Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle (2016)
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Re: Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle (2016)
#2Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11383601
Re: Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle (2016)
#3Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11383601
I did not realize that Hacker News is that old ...
Re: Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle (2016)
#4Re: Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle (2016)
#5Same battle as in this recent article
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/warrior-skeletons-re...
Re: Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle (2016)
#6Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11383601
I did not realize that Hacker News is that old ...
It was originally posted to HN only 2 months before you created your HN Account. ;-)
I checked my account - created 3 years prior to the article. And I thought that I was late to the HN game when I joined. Wow... time flies...
Re: Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle (2016)
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did not realize that Hacker News is that old ...
It was originally posted to HN only 2 months before you created your HN Account. ;-) I checked my account - created 3 years prior to the article. And I thought that I was late to the HN game when I joined. Wow... time flies...
Woosh.
Re: Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle (2016)
#8The pictures are staggering.
Re: Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle (2016)
#9> Before the 1990s, “for a long time we didn’t really believe in war in prehistory,” DAI’s Hansen says. The grave goods were explained as prestige objects or symbols of power rather than actual weapons. “Most people thought ancient society was peaceful, and that Bronze Age males were concerned with trading and so on,”
Is that really true (that "we" didn't believe in war in prehistory)? It seems like a case of taking an absurd null hypothesis, not finding any evidence to refute it, and then deciding that your null hypothesis is probably true. We have plenty of evidence of pre-literate societies engaging in organized warfare, so why would prehistoric Europe be any different?
Re: Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle (2016)
#10> Before the 1990s, “for a long time we didn’t really believe in war in prehistory,” DAI’s Hansen says. The grave goods were explained as prestige objects or symbols of power rather than actual weapons. “Most people thought ancient society was peaceful, and that Bronze Age males were concerned with trading and so on,” Is that really true (that "we" didn't believe in war in prehistory)? It seems like a case of taking…
It's true enough that in the early 2000s one of my poli-sci professors devoted most of a course to the book War Before Civilization and kept hammering on the idea of prehistoric war being widespread and common as some kind of huge revelation and surprise.
I found such intense and sustained focus baffling, since the point seemed obvious (though the evidence was interesting, at least). I've since come to understand this as some "inside baseball" grad-level anthropology leaking through to the undergrad curriculum. We newbies didn't need to be convinced because we'd never strongly held the contrary view in the first place, but the field (and related ones) had only recently convinced itself so thought it worth spending a lot of time on.