The Stone Battle Axe of Neolithic Europe

the most important weapon of early bronzo's europe was not made of metal but stone these weapons were used for a thousand years by peoples from the baltic to the atlantic but where and when were they invented who were the people who wielded them and how were they used and what is their link to the germanic thunder god thor i'm dan davis i'm a novelist and on this channel we talk about the real history behind my historical fantasy stories and in this video we're going to find out all about the stone battle axe the history of making things to bash your enemies heading probably starts with the invention of the stout stick which leads naturally onto the wooden war club or cudgel and if you attach a shaped rock to the end of it you get the invention of the stone mace stone maces were used by the neolithic and early bronze age step herders like the yamnier and we know these things are weapons rather than tools because these shapes are only good for cracking heads and breaking bones but what about that famous tool of the neolithic the polished stone axe this was the higher technology of the period and it really was a magnificent innovation by first shaping out the axe heads from stone and then grinding and polishing them to a sharp edge our neolithic ancestors made tools that could cut wood with far greater efficiency than any previous stone axe type it was polished stone axes that chopped down much of the forests of europe thousands of years ago [Applause] so in the neolithic everyone worth his salt used a polished stone axe for his work and probably they ended up being used for fighting whenever it came to that but as we know the neolithic farmers of europe were peaceful and innocent people who were overrun by lunatics pouring out of the steps wielding weapons of war like stone macy's and so when the stone battle ax was developed obviously it was the step warriors who invented them right well the battle axe was used extensively by the people of the corded ware culture and the contemporary local variants such as the battle axe culture and later descendant cultures and the corded ware were an indo-european people while i wouldn't go so far as to say they were the indo-european people they were responsible for spreading indo-european languages and indo-european mythologies and material culture and social structures across eurasia so if the corded where people used the stone battle axe and the corded ware were derived from step peoples it would make sense that the stone battle axe was developed on the step and brought into northern europe by waves of invaders but it wasn't so who did invent it we need to take a minute to talk terminology these implements have been collected by for example german archaeologists for as long as there have been german archaeologists and the antiquarians before them there are thousands of battle axes in local museums and private collections and in normal people's houses from poland to scotland and beyond actually they are found in burials and around what must have been settlements or camps farmers have been plowing them up for millennia we'll get into that more later and archaeologists in different countries spent decades recording measuring and categorizing these artifacts according to shape and size and so on although archaeologists from different countries have always had international conferences where they share data and methods and sometimes tried to come up with consistent naming and dating practices differences in convention remain nevertheless there is a basic agreed typology battle axes are the smaller ones and axe hammers are the bigger ones some people prefer to call them hammer axes but i prefer axe hammers because that's obviously better so who invented them well battle axes and axe hammers appear first of all in the archaeological record in the context of the funnel beaker culture shortly before or even during the migrations of the step herders across the nipper frontier we've touched on this a bit in previous videos but this time and place in the centuries around 3000 bc was extremely complex there was a lot going on too much to get into now but the settled farming cultures of europe experienced a range of interactions with these mobile step herders i said in the kucatani tripilia video that in that culture there was little evidence they used weapons and that was true for most of his existence but at the end when they started moving away and building fortified settlements weapons do appear at one site there were about a hundred arrowheads found many at the outside edges of the houses suggesting there was a ranged assault on the settlement by their enemies and from this time they also find these round-butted battle axes and beak hammers with the long heads imagine getting clocked with that one as the unified cucuteni trapelio culture breaks down into regional cultures one group on the nipper is seen to develop a pottery style that has multiple external influences and importantly they contain explicitly funnel beaker-style ceramics and they also start using stone ax hammers that look just like the ones developed by the funnel bigger culture to the north and west so what are these weapons doing here did the locals obtain them by trade along with the pottery or did the funnel beaker people themselves move into this region bringing their weapons and pots and becoming part of this short-lived culture might they even have come in order to fight against the incursions from the steppe peoples i don't have any answers by the way these are just rhetorical questions interestingly some of the first examples the earliest examples have what they call casting