A bronze age battlefield. Weapons and trauma in the Tollense Valley, north-eastern Germany.pdf

A Bronze Age battleﬁeld? Weapons

and trauma in the Tollense Valley,

north-eastern Germany

Detlef Jantzen 1 , Ute Brinker 1 ,Jorg Orschiedt 2 , Jan Heinemeier 3 ,

Jurgen Piek 4 , Karlheinz Hauenstein 5 , Joachim Kruger 6 , Gundula

Lidke 9 , Harald Lubke 7 , Reinhard Lampe 8 , Sebastian Lorenz 8 ,

Manuela Schult 8 & Thomas Terberger 9 ∗

Chance discoveries of weapons, horse bones

and human skeletal remains along the banks

of the River Tollense led to a campaign

of research which has identiﬁed them as

the debris from a Bronze Age battle. The

resources of war included horses, arrowheads

and wooden clubs, and the dead had suffered

blows indicating face-to-face combat. This

surprisingly modern and decidedly vicious

struggle took place over the swampy braided

streams of the river in an area of settled,

possibly coveted, territory. Washed along by

the current, the bodies and weapons came to

rest on a single alluvial surface.

Keywords: Germany, Bronze Age, warfare, conﬂict, weapons, arrowheads, wooden clubs,

trauma

Landesamt fur Kultur und Denkmalpﬂege, Abteilung Archaologie, Domhof 4/5, D-19055 Schwerin, Germany

Archaologisches Institut, Universitat Hamburg, Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, D-20146 Hamburg, Germany

AMS 14 C Dating Centre, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Aarhus University, Ny Munkegade 120,

Building 1520, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark

Klinik fur Neurochirurgie, Universitatsklinikum Rostock, Schillingallee 35, D-18057 Rostock, Germany

Institut fur Diagnostische und Interventionelle Radiologie, Universitatsklinikum Rostock, Schillingallee 35,

D-18055 Rostock, Germany

Historisches Institut, Universitat Greifswald, D-17487 Greifswald, Germany

Zentrum fur Baltische und Skandinavische Archaologie, Schleswig-Holsteinisches Landesmuseum Schloß

Gottorf, Schlossinsel, D-24837 Schleswig, Germany

Geographisches Institut, Universitat Greifswald, D-17487 Greifswald, Germany

Lehrstuhl fur Ur- und Fruhgeschichte, Universitat Greifswald, D-17487 Greifswald, Germany

∗ Author for correspondence (Email: terberge@uni-greifswald.de)

Received: 27 July 2010; Accepted: 21 September 2010; Revised: 7 December 2010

ANTIQUITY 85 (2011): 417–433

http://antiquity.ac.uk/ant/085/ant0850417.htm

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A Bronze Age battleﬁeld?

Introduction

From c . 2200 BC onwards, the material culture of Central Europe saw an increase in the

production of weapons such as axes, halberds, daggers and — later on — swords. Without

doubt these were prestigious objects, but at the same time wear-traces on swords indicate

their true use as weapons (Kristiansen 1984, 2002). Further information on the belligerent

nature of Bronze Age society is provided by settlement structure. In Central Europe, the

ﬁrst hillforts and fortiﬁed settlements were constructed in the Early Bronze Age (Czebreszuk

et al . 2008; Kneisel et al . 2008) with increasing evidence for hillforts from the later Lusatian

and Urnﬁeld cultures (e.g. Rind 1999; Abels 2002). In northern Germany and southern

Scandinavia, reliable evidence for fortiﬁcations seems to be unavailable before the Late to

Final Bronze Age (e.g. Kuhlmann & Segschneider 2004: 70) with a possible exception in

north-western Germany (Veit & Wendowski-Schunemann 2006). A similar situation is

reﬂected in the evidence from Britain (Thorpe 2006: 157).

These various lines of evidence indicate an increasing incidence of interpersonal violence

and conﬂict. But while some authors characterise the Bronze Age in the north as a stratiﬁed

order with a warrior aristocracy (Vandkilde 1996: 259; Fyllingen 2003: 40), until now

skeletal remains have not shown a signiﬁcant frequency of injury or violent death (Peter-

Rocher 2006, 2007). Here we present new evidence from a river valley in north-eastern

Germany, where human bones and weapons can be interpreted, for the ﬁrst time, as signs

of Bronze Age group conﬂict.

The ﬁnds

Since the 1980s, the Tollense Valley in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern has produced a

remarkable number of bronze objects ( c . 70), recovered mainly from dredged river sediments

in a section c . 3km long (Figure 1). Among the ﬁnds are tools and weapons such as knives,

several arrowheads and spearheads, adzes, a dagger blade and a small sword fragment.

Ornamental objects are also represented by two ﬁbulas, various pins and a decorated box

( Gurteldose )(Figure2).

From time to time, human remains have also been found in the valley and by the 1990s

numerous skulls had been registered by the heritage service. Among the human remains,

recovered in 1996 by amateur archaeologist R. Borgwardt, was a right upper arm bone with

a Bronze Age ﬂint arrowhead embedded in the shoulder joint. Borgwardt also identiﬁed a

wooden club in its original position close to the bones. Soon afterwards, test trenches at the

site documented a consistent layer c . 1m below the ground surface, containing clusters of

human and animal bones in ﬁne-grained, ﬂuvial sediments (Figure 3). Most of the animal

bones were identiﬁed as horse, representing a minimum of two individuals. A human skull

with a large fracture in the frontal bone provided additional evidence for heavy violence

(Figure 4). In 1999 Borgwardt also recovered human remains in connection to a second

wooden weapon.

In 2008 D. Jantzen and T. Terberger initiated a research programme at the site, carrying

out investigations by test excavation and diving, and obtaining data on human pathology

and the geological and botanical sequence (from 50 cores). This was supported by a series

of AMS radiocarbon dates.

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Detlef Jantzen et al.

Figure 1. Map of the Tollense Valley in north-east Germany. The valley section with human remains found in secondary

positions is marked in light green. Large black dots indicate several bronze ﬁnds.

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A Bronze Age battleﬁeld?

Figure 2. Bronze ﬁnds from the Tollense Valley: 1–2 & 4) spearheads; 3) arrowhead; 5–6) pins (Ulrich 2008); 7) adze; 8)

box; 9) sickle; 10) ﬁbula of Spindlersfeld type (Schoknecht 2000). Scales: 1) 1:2; 2–8) 2:3; 9) 1:3.

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Detlef Jantzen et al.

Figure 3. The ﬁnd layer in the test trench excavated in 1996. Note the mixture of human bones and the two long bones

found close to the river in anatomically correct positions (photograph: Ch. Jantzen).

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