Tollense - a bronze age battle?
The latest - and this one may have the record for the longest digression of all. I do eventually steer it back to the topic, though.
Archaeologists may have unearthed the first good evidence for a battle in the bronze age, in north-east Germany. The paper was published in 2011, so this isn't exactly 'breaking news' but if you didn't know about before, then you can imagine that it is more recent to add that thrill of the new.
Comments (5)
Very interesting. Makes you think about how good the good old times actually were. I wonder how the few women and children ended up there. That bit reminded me of a gruesome find from a small place just next to my hometown although that admittedly happened approximately 3000 years earlier: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talheim_Death_Pit" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talheim_Death_Pit</a> So, yes, tribal warfare is a very terrible thing. Could it be, that at Tollense, too, a whole settlement was wiped out (hence no burial), and we just didn´t find the remains yet of those who waited at home for the outcome, only those who went out to the riverbank to meet the advancing enemies? And yeah, violence as a cause of death seems to have been significant on the continent in the olden days....
The time frame coinsides with the bronze age collaps.
I was going to say that it reminded me of a shillelagh, but forgot.
Oh, yeah - the wikipedia page for that has one that's quite similar, and even has a curved handle - it's just a section of trunk of a small tree, with an up-curving branch. -- <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shillelagh_(club)" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shillelagh_(club)</a>
That hammer-head is a common weapon type (maybe not that particular shape) - see 'knob kerrie'.