The Battle of Tollense, Germany - 1250 BC

[Kirkhill]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/dig-reveals-an-event-so-violent-that-its-participants-must-have-been-civilized/2016/03/31/64cc6968-f6ba-11e5-9804-537defcc3cf6_story.html

4000 men with at least five of them mounted.
Standardized metal weapons.
Healed wounds indicating professional warriors.
Combatants from hundreds of miles away from the battle site.
Contesting a bridge 120 yards (meters) long.
High level of organization and coordination suggested.

We've been at this for a long time.  A little more practice and we might get good at it.

 

[a_majoor]

To redo this battle today would require hundreds of PowerPoint slides, at least two staff conferences, the intervention of headquarters from the local brigade up to the CJOC (and input from 1 CANDIVHQ) and oversight from the PCO and PMO.

And the troops would still need allied support for air and artillery, mechanized support (bridging and other engineer assets), plug and play reinforcements from all the Divisions, 20% Reserve augmentation and most would not have proper issue boots to wear.

The ancient Germans would kick our collective butts  :rage:

 

[George Wallace]

Was looking at that discovery the other day.  One theory was not that this was a major battle between two large armies, but more of a large band of bandits attacking a large, well guarded caravan of traders.  The location, well removed from any known villages and towns of the day, seems to lend credence to that theory in my mind.

http://oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.ca/2015/07/tollense-battle.html 

That theory may more logically explain the far ranging genetic and dietary characteristics being found among the fallen.

 

[Kirkhill]

Raiders or traders, or even settlers - warriors or merchants with their own PSC - somebody had their act together to move large numbers of bodies over long distances and then fight a major battle.

Even if it is just a foreshadowing of Wallace at Stirling bridge - a long, narrow path/bridge/causeway over marshy terrain.

 

[George Wallace]

- somebody had their act together to move large numbers of bodies over long distances and then fight a major battle.

That basically is the most important part of this discovery.  It sheds light on "civilization" in an area that has up until now been lacking and thought of throughout archaeological histories as being way in the back waters and "uncivilized".

 

[Kirkhill]

That basically is the most important part of this discovery.  It sheds light on "civilization" in an area that has up until now been lacking and thought of throughout archaeological histories as being way in the back waters and "uncivilized".

Rome casts a long shadow.

 

[Lance Wiebe]

Rome casts a long shadow.

Would this not have been before Rome's time?
I find it fascinating that we know so little about this time period, outside of the cultures around the Mediterranean.

 

[jollyjacktar]

Would this not have been before Rome's time?
I find it fascinating that we know so little about this time period, outside of the cultures around the Mediterranean.

I would have imagined the further you got from "civilization" in and around the Med the less likely you were to have societies that were big on record keeping unless it was the oral tradition vs documents and other written records.

 

[Kirkhill]

Would this not have been before Rome's time?
I find it fascinating that we know so little about this time period, outside of the cultures around the Mediterranean.

This was indeed well before Rome's time - 500 years before Rome was founded.  My oblique reference was to how much of our sense of the past is driven by the written histories that came out of Rome.  They have driven the narrative that defined Rome as civilized and the rest of Europe as uncivilized - or barbarian.  Terry Jones is a great read to set things right.

I find myself drawn to the period from the end of the last ice age, through the younger dryas and past the era of the great floods that saw the Black Sea expand, the Baltic, Sweden and Denmark made and unmade numerous times, and Britain rendered an island by the flooding of the North sea.

The old thinking was that the people experiencing those events were unfeeling, unthinking cavemen.  Now it is becoming clear that they were intellectually our equals, technologically capable and with well developed societies that actually lived through an era typified by the tales of the great floods, Ragnarok and Sodom and Gomorrah. 

And, we're still here.

By the way, 1250 BC is the era of the Cimmerian and the Phoenicians, Ramses tackling the Hittites and, broadly speaking (+/- a century), the era of Moses and Joshua.

Stonehenge and Skara Brae had been built and abandoned for a thousand years.

Edit:  Here's a great site that I check on regularly for all the Archaeological news.

http://www.archaeologica.org/NewsPage.htm