Migliaia di ossa e centinaia di armi rivelano macabri dettagli su una battaglia vecchia di 3.250 anni (Valle del Tollense, Meclemburgo-Pomerania occidentale)

TLDR:

In 1996, an amateur archaeologist spotted a bone in the Tollense Valley (Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania) in northeast Germany, thus discovering Europe’s oldest known battlefield (3,250 years ago).

For a long time, researchers thought that Bronze Age “wars” could involve tens of local guys at best, but Tollense blows the theory apart.

Since then, excavations have unearthed 300 metal finds and 12,500 bones belonging to about 150 individuals who fell in battle at the site in 1250 BC. Recovered weaponry has included swords, wooden clubs and the array of arrowheads — including some found still embedded in the bones of the fallen.

A recent study published in *Antiquity* reveals that arrowheads from the Tollense Valley conflict represent the earliest known example of interregional warfare in Europe. While some arrowheads were locally made in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, others resemble designs from southern regions like Bavaria and Moravia. This indicates that at least part of the fighters, or an entire faction, came from a distant area, highlighting the complexity of organized violence thousands of years ago.

The large scale of battle has researchers rethinking what social organization and warfare were like during the Bronze Age.

“Were the Bronze Age warriors (organized) as a tribal coalition, the retinue or mercenaries of a charismatic leader — a kind of ‘warlord’ — or even the army of an early kingdom?” Inselmann said.

“We have many sites where we find evidence of mass killing and even slaughter of whole communities,” Molloy said, “but this is the first time that the demographics of the dead are those we can reasonably argue were warriors and not, for example, whole families migrating.”

Bronze Age societies built fortified settlements and smiths to forge weapons, but Tollense shows that they “were also created for very real military purposes including full scale battles that involved armies on the march, moving into hostile lands and waging wars”, Molloy said..