Huge battle, lost in the mist of time

[jon_norstog]

Something to draw your attention from current events.

A man saw some bones sticking out of the riverbank ... this time it was a humerus with a stone arrowhead lodged in its upper end. Archaeologists were called in and they found the bones of many men, all killed at the same time. They found weapons and the bones of cavalry horses too.

bronze_age_casualties.jpg

By the time they were done they had done spot digs indicating that there were hundreds of bodies buried/left on a battlefield that was several Km long. A lot of the fighters were locals armed with stone and wood weapons. Also in the mix were mounted warriors armed with bronze weapons and wearing at least some armor. And archers shooting bronze arrowheads.

This battle took place at the end of the bronze age - the first great age of ocean voyages and long-distance trade. It was also the time frame of the invasions of the "sea peoples', the Trojan War, and the collapse of Crete and Mycenae.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/...nze-age-battle

As the article states, it is a unique find, a major prehistoric battlefield complete with weapons and casualties. All that is missing is the reason for the fight and who was involved.

jn

[dryheat]

Fascinating.

[bruce]

Fascinating post. Reminds me of when about 7,000 bodies were found that later turned out to be French soldiers who died mostly of disease in Napoleon's retreat from Russia. Sincerely. bruce.

[Dan Shapiro]

Wow!

[Allen]

For some reason this reminds me of the checkout line at WalMart.

[Vern Humphrey]

I'm going to clean my M1 Garand very, very thoroughly.

[jon_norstog]

The timing of that battle was at the end of the "maritime" bronze age, when for some reason, sea transportation of goods and people was shut down. So land routes had to substitute. One of the major land routes was the "Amber Road" from the Baltic down to the Mediterranean. This battle was fought at a causeway/bridge, a choke point on the Amber Road. The men who fought there included hundreds, maybe several thousand locals on one side and on the other side, men-at-arms from the south. The men-at-arms had bronze weapons and armour, and their forces included mounted troops, perhaps cavalry.

This is about the same time frame as the Trojan War, the Sea People's attacks on Egypt, and the arrival of new nations in the Med. This upheaval ended a kind of cosmopolitan world-culture. My own thought is that bronze-age mariners were regularly sailing to the Americas, if for no other reason, then for copper. There are bronze-age contemporary copper mines on Isle Royale and the Keeweenaw Peninsula that yielded perhaps 750,000 tons of pure copper. Where did it go? All the copper goods that have been found in the US would just about make one good scrap run to Pacific Hide and Fur. Read this and think about it:

http://philipcoppens.com/copper.html

When thousands of men fight and hundreds die there has to be a reason.

jn

[JB White]

When thousands of men fight and hundreds die there has to be a reason.

"ALIENS!"

[clintonhater]

My own thought is that bronze-age mariners were regularly sailing to the Americas, if for no other reason, then for copper...

Maybe, but not for copper, because never during the Bronze Age was there any shortage of copper ore in the Mediterranean basin--the mines of Cyprus were still producing copper in late Roman times. The great limiting factor in bronze production was always TIN, as no significant deposits occurred in the Mediterranean area, and it had to be imported from such far away places as Spain & Cornwall in Britain.

[jon_norstog]

Maybe, but not for copper, because never during the Bronze Age was there any shortage of copper ore in the Mediterranean basin--the mines of Cyprus were still producing copper in late Roman times. The great limiting factor in bronze production was always TIN, as no significant deposits occurred in the Mediterranean area, and it had to be imported from such far away places as Spain & Cornwall in Britain.

This is true. But the "Old World" was using a LOT of bronze and it may be that some enterprising "sea people" had found a source of very cheap, 99% pure copper - no smelting required. Geoffrey Bibbey wrote that archaeologists were finding the same artifacts and the same settlement patterns at sites with good harbors all the way from India to the Baltic. His theory was that Scandinavian mariners were contracting to carry goods to all points of the compass. needless to say there are no written records. But there are records of a sort.

petroglyphs_2.jpgpetroglyphs.jpg

jn

[Peconga]

Very cool! Thanks for the summaries and the fascinating links. We are seeing history re-written before our eyes, with compelling evidence piling up from around the world that the ancient world was WAAAY more sophisticated than conventional thinking would allow.