers were killed early in the war and left unburied. He was sent on a mission down to the river to check for messages sent by a German spy and had to go through the valley which was littered with the bones of these soldiers. Tolkien could have heard stories of this place, or seen with his own eyes/heard stories of what I am sure were plenty of other places just like this. Early in the war (this was before it broke down into trench warfare) the battles were quick moving and very costly so very often the bodies of the dead were left unburied.