Tollense - a bronze age battle?

I would like to regale you if I may I crave your indulgence with a tale of possible warfare of inferred mayhem of tentatively interpreted battle in this video which has been sponsored by audible more of that later now in North East Germany there is a valley called the tal n serve valley through which a river flows and archaeologists in this paper the name which is appearing on your screens now have kept their scientific minds working and have tentatively interpreted what they found as the remains of a Bronze Age battle in Northeast Germany and this is quite exciting for them because well battles are not things that naturally lend themselves to the archaeologists trowel archaeologists spend almost all their time digging up Graves and refuse pits and settlements and so forth you know things that stay still for a long time and accumulate you know stuff that tells us information about you know the past whereas a battle might last only a few hours so how do you dig up a battle well in the 1980s a lot of bronze fines were being dredged up from River bottom and that piqued the archaeologists interest they took a look at them and notice that they were tend to be small and there was awful lot of weapons its have a look at some of the things that came out spearheads for instance you can see an axe there is a sickle that round thing is a lid of a box various pins and that line during at the bottom is a fibula that's a fancy sort of broach so could these have been evidence for a battle and they decided to investigate further and in 1996 open this bit and they one of the things they found made them think oh maybe we have found some evidence of a battle here because again they found no evidence for settlement there were no loom weights no pots and pans pottery well you have the usual things that you find when you dig up a settlement no one gear to be living here and yet they found a lot of human bones and one of them had an arrowhead embedded in it it was embedded in metric up upwards at that sort of angle in the back of the burn I say in metric because of course this was Germany so it was 22 millimeters deep had the arrow being shot in Britain it would've been 7/8 of an inch deep but there you go they embedded in metric over there now that's an odd place for an arrow to be in bed it's difficult to shoot yourself accidentally just there so fairly clearly this man had been shot by someone else so was it in the battle daddy put his arms up to defend himself and got shot that way or possibly he'd been shot by another Arab gone down and then being shot again whilst lying on the ground that would explain the rather unusual entry angle of this Arrowhead the air ahead didn't show any signs of having ricocheted it was a complete piece of Flint Bronze Age fairly typical Bronze Age Flint Arrowhead so I thought oh we might be on to something here so they carried on digging and they found quite a lot of Bones almost all of them human some animals mixed in there almost all of them horses and the the demography of the humans was quite significant there were yes some children's some women but almost all them were of men between 20 and 40 years old fighting age so but again backs up the idea that perhaps this is actually a battle they found now there were two star finds of the dig which were both probably weapons and they are these two wooden clubs and now one of them looks a bit like a modern rounders bat it's that's not a stick that is that these worked woods has been quite deliberately shaped and the other one looks a bit like like a croquet mallet or something it's got quite definite hammer head on it and reading the text of the report I got the impression that they thought that perhaps the the the curve on the handle was deliberate I think they're wrong I think that there was straight and that the ravages of time have bent it over the millennia but anyway so we have two clubs of some sort one about 29 inches long and about 25 and a half inches long now that's unusual and why did the wood survive well it survived because this was very marshy ground as waterlogged conditions and wood can if it's sealed underground in fairly airtight waterlogged conditions it can survive a very long time so that's unusual bronze does survive quite a long time and that might explain why you find more bronze weapons it could be that things weren't getting more warlike we're finding more of their weapons now in the Iron Age they presumably also produce an awful lot of spears and so forth but we don't find nearly seven the Iron Age spearhead as we do Bronze Age spear heads but that I've put to you is because of the fancy words coming now taphonomic the the science if you like the process of how something ended up being found by an archaeologist now iron rusts stick in the ground for a few millennia and it's gone it crumbles to nothing usually now you may say well I I've seen Iron Age spear heads and Dark Age spear heading in in museums and they look like spear heads to me and it appears we made out of mine and it could be that the person conserving it had covered the surface in a in subtle of graphite II silvery stuff which keeps it stable and serve the dual purpose of making it look more like iron but actually if you put a magnet on an Iron Age spearhead that they're trying to run a no steel by some clever subterfuge from a museum you will be disappointed because the magnet won't pick it up there's pretty much no iron left it's just ferric oxide it's just rust that's survived in the shape of the spearhead that was once of iron and now being conserved deftly to look like an iron spearhead in the museum whereas bronze survives really quite well I've dug up a few bronze objects on the archaeological digs that I did many years ago and some of them come out of the ground even looking a bit shiny and some of them can buff up and look as new most of the stuff that I picked out the ground looked a some dark green gungi surface because that so that would be the green patina that that