A battle between unknowns

I recently got into a discussion with a history-buff friend about the unfortunate fact that everything we know about history is incomplete -- and generally speaking, the further back in time you go, the more incomplete it is.  She referenced human remains like Tollund Man, the Lady of Caviglione, and the Egtved Girl, all European burials that have been extensively studied.  Tollund Man is the most recent (estimated at around 400 B.C.E.) and the Lady of Caviglione by far the oldest (at around 24,000 years ago), but all three share an aura of mystery regarding who they were, raising questions we almost certainly will never have answers to.  There's evidence Tollund Man was the victim of a sacrifice, but by whom, and toward what end, is unknown.  And about the circumstances of the other two, we know next to nothing.

Compound this with the fact that for every body that has survived, at least in skeletal form, literally millions more have crumbled into dust and are completely gone.  Most of our history is, and will always remain, lost.

The reason this comes up is the excavation in the Tollense Valley of Germany of the site of an ancient battlefield, dating to around 1250 B.C.E.  It was discovered in 1996 when an amateur archaeologist was walking along the edge of the Tollense River and saw something protruding from the bank.  It turned out to be a human bone -- and since that time, over 12,500 bones and 300 bronze arrowheads have been recovered from the area.  It appears to have been the site of one of the oldest known battles in Europe.  Some of the finds were downright gruesome:

The skull of one of the battle's casualties -- with the arrowhead that killed him still embedded in his cranium [Image credit: Volker Minkus]

What is most curious about the site is not that a bunch of people fought and killed each other -- after all, humans have been doing that pretty much forever -- but that an analysis of the arrowheads shows that the battle was between two groups, one of which had traveled there from hundreds of kilometers away.  The Tollense River Valley is in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, and about half the arrowheads are of a design known to occur in archaeological sites from that area; but the other half are clearly of a different make, matching designs from much farther south, in Bavaria and Moravia.

"This suggests that at least a part of the fighters or even a complete battle faction involved in Tollense Valley derive from a very distant region," said Leif Inselmann, of the Free University of Berlin, who co-authored the paper on the study, which appeared this week in the journal Archaeology.

Who they were, and what brought them northward and into conflict with the residents there, are unknown, although there are some speculative possibilities.

"A causeway that crossed the Tollense River, constructed about five hundred years before the battle, is thought to have been the starting point of the conflict," said study co-author Thomas Terberger, of the University of Göttingen.  "The causeway was probably part of an important trade route.  Control of this bottleneck situation could well have been an important reason for the conflict...  This new information has considerably changed the image of the Bronze Age, which was not as peaceful as believed before.  The thirteenth century B.C.E. saw changes of burial rites, symbols and material culture.  I consider the conflict as a sign that this major transformation process of Bronze Age society was accompanied by violent conflicts.  Tollense is probably only the tip of the iceberg."

The fact is, though, the rest of that iceberg is likely to remain forever underwater.  Who the people were that fought and died in the now peaceful river valley in northern Germany is very likely going to stay a mystery, as will the reason that drove some of them to make the long trip from the forests of Bavaria.  It behooves us amateur students of history to remember not only the old adage that "history is written by the victors," but that the vast majority of history is completely forgotten by both sides -- what we don't know about our own past far outweighs what we do know.

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