seams running down the top this ridge has been carefully shaped in the making of the axe hammer and it's thought to be an imitation of copper and bronze axes metal axes of the period were made in bivalved moulds that left a ridge in the castling process where the two halves of the mould met early metal axes were still rare prestige items in the early bronze age so copying the distinctive casting scene in stone must have been done to draw on the sublime magical power of the real thing like when you get a knockoff louis vuitton handbag off romford market the poster polio group we're talking about here is called the sofievka culture and they were clearly on a war footing they are one of the earliest apparently militarized cultures of the region and they were armed with bows darts or small javelins the axe hammer and a dagger interestingly this is the same kind of armaments that the corded ware people would carry so these axe hammers that they used were based on a funnel beaker design or they were actual funnel beaker axe hammers but where did they get the design from considering the occasional appearance of those knock-off casting scenes did they copy them from metal weapons but how did they do that when they didn't use metal themselves well it's possible that the funnel beakers coppered the design from the copper axe hammers of the bodrug caresta culture on the other side of the carpathians if that is the origin then they spread from the funnel beakers to the other cultures in this complex patchwork of interacting peoples in the region that eventually gave birth to the corded ware culture and as i already said the axe hammer is closely associated with the corded ware peoples right across their territory throughout the 3rd millennium bc including in the single grave culture which is basically around denmark and in the battle ax culture of sweden and norway we'll talk more about them in a minute but first i have a confession to make i've not been entirely honest with you so far i've been calling this a weapon since the start of the video but what if it isn't a weapon it seems so obvious that these are weapons that people have always called them battle axes they are often found in the graves of corded wear men whereas they're not found in the graves of corded wear women who were usually buried with pottery some men were buried with pottery too but they didn't have a battle axe as well men either had pots or an axe so of course this is seen as evidence of social stratification men with pots were presumably servant or at least domesticated in some way while the men with axes were the warriors and the axe hammer was his weapon because he couldn't be at all because why wouldn't all the men have one and for another thing the polished stone axe was still in use at this time and was also found in burials and the polish stone axe was obviously for tree filling woodworking and so on while the axe hammer and battle axe were the perfect shape for warfare but is all that actually correct some archaeologists have argued that the battle axes were purely ceremonial while others that axe hammers were too large to possibly be functional others have said that they must be mining tools or tools for metal working we should say as well that hammers don't really exist in prehistory not as household tools anyway you would use a wooden mallet for bashing in wooden stakes and pegs and only smiths would need hammers it's only when you have nails that you need a hammer really so even in the medieval period it would only be blacksmiths and shipwrights who had them so axe hammers and battle axes don't make sense as household tools to chop your wood you have a polished axe and to whack your timber you have your big mallet you don't really have anything you need bashing with a stone hammer except other people it's so obvious you don't even really need to look into it any more than that but typical archaeologists that's what they've done one way archaeologists find out how objects were utilized in the past is by doing what they call use wear testing they carefully examine an object like a stone sickle or a bronze sword using a microscope and they take casts and measure and record the tiny marks on the surface that were caused by the use of the object in its life then they use replica objects in various ways hitting them against wood or dead pigs and stuff and compare the results with the historical objects and that's how they can tell that one specific tool was used for cutting straw while another was used for distributed animal hides and so on it usually takes hundreds or even thousands of uses for the specific evidence to start to show up on the stone or the metal of the of the tool or weapon to see the damage from chopping firewood it might take i don't know a thousand blows of the axe maybe it's a lot of work to do stuff like that and it sounds really intricate and boring too and i couldn't do a job like that but thank goodness for the archaeologists say but there hasn't been that much use-wear testing done on axe hammers part of the problem is that these objects often re-ground in their own lifetimes the same way you sharpen your steel knife or axe today re-grinding of course removes the evidence of use and other axe hammers are often found a bit eroded you see these axe hammers were made of all kinds of stone often not special or particularly good stone they seem to have favored cobbles picked up from rivers or from the coast and anyway millennia in the soil often leaves their services pitted and weathered and that destroys the use wear evidence and yet some work has been done one study looked at bell beaker battle axes and axe hammers from