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This is a pretty interesting article for those who 'dig' this stuff.


Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle

Wife and I saw this the other day online. Fascinating.

WOW... thanks for sharing.

I can't help but wonder what they were fighting about.



Was it an election year?

Cool link Steve.

Unrelated, but I was watching a History show a while back and they ran across this object from Waterloo..

Was a bad day for somebody..

Interesting!

Thanks!

Steve
Thanks for posting this I am a bit of history buff, so enjoyed it very much. Still need to get together for that coffee some day. Cheers NC

Thanks for the post.. very interesting read...

When I lived in England, there was a park up at the end of the street....in olden times it was used as a fording spot for the river there, as it was narrow and shallow..

we had an incident, where one of the local farmers had changed from dairy cattle to tulip farming.. so he had purchased a large John Deere Tractor and was out plowing when there was a large explosion...destroyed the tractor, but the size of it was what saved the farmers life, as the tractor took the brunt of the explosion...

so as was common in those days, the British Army got out there with Geiger counters and started going over the local area.... they ended up finding a whole lot of bombs buried over the local area from WW2, Battle of Britain...

searching German Records, they found that a 110 plane raid was to bomb a target in a town close by, that had a munitions factory in it and also one that made parts for aircraft production...

they couldn't find the target due to overcast ( it was a night raid), so they turned east, defused the bombs they could and dropped them over farm country, as to not have to carry the weight back to Germany...burning up fuel...and not making it back over the North Sea....

There was so much bombing during the Battle of Britain, it all got lost in the shuffle...

HOWEVER one of the interesting things that they found at the local park, was a bunch of helmets, swords etc, on both sides of the river bank where the River Ouse was at its narrowest point...and tons of bones and skeletons...

The park was walled off as the British Government came up and excavated the entire place... they figured that it was the remains of a battle between Vikings and local defending army.... the death toll was considered to be about 900 men based on what they found...which would have been a major engagement for the time... however, there was never any records of the battle historically...

from a kids perspective, it was really cool.. but this being 1964, almost all the local kids started going around imitating Vikings and battles...with broom sticks and mop handles for swords and Garbage Can lids for Shields...

one of the great things about living in England from age 11 to 14, was all the historical stuff they were constantly finding....

ON the base where my old man was stationed, they had the new RF4C Phantoms ( 10th TAC Recon Wing At Alconbury)..my dad was part of the team that was testing infrared filming, that was to be use to find and follow VC tunnels in Vietnam....in the testing flying over Europe, they were finding some amazing things...

some of the ones I remember is that they found a buried Roman Bath complex up in Scotland, and at the time period they didn't know the Romans had made it that far north in Britain...

They located in Baden Wurtemberg in Germany in the Black Forest, a land mark put up by the Nazis....a grove of Maple Trees had been planted in the Black Forest Pines.. in the Fall when these Maples' leaves turn color, they turn Golden..it was overgrown was why it hadn't been noticed before.. but under infrared, the grove was a Swastika and under it they formed 1933...the rise of the Nazis to power..

Also in Bavaria, infrared showed several tunnels buried into mountain sides, that had been sealed before the fall of Germany.. they had evidently been put there for a clandestine guerrilla warfare against the Allies... contained a bunch of brand new never used arms, to include Tiger Tanks...and also an underground holding area of HE 162 Fighters, TA 152s, and Arado 234s...

What the article the OP presented makes one wonder what else is undiscovered in Europe and other parts of the world..

I remember getting the wind knocked out of me before; thinking that guy didn't though.

Given the direction of that hole, the term 'surrender monkeys' must have been coined in some conflict after Waterloo.

I suspect that might have gotten a lung.....

Steve, thanks for posting that link. Fascinating stuff, and the conclusions about this being a pivotal time for development of civilization is certainly on point.

I was struck by this one statement in the paper:



The estimates may be low, if what is commonly held to be true by archaeologists/historians of warfare bears in this case. Massed battle hand-to-hand fighting rarely produced casualty rates as high a 25-30%, and never more than that. Armies typically broke when casualties approached 1 man in 4 in Iron Age battles, and probably even lower than that in Bronze Age fights. This battle was really at a transition point from Stone-age to Bronze Age, if I read the authors correctly. To be sure, casualties could go up after the battle during the pursuit phase, but that presumes effective numbers of cavalry... which they may not have had.

Anyway, the authors' suggestion that KIA's were as high as 20% is really, really high. Mortality rates of 10% or less were more the norm. It's not like modern battles where most of the casualties are inflicted at a distance.

So, my point (finally!) is: if you take the more commonly-accepted casualty predictions from ancient warfare, the number of skeletons they found, when extrapolated over the whole battlefield, may suggest much larger armies than the figures these guys have published. Like 8000-10,000 or more.

Big doings.

Holy crap, you think it was violent? Bashed him in the forehead and then again after he fell, I'd say.

Hatari, I don't think the missing piece of left parietal skull bone is from antemortem trauma... you can see the suture line as the anterior boundary, which suggests the fracture occurred quite some time postmortem. A clean break along the suture line is more likely to happen after all soft/connective tissue has decayed away. I could be wrong, but that's what it says to me.

Can you say, "sucking chest wound", boys and girls? I knew you could...

And no saran wrap to seal it off.

But, I'm guessing his suffering was not prolonged...

Fascinating!!!

And to think there is no reference in recorded or oral histories to tie it to

That must have been made by one of those bullets that starts expanding when it leaves the muzzle. I wonder if there was complete penetration?