New evidence of the oldest battle in Europe - some warriors came from Moravia

3,300 years ago, a great bloody conflict took place at the Tollensee River in the valley of the same name in northeastern Germany. Recently, a detailed analysis of bronze and flint arrowheads has produced evidence that a large of the warriors came from more southerly areas, particularly present-day Bavaria and Moravia.

The first traces of the battle were discovered in 1996 by amateur archaeologist Ronald Borwardt. He found an arm bone with a flint arrowhead embedded in an exposed bank of the Tollense River. Since then, there have been several partial excavations. Since 2007, the area has been systematically explored by outcrops, diving and detector surveys, which have yielded evidence of extensive conflict along a nearly 3 km stretch of the Tollense River.

More than 300 metal finds have been discovered, dating mainly to the 3rd Nordic Bronze Age (1300-1100 BC). There were also 1,250 bones belonging to 150 individuals, mainly young men with typical traces of perimortem trauma. The source of the conflict may have been an important valley crossing along a trade route, but the actual extent and cause of the conflict are as yet unknown.

The more than 150 individuals found here (so far) suggest that over 2,000 people were involved in the battle, with some sources putting the number as high as 5,000. This is an unprecedented number for the Nordic Bronze Age. No other conflict of this scale and earlier date has yet been discovered. However, there is not much information about the dead at Tollense. Who was involved in the battle and where did the warriors come from? These questions were answered by a team of researchers from several German institutions who compared bronze and flint arrowheads from thearrowheads from the battle site with more than 4,743 arrowheads from southern Scandinavia, Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

The thirteenth century BC was a period that saw an overall increase in armed conflict. This corresponded to the increased scale and professionalisation of organised violence. Wooden mallets, flint points, bronze knives, palstaves, spearheads, arrowheads and swords have been found in the Tollense valley, most of which are associated with conflict. Arrowheads are the most numerous, the majority being bronze arrowheads, which far outnumber the evidence from any other Norse Bronze Age site.

"Arrowheads are a kind of 'smoking gun'. Like a murder weapon about the culprit, they provide clues about the warriors in the Tollense Valley, where they came from," said lead research author Leif Inselmann of Freie Universität Berlin. Most of the arrowheads correspond to types that are occasionally found in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and thus probably belonged to local warriors. But other arrowheads with straight or diamond-shaped bases, backward "hooks" or a sharp thorn at the bottom are known from southern areas such as present-day Bavaria and Moravia. These types of spikes have not been found in burials from the Tollense area, suggesting that the locals did not have them and thus did not use them in battle.

Analysis of these arrowheads demonstrates the presence of foreign fighters in the Tollense Valley, most from the southern regions of central Europe. For the first time in Central Europe, not only trade and cultural exchange, but also warfare on a supra-regional scale can be documented. The approximately 150 recorded individuals from the Tollense Valley are most likely only the tip of the iceberg. Given that the number of combatants was up to several thousand, it is possible that one or more groups/tribes were involved in the conflict and that it was not just a small raiding war party.

"The Tollense conflict falls within a period of great change. This raises questions about the organisation of such violent conflicts. Were the Bronze Age warriors organised as a tribal coalition, a retinue or mercenaries of a charismatic 'war leader' or were they even armies of an early kingdom?' Leif Inselmann concludes the paper with a question.

Roman Nemec

Sources: phys.org, cambridge.org

Older articles about Tollensee on hunterpoklad.cz

• Early Bronze Age battlefield found on the banks of a German river
• June 13, 2011 Oldest Bronze Age battle site

The site of the Battle of Tollense

Tollense River

Arrowhead from a flint in the arm bone found at the Tollense battle site

Distribution of bronze arrowheads of types 4B, 4C and 2A

Projection of all wounds found from the preserved skeletal remains

a skull pierced by a bronze arrowhead

bronze and flint arrowheads from the Tollensee valley