northern britain and concluded that they were in fact multi-purpose tools now it's important to note that this is looking at a specific time and place and so the results may not be applicable to everywhere that used axe hammers but this used where study found that most of both the battle ax sized and the axe hammer sized weapons were actually used for cutting down trees and working wood and quite often for digging through soil to chop through roots while only 9 of both types showed you swear from cutting through bone there's no way to know but the researchers reckon that that was likely to be from slaughtering animals from polaxing cattle rather than people so does that mean that these weren't weapons uh no a couple of things to bear in mind the british bell beaker fighting style might have been more about shooting arrows from a distance and then charging in for close-range dagger fights how brutal does that sound whilst other areas like scandinavia might have preferred the traditional far more civilized caving in of skulls method but also if these axe hammers were used as weapons as well as tools you wouldn't really expect you swear to show up would you despite what some people think this early period wasn't all that militarized and combat would have been somewhat sporadic or at least seasonal and your average warrior wouldn't likely be slaying dozens of enemies in his lifetime with a single battle axe not enough for use wear to show up on the blade and even if some famous hero did crush 50 of his enemies beneath his weapon enough to leave the imprints from the shards of their bones on the cutting edge of his battle axe you would still get a 21st century archaeologist writing down in their report probably from animal slaughter nevertheless the study is really amazing to me the use wear paints a picture of these ax wielding farmers clearing land i love that chopping through roots and soil with them are so common that's really that's really evocative of the hard work necessary to tame the land to raise your cattle to feed your family so that's the bill because of britain but what about the culture named after the thing what about the battle ax culture they're also called the botax culture because the axe heads look like boats like little canoes like little kayaks modern archaeologists prefer to use that name probably because it's more descriptive of the shape rather than making assumptions about the nature of its use but i'm calling them the battle ax culture it's important to say that there is not a single battlelex type across time and space and the many variations and subtypes are well recorded some do have blades that could be used for chopping tasks but others are blunted at both ends and are only useful for hammering probably pollaxing cattle or men it has been proposed that these objects were used in ceremonial ritual combat maybe they were but these warriors were well versed in raiding as i showed in my treponation video it wasn't just men who were victims of getting their skulls bashed in so what on earth does all this have to do with thor there was a long time over 2000 years between the battle ax culture and the first recorded evidence of a thor-like germanic thunder god first noted by the romans who said he was the german version of hercules which you could see as just roman cultural chauvinism but of course they were absolutely right or rather hercules and thor both descended from a more ancient common ancestor like the god perquinos thor's hammer is called mjolnir there are theories but no one really knows for sure why it's called that but the weapon is deeply connected to the mythology of the god featuring explicitly in many of the stories of thor's adventures there are plot devices about him having his hammer stolen or leaving it behind to prove he can fight without it he uses it to slay countless yachts the giants and it's just an incredibly powerful and special magical weapon the weapon is made by the dwarves and famously has a short handle due to loki's sabotaging of the process and it's clearly made of iron and when thrown it always hits its target and returns to thor's hand the various incarnations of the indo-european striker thunderer all use a striking weapon whether it's an axe or a club and as he is a thunder god the strike of the mighty weapon is of course the lightning strike it flies out and hits exactly where required delivering a devastating blow before returning to the hand through it riding above the clouds in his goat-drawn chariot the hammer is so closely associated with thor that the hammer pendant worn by men and women became incredibly popular in medieval scandinavia i especially like the one found that has the runic inscription that says this is a hammer it is often said that these pendants grew out of an earlier tradition of the hercules club pendant popular during the late roman and post-roman period in the 5th to 7th centuries a.d during the germanic migrations period this amulet type rapidly spread across europe these germanic donars clubs don are being the southern germanic version of thor it's the same word were made from antler bone or wood presumably it would be oak but i don't know but more rarely from bronze or precious metals and apparently they are found exclusively in female graves it's often also said that the wearing of mjolnir amulets is a response to christians wearing crosses and i suppose they would say that the hercules club amulets are the same thing as they post-date christian rome but we should always be a little suspicious of those neat uh just so stories in history and close archaeological investigation shows that there is no real relationship between crosses