forms on the surface but that can be buffed off and quite often you go yeah yeah that's a bronzy looking thing so bronze survives very well so it could be that actually they weren't tremendously warlike and this time is just that we're finding more of what has survived and so what we find well in a layer of river silt about three to six feet down they found a lot of the bones as I say and on analyzing the bones they found a lot of wounds on the bones which again definitely supports the battle idea now a lot of these bones weren't in situ they had been washed downstream from wherever they had initially been deposited but some of them further upstream appeared to be an anatomical relation to each other though they weren't finding complete skeletons even and so how many people to be fined well we don't know they found 38 skulls so unless some of these people had two heads which would be very unusual that's at least 38 people but if you finds a rib there and a rib there and a rib there have you found three ribs from the same person or one rib from three different people you can't always tell but they have looking at what they've got recognized that they've got at least a hundred different people at least a hundred people died in close proximity both in time and place and why was that then well six to nine percent of them depending exactly on how you count them six to nine percent has wounds that's that's a lot particularly when you imagine that they're not finding complete skeleton so he's imagined that you found more of these skeletons they'd have more wounds on them on different bones elsewhere on their bodies and of course there are probably more people out there to be found because I didn't excavate the entire Valley they just put in your dug a few sample trenches so they've got at least at the very least a hundred different individuals and with a lot of wounds you've got some identifiable wounds some puncture marks from arrows and spear heads they're quite identifiably that and others less so now there are four different categories of wound and you could say that the chair is the nicest of these wounds is the type that it healed well that's great and now to cheery thought-- the idea that even back then you could you could suffer an injury that's so bad that it's it shows on your skeleton I mean how many times have you in your life suffered an injury which could be spotted by an archaeologist looking at your skeleton 4,000 years later I can imagine not very many I don't think I've got a single mark on my skeleton that would give away what injuries I've suffered but there was one chap who had three of these on his head yeah three massive craters in his head but it all healed so what does that mean you could say and this is probably the simplest and most straightforward explanation but he lived in very violent times and he'd been involved in three fights that he had presumably lost but they didn't finish him off permanently and that he then lived to fight one more day and then didn't get that was it that was the end for him or you could say what maybe he was on I'll minor and a rock fall crushed part of his skull but he was dragged from the the rock for and and nursed back to health with some good sustaining soup and then he went back in the mind of would you believe it happened again and no he didn't get into the habit of wearing a helmet in the admin or third time that's another possibility but I think it's more likely that the fact that this guy had three nasty head wounds so that all healed shows that he lived in violent times now and that's the first category that you might say is it serious because it's a nice thought that you could you could suffer and still get back to perhaps full health the opposite of that of course is the wound which hasn't healed at all so for instance there's there's this nastily shattered hip bone and these are these are sharp edged bones in the break there there is no sign at all of any healing having taken place and so that tells us that this guy didn't live very long at all he suffered back wound and then died pretty much immediately afterwards and I didn't need to read the next sentence in the report to nobody was going to say possibly from a fall from his horse it said yeah that's the standard archeologist cliche of any wound like that up fall from the horse maybe we don't know that of course he could have got drunk and fallen off a roof he could have slipped on the riverbank and landed on the rock maybe he a bull kicked him several times maybe his horse fell on him we don't know but it's not unreasonable fall from the horse sort of injury and it you can imagine if in battle you suffer that sort of injury you would be then lying on the ground in agony shouting something along the lines of art only in Bronze Age German and then someone perhaps with the spear would come along and finish you off and that would be the end of that then there's another category which is perhaps nastier and that is wounds that had healed slightly showing us that these peoples didn't die immediately but died a couple of days later some of them maybe a couple of weeks later that's worse isn't it because how do we interpret that the most obvious interpretation is that some of the people after what might have been a battle were lying there for days even weeks slowly dying and their bodies were swallowed up by the river I would say that's less cheery but there's yet a fourth category which is that's even more there and that is wounds on a bone some of which have healed a bit and some of which haven't so what does that tell us well again there are a number of possibilities but they're most likely who greatest likelihood I would suggest is that someone's a jet has suffered a significant wound that went right down to his bone cut into the bone so that we can see it today and then he survived that fight and was you know sustaining soup again and then a very short while later before he was really fully fit again someone said no I'm sorry we need everyone we can