
Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle (2016) - lighttower
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/slaughter-bridge-uncovering-colossal-bronze-age-battle
======
defen
> Before the 1990s, “for a long time we didn’t really believe in war in
> prehistory,” DAI’s Hansen says. The grave goods were explained as prestige
> objects or symbols of power rather than actual weapons. “Most people thought
> ancient society was peaceful, and that Bronze Age males were concerned with
> trading and so on,”

Is that really true (that "we" didn't believe in war in prehistory)? It seems
like a case of taking an absurd null hypothesis, not finding any evidence to
refute it, and then deciding that your null hypothesis is probably true. We
have plenty of evidence of pre-literate societies engaging in organized
warfare, so why would prehistoric Europe be any different?

~~~
Zippogriff
It's true enough that in the early 2000s one of my poli-sci professors devoted
most of a course to the book _War Before Civilization_ and kept hammering on
the idea of prehistoric war being widespread and common as some kind of huge
revelation and surprise.

I found such intense and sustained focus baffling, since the point seemed
obvious (though the evidence was interesting, at least). I've since come to
understand this as some "inside baseball" grad-level anthropology leaking
through to the undergrad curriculum. We newbies didn't need to be convinced
because we'd never strongly held the contrary view in the first place, but the
field (and related ones) had only recently convinced itself so thought it
worth spending a lot of time on.

~~~
jariel
It should be a revelation because war is a civilizational concept - it's a
form of organized violence, 'organization' being the keyword here.

If you're living in scattered, small tribes, then at most you can get into
small tribal scuffles and vendetta ... but war requires planning,
organization, support, possibly diplomacy, marshalling of resources - so it's
hard to have proper war without the mechanisms in place to support it.

So maybe it's not quite so obvious.

~~~
selestify
Indeed, the article itself says

> We had considered scenarios of raids, with small groups of young men killing
> and stealing food, but to imagine such a big battle with thousands of people
> is very surprising

So it's not so much the violence itself that's the surprise, as it is the
scale of said violence

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EForEndeavour
This article was impossible not to read all the way through. I really hope to
be able to write in such a compelling way at some point in my life.
Admittedly, the subject matter of an epic battle is probably intrinsically
more interesting than what I'll typically write about in my career, but still,
the author tells such a vivid story by diving into minute details only to zoom
back out to a broader context.

~~~
poma88
Go for this book, it changed my life: "The Elements of Style was listed as one
of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923 by
Time in its 2011 list"

------
8bitsrule
More details:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tollense_valley_battlefield](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tollense_valley_battlefield)

------
yread
Same battle as in this recent article
[https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/warrior-skeletons-
re...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/warrior-skeletons-reveal-
bronze-age-europeans-couldn-t-drink-milk)

~~~
yread
Also this one
[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2019/10/puzzling-...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2019/10/puzzling-
artifact-found-tollense-europe-oldest-battlefield/)

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arifleman
Lindybeige did a great and relatively short video on this
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoYj4BZdB1w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoYj4BZdB1w)

~~~
philwelch
As much as I enjoy Lindybeige, I would take his analysis with a grain of salt.
There’s a rather infamous case where Lindybeige released a video filled with
bizarre and misleading claims about the MG34 and MG42 German machine guns
(which he bizarrely conflated with each other and incorrectly dubbed the
“Spandau”) and their relative merits with the Bren, followed by a rather
substantial rebuttal from Military History Visualized, to which Lindybeige
issued a defensive counter-rebuttal, the comments of which contain further
commentary from Forgotten Weapons. If you don’t really want to get invested in
an argument between three youtubers, fair enough—my takeaway is that while
Lindybeige often has _some_ idea about the topics he presents, he also has
strong biases and gaps in his understanding that often result in him
confidently pontificating well past his actual expertise.

------
dang
Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11383601](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11383601)

~~~
c-smile
I did not realize that Hacker News is that old ...

~~~
nl
I don't know exactly when HN was founded, but it was quite large when I
joined.

~~~
erik_seaberg
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1)
looks pretty plausible as the actual first post, though I can't remember
whether postings always had ids (most pageviews used to have URLs with random
names that pointed at expiring Arc closures).

------
bookofjoe
The pictures are staggering.

------
charlieflowers
The article claims something I found surprising -- that the written word was
not common near Germany until about 1000 AD.

~~~
mncharity
Even being able to write your name was uncommon through the 1600's. Literacy
has changed a lot in the last 200 years.

In 1500's(14?) Spain, being able to read and write got you better than "I'm a
computer programmer in 2000" prospects. Being able to read _silently_ ,
without even moving your lips(!?!), got you rumors of deals with the Devil.
Now you get to graduate primary-school, and eventually learn programming.
Before the recent vast expansion in programming jobs, lots of science phds
were driving cabs. Veterinary masters clean cages in zoos. Minimum viable
education has been seriously escalating. Even with everything still being
taught very _very_ badly. If education tech ever dramatically improves...
that'll be interesting.

~~~
jariel
The question isn't about common literacy, it's about literacy among the
nobility, chieftains, clerics.

Much of that, among many other things like basic education, architecture, so
many materials and methods, didn't happen until Latinization/Christianization
of that part of Europe.

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curiousllama
Cmon, a guy with a sword as the first graphic? This is the Bronze Age - a club
is a better weapon at that point...