and thor's hammer now take a look at this this battle axe is made of amber and it is 4.4 centimeters long and 1.4 centimeters wide or one and three quarter inches by half an inch it is a perfect tiny replica of a battle axe culture stone battle axe but it's carved from amber this one is a unique object there's no others made of amber have been found but there are many examples of miniature battle axes made from stone miniature battle axes in stone have been interpreted sometimes as children's grave goods because they've been found in children's graves in especially in central sweden but in southern sweden they appear as wetland deposits and they've also been interpreted as a symbolic object for some kind of mortuary practice involving cremation because that's how they're found in northern germany and norway but as i said these things are not rare nine percent of all battle axes in central sweden are miniatures miniature versions the proper full-size battle axes are tools and weapons for men but the miniatures are found in men and women and children's graves and so might have had a more magical protective function intriguingly some of the miniature battle axes have traces of pounding wear on the neck that you don't see in ordinary battle axes so they might have been used as mortars for crushing some substance onto perhaps some substance that was going to be used in some mind-altering ritual the fact that these miniatures in stone and at least one in amber have a hole through them where the shaft goes in a full size axe means they could have been worn as a pendant or perhaps attached to clothing and these miniature battle axe pendants are also found in the british royals too well into the british bronze age so to say that the thor pendant is a response to christian crosses is wrong it may well have come from the tradition of the hercules club pendants but that in turn was perhaps based on a far older tradition of wearing miniature stone battle axe pendants for protection let's talk about thunderstones now a thunderstone is a part of european folklore a part of our history into the modern period the word has its own variants in other european languages and it referred to ancient stone tools found in the ground because our ancestors didn't always understand that they had ancient predecessors with vastly different technology who'd lived in the same place that they did when they found what was obviously worked shaped stone tools in the ground they often assumed that it belonged to a fairy or a troll or some other magical creature that dwelled beyond the limits of the normal world but the name thunderstone comes from the common understanding that the object was found at a place where lightning had struck farmers would plough them up in their fields and conclude of course that it was thrown into the ground by the thunder god during a storm and then rose back up heading back up towards the sky maybe one year one of your sheep was struck by lightning out in the field and a few years later you find an ancient stone axe right there or nearby and then you understand what's happened they were something like petrified lightning these stones were therefore special and magical and had a power all of their own and that's why they were used as amulets to protect a person or a building this has been going on for a long time ancient greeks and romans often put neolithic axes in their homes and their barns and barrack blocks and all kinds of structures to ward off evil and to bring good fortune and well into the 20th century they were kept in kitchens or barns to ensure that lightning would not strike the building and i'm sure people would still do the same today i would if i was blessed enough to dig one up with the potatoes the upton level shaman lived in middle bronze age britain when metal working had become far more prevalent this ancient shaman was buried with a stone battle axe placed upon his chest he was a metal worker his role in his society was to placate the gods and spirit in such a way as to ensure that the physically and spiritually dangerous task of metal working was made safe when you transform a material from one state to another a material as special and powerful as gold or copper and tin then you had better be psychically robust and spiritually purified or else you could bring disaster down upon yourself and your people and this ancient british shaman drew upon the protective power of this battle axe in order to protect himself from these dangers but that was fairly typical for his people what's more interesting is that he also carried far more ancient neolithic flint axes that were over a thousand years old to him were these found in the ground or within neolithic tombs were they passed down by his ancestors over 30 generations and and more or were these a kind of thunderstone to this man anyway we know that throughout europe people were finding stone axes that they believed came from the thunder god in northern europe they would have been finding the polished stone axes and also the battle axes and axe hammers broken and whole in tombs and fields and beneath buildings so the question is did the morphology of these weapons inform the shape and type of weapon carried by their conception of thor and duna and duna and donna now let's have a look at this this funnel bigger axe was jammed into the soft mud on a danish coast in about 3500 bc it's not a perforated battle axe of course but i love how the anaerobic conditions of the clay preserved the halved so perfectly the wood above the clay layer brought it away leaving this short-handled axe this axe was intentionally shoved down into the earth on the boundary between