get I know desperate times get in line with the rest I don't care bandaged up take the pain and so a guy started the fight already wounded from a previous fight which really speaks a desperation doesn't it so it seems that a lot of people have a carrying a lot of injuries and then died in this place so life was nasty brutish and short it seems for a lot of people back then and it's a shame isn't it really would you like to think that we can appeal to the you know the better angels of our nature and to do something to to put violent into decline and perhaps that in fact has happened there is a book called the better angels of our nature why violence has declined by Steven Pinker and it talks about this very thing about how actually in the past things were so much worse modern media outlets are constantly trying to persuade us that things are getting worse all the time that we're getting more and more violent in society but in fact murder rates Violent Crimes there they are in developed nations on the way down and globally the number of people dying in wars goes down and down and down and modern warfare despite advances in modern rap weaponry actually isn't as deadly as old-fashioned warfare and you might think that's rather strange because surely people in the big Wars of the 20th century died in very large numbers yes they did but the proportion of people involved in those wars who died was not as great as the proportion who died in earlier Wars that involved fewer people tribal warfare is really nasty if you get a load of guys running at each other with Spears and clubs and they Biff away until one side eventually wins the casualty rate can be horrendous tribal warfare is roughly nine times deadlier than modern warfare which is not a very nice thought and even when there isn't a war on the murder rate in the past has been horrendously the murder rating in medieval Europe was thirty times what it is today although I just like to say advocacy of with the English that the murder rate in medieval England was a small fraction of what it was on the continent although for fairness I should add that it was still by modern standards alarmingly high so things were more violent back then and things are getting a less violent for all sorts of reasons in the outlined in his book which you might want to read and now I have met Steven Pinker a number of times at evolution conferences went back in the days when I was a research associate with Newcastle University looking into evolutionary psychology and I made a video called built for the Stone Age which you might like to watch there's a link to it appearing Momoa somewhere on the screen and the reason actually I have a YouTube channel at all is largely because of that I made a pilot tried for years to get commissioners in British television to watch it but I wasn't famous so no one would watch it so I couldn't dissuade anyone the idea I had was good then YouTube came along I thought but I'll just stick it on YouTube and see if anyone would see it there and perhaps picked it up nobody did what is your saying I don't usually watch it I think still it's actually possibly the best thing I've done on YouTube and you know you might want to watch it just to see what I used to look like you know before the dark times before the bald patch anyway so that's built for the Stone Age um Steven Pinker's books though do have a flaw they are very well researched they're very dense they're full of interesting facts and they're also very funny well all that's good but they are very long I do remember picking off the shelf once in the book shop how the mind works and loads people have told me it was a really good book and so I had a look at it I saw that the writing was really small they'd picked a very very small typeface and I've never known a book printed on thinner paper these tiny fine sheets of gossamer I think the publisher had thought that the the full-length book might terrify the potential buyer and so they did everything they could to disguise the fact that it's a very long book has it been printed on normal paper in normal typeface I think it's been about that thick so they are a bit long but they are good if only there was some way if only there was some way of enjoying their content without all the slog of having to keep it but there is you could go to audible yes audible is a massive website online which has something like oh qoodles I mean I mean literally I'm not a man to use a word like boodles lightly of titles that you can pick from so don't give me the excuse I went to decides I couldn't find a single title that interested me if you have any interest in pretty much anything you will find some book that interests you and you can get to read it or listen to someone else read it to you whilst you I don't know drive to work on that awful commute that you have to suffer for an hour every day or whilst you're either minding the kids or looking after the cat or whatever it is you have to do you can listen to it read to you for free because if you go to www.h then you will find an offer of a 30-day free trial on the audible website and you can pick any title you like get it for free listen to it for a bit and you know what it's even risk free which one you pick because you might decide you don't like it very much doesn't matter just solve it for another one no charge and even if you decide Lee not going to sign on for the full service and at the end of the month free trial you decide now it's not for me and you sign out you still get to keep the book it's yours forever you can even share it with a friend so it's a risk-free thing you could try to why not go to audible and they've got some others of bursty Pinker's as well and if you want you know bang for your buck if you like you can do a lot worse because and the book I've just described use fifty six and three-quarter hours long yes it's a mammoth book but it's full of fascinating stuff and you know so if you want you want to get the mood you can but nothing then I'm reading a