{"id":7866,"date":"2016-03-30T07:26:44","date_gmt":"2016-03-30T13:26:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=7866"},"modified":"2016-03-29T21:13:02","modified_gmt":"2016-03-30T03:13:02","slug":"a-bronze-age-battle-lost-in-the-misty-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=7866","title":{"rendered":"A Bronze Age Battle Lost in the Misty Past"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Tollensetal<\/a>

Some fighters had bronze weapons and armor; others carried wooden clubs \u2014 and used them. (Landesamt f\u00fcr Kultur und Denkmalpflege Mecklenburg-Vorpommern\/Landesarch\u00e4ologie\/D. Jantzen)<\/p><\/div>\n

Men came to Tollense <\/em>. . . or whatever it was called about 3,260 years ago.((“The things they carried” \u2014 an appropriate literary reference?)) In a river valley north of Berlin, two Bronze Age armies clashed, casualties were at least in the hundreds, and no one can say who fought or why.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWe have 130 people, minimum, and five horses. And we\u2019ve only opened 450 square meters. That\u2019s 10% of the find layer, at most, maybe just 3% or 4%,\u201d says Detlef Jantzen, chief archaeologist at MVDHP. \u201cIf we excavated the whole area, we might have 750 people. That\u2019s incredible for the Bronze Age.\u201d In what they admit are back-of-the-envelope estimates, he and Terberger argue that if one in five of the battle\u2019s participants was killed and left on the battlefield, that could mean almost 4000 warriors took part in the fighting.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And this comparison to a war that spawned literature we still read today:<\/p>\n

As University of Aarhus\u2019s Vandkilde puts it: \u201cIt\u2019s an army like the one described in Homeric epics, made up of smaller war bands that gathered to sack Troy\u201d\u2014an event thought to have happened fewer than 100 years later, in 1184 B.C.E. That suggests an unexpectedly widespread social organization, Jantzen says. \u201cTo organize a battle like this over tremendous distances and gather all these people in one place was a tremendous accomplishment,\u201d he says.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s my literary imagination at work \u2014 someone must have sung those dead warriors, maybe in a long elegiac poem like Y Gododdin<\/em><\/a> \u2014 but in what language? And to what ends?<\/p>\n

Lost, all lost.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Men came to Tollense . . . or whatever it was called about 3,260 years ago.((“The things they carried” \u2014 an appropriate literary reference?)) In a river valley north of Berlin, two Bronze Age armies clashed, casualties were at least in the hundreds, and no one can say who fought or why. \u201cWe have 130 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[20,198,93],"class_list":["post-7866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-archaeology","tag-bronze-age","tag-germany"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-22S","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":7246,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=7246","url_meta":{"origin":7866,"position":0},"title":"Scandinavian Style, 1400 BCE","author":"Chas S. 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Clifton","date":"May 3, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Bull-leapers, then and now Archaeologists -- but not some goddess-worshippers -- generally accept that Arthur Evans basically invented the popular conception of Bronze Age Crete, the \"Palace of Minos,\" the Cretan Labyrinth, and so on. (More Bronze Age archaeology resources here. But the famous fresco of the \"bull leapers\" is\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":388,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=388","url_meta":{"origin":7866,"position":2},"title":"Diffusionists, Rejoice?","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 3, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Diffusionists, rejoice! I blogged it, so now I needed to watch it, if only for the llamas. Turned off by poor reviews, I had passed over Troy, until I learned that it made a case for Bronze Age trade between Anatolia and Peru. How else did there come to be\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5100,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5100","url_meta":{"origin":7866,"position":3},"title":"Peaceful Minoan Crete . . . Was Not","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 16, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Bronze Age (Minoan) Crete is often portrayed as this peaceful place where people gathered flowers, danced, sang, and worshiped the Great Mother Goddess. Um, no, says an archaeologist from the University of Sheffield: \u201cTheir world was uncovered just over a century ago, and was deemed to be a largely peaceful\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"archaeology\"","block_context":{"text":"archaeology","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=archaeology"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/e\/e2\/NAMA_Akrotiri_2.jpg","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8507,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=8507","url_meta":{"origin":7866,"position":4},"title":"The Story of Three Athames","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 23, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"I have owned three athames in my life \u2014 or more precisely two athames plus a new knife that may well become one. There is a story in here of changing Craft practice. Actually, the first athame was simply my wooden-handled Mora hunting knife, not in the photo.((Those wooden (birch?)\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Colorado\"","block_context":{"text":"Colorado","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=colorado"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/3-athames.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/3-athames.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/3-athames.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":353,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=353","url_meta":{"origin":7866,"position":5},"title":"Northumberland rock art An elegant\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 15, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Northumberland rock art An elegant Web site of Bronze Age rock art from Northumberland, in northeastern England. Pagan by definition. I would love to see the same thing done for southeastern Colorado, with our mysterious \"Ogham\" and not-so-mysterious cowboy\/sheepherder rock carvings.","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7866"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7881,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7866\/revisions\/7881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}