land and sea as part of some sort of ancient ritual and remained here for five and a half thousand years and was only discovered because they were going to build a bridge or a road or something here to be clear i'm not saying that there were so many axes deposited like this that people 2 000 years later found them and started to imagine thor used a weapon with a short handle i just think it's a really striking example of how an ancient stone implement in this region can so much resemble our conception of a mythological weapon thor's hammer as we know it comes from the medieval period when tools and weapons were made of iron and so of course the people's mythology changed to reflect this new material but in fact there's no doubt they originally conceived of it as a weapon of stone in local folk tales and hints in art and even place names it seems that the early thor sometimes used an axe and sometimes he used a rock and other times a club or cudgel and even a stone bolt that is a lightning bolt of stone a lightning bolt stone like a thunderstone and there's no doubt they knew it was a weapon that could both bludgeon and cut in the literary sources we have for norse mythology the language used demonstrates this clearly with his hammer thor smote and shattered into fragments the skulls of giants and he also uses the weapons who cut off their heads using words that mean to cleave and to sever the same words used for the act of hewing by axes and swords and there is a kenning that calls thor friend of the edged battle axe one of the words used to describe thor's weapon is hammer this comes from an indo-european root with the meaning pointed sharp and stone in old high german the word hammer was used for the tall hammer but it also had the meaning hammer used as a weapon while in old icelandic hammer also means crag rock and cliff in both sanskrit and lithuanian a derived word meant stone and rock and an old slavonic word derived from the same source means stone weapon while in one of the iranian languages the word means both stone and heaven so i think the corded ware people probably gave these objects a name that sounded something like hammer so since the ethnogenesis of the cordedware people the men used stone battle axes and axe hammers to wage war and they also used them for other tasks around their homesteads when necessary these were functional objects certainly and took only a few days to make perhaps just 14 hours work all told depending on the stone and the size and the form of the finished object if they broke in use they were reshaped and if that wasn't possible they were discarded they didn't necessarily have all that much inherent value if they didn't break however they were passed on perhaps father to son and perhaps traded gaining value by the story of their use lives these long-lasting weapons moved with their owners and without them sometimes perhaps for centuries before being carefully deposited somewhere in the landscape at a field boundary maybe or under a house or they were buried with their final owner some would have had special significance as the weapon that slew a famous warrior or the weapon that was owned by a famous warrior and no doubt men cherished the tools that they inherited just as i had cherished the hammer my dad gave me that he got working for the gas board 40 years ago and just as he values the tools medals and weapons of his warrior father although they were formed by a mixing with the neolithic farmers corded ware people followed an indo-european tradition and that tradition included the thunder god the thunder god is a warrior god and when they fought with their battle axes the corded where warriors were enacting a kind of worship not in a holy war or a ritual war but as a kind of doing what was right for the men of the clan we'll have to talk more about that in another video and the people of this time men women and children even more tiny stone battle axe amulets to invoke the thunder god's power and to protect them from evil and when the battle ax culture of scandinavia transitioned into the nordic bronze age and weapon technology changed the thunder god continued to wield a striking weapon that could both shatter and cleave down the centuries of millennia the peoples of northern europe kept finding thunderstones in their fields and in ancient tombs and barrows and all over the place continuing to reinforce the nature of the god's weapon even when the age of iron came and the materials of the god's weapon changed its metaphysical nature fittingly remained unchanged and everlasting even though the warriors of the medieval period used spears axes and swords for their weapons their warrior god continued to use his half-did striking cleaving axe hammer thanks to my patrons who are helping to improve the production quality and frequency of these videos to support the channel the link to my patreon is in the description as are links to my books on amazon and audible please do subscribe and check out the playlist for more content like this thank you for watching

Channel: Dan Davis History

Views: 750,421

Keywords: bronze age, battle axe, thor's hammer, bronze age warfare, thor's hammer real, thor's hammer real life, axe hammer, axe-hammer, battle-axe, hammer-axe, battle axe culture, battle-axe culture, bronze age weapons, thor mythology, thor mythology hammer, Neolithic warfare, funnelbeaker culture, history documentary, ancient civilizations, ancient history documentary, norse god thor hammer, thors hammer, history documentary 2021, bronze age history, bronze age europe, Mjölnir

Id: X1PduS2ocl8

Length: 29min 30sec (1770 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 06 2021