Joyce now back to archaeology so and the Baltic the C was a fair bit higher back in those days because not so much of the world's water was locked up in ice and so these rivers in northern Germany were very marshy and the river was slow flowing and quite broad part of the reason we know that is that because of the plant remains that we find in the river sediments which show all sorts of plants that grow in slow-moving water like reeds and so forth and analysis of pollen and other biological remains tells us that there was quite a bit of forest around but also some farmed land and these poor swine's were living on a millet based diet could you believe it anyway thank goodness I'm modern now there's something called isotope analysis you can look at the isotopes that have been deposited in people's bones and teeth and from that in first some idea of what diet they had at least when they were growing up growing those bones and teeth and these people were not living a marine diet they weren't living on mussels and fish and so forth they were farmers so we've got a load of farmers at a time when the climate was getting colder which is worse getting wood the climate is deteriorating people mean it's getting colder that's pretty much standard what they mean particularly northern Europe so it's getting colder and some people say now that explains conflict at times when the conditions are getting worse people put under more stress and so they're more likely to end up competing for what few resources are left and that leads to more warfare yes I can see how that could happen but I can also see how the opposite could happen in times of tremendous Plenty you have a huge surplus population and loads of people are well fed what do we do with them all or well we could go and try conquering them having got the manpower so I could see how more people are more likely to encounter each other and more likely to rub each other up the wrong way and end up fighting so I don't I don't wholeheartedly buy into this more stress fewer resources equals more warfare notion and but anyway how do we know that these people were fighting a battle well we don't really either say we haven't found the settlement but we haven't found any evidence whatsoever these people were buried and people were were given the funeral rites in these times but there are no tombs there are no urns there are no grave Goods though there's no apparent deliberate digging of pits to put these bodies in they just appear to be wherever they have fallen and there is no evidence on any of them that being gnawed by rats or scavenged on by wolves or anything like that so it seems that these bodies were either thrown into the river immediately after the battle or perhaps they died in the river and they the river then swallowed them up and that's how they came to survive to be found today by us now as for dating it seems that about 12:30 BC is when all these bones suddenly got deposited all at once with carbon dating with burns you always get an age range something like 1200 BC plus or minus 40 years and even that's not absolute cutoff that's just within a certain standard deviation so the best fit line is 1230 BC which just put it in context 1250 BC is the usual date that people guessing when the Trojan War happened if it happened happened so it's around the time of the Trojan War these Germans were bashing each other and but they were perhaps bashing each other not with bronze swords not a single bronze sword has been found there and there are no wounds that are clearly the result of being cut with a sword so it could be that these these farmers were equipping themselves a little bit for the warfare they had a spearhead perhaps that was off bronze as a knife might not have been a purpose-built dagger but you know a knife or salt cover throat even if it's your normal kitchen knife and so that's the mid-range combat which might not happen but just in case it does a simple wooden Club will do now there was a problem there because the carbon date for the wooden club that they dated came out as significantly older than the bones which is a shame because they were so excited that these these clubs were found in direct association with the bones but it's actually not too big a problem partly because I they say carbon dates are not solutely hard-and-fast but also because it's perfectly possible that someone brought his great granddad club to the fight or possibly only a month earlier he made that club from scratch from the heart would the hard heart was at the center of a big tree that was over 200 years old so that's perfectly possible there are lots of trees that are over 200 years old so yeah it's possible that it was just an old club or old wood in a new club so that's as far as we can really take it it's not proof of a battle but the numbers are much greater than other examples from other places in the world there are I think a 22 found in a pit in Norway there something team in the Netherlands there are about five or something found in a pit in Britain these are young men with wounds on them perhaps with associated weapons but they're in an excavated pit they've been thrown in there deliberately afterwards they're not actually the scene of the battle itself this appears to be the scene of the battle itself and even we don't have the the the flashy sword you know a sword yeah they may be very high status they may look very nice may be good for impressing pressing people of course a sharp and so they can cut you but actually if someone takes a good stout stick and belt you in the face with it that will do the job [Music]

Channel: Lindybeige

Views: 558,174

Rating: 4.9359708 out of 5

Keywords: tollense, valley, battle, bronze, age, warfare, clubs, wooden, spears, river, marsh, bones, wounds, broken, lesions, archaeology, archeology, excavation, archaeological, dig, digging, evidence, interpretation, dating, carbon, steven pinker

Id: xoYj4BZdB1w

Length: 23min 40sec (1420 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 17 2017