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Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle (2016)

sciencemag.org

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Re: Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle (2016)

#41

Post by Spooky23 »

defen wrote: post #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…

There’s a no true Scotsman type thing where some folks require some threshold of size or violence or whatever to meet the definition of war. I’m sure if you lived in the village where your neighbors kidnapped and raped your wife and daughters and stole your livestock the distinction may not quite work.

As with anything, people run with type of thing and make seemingly absurd leaps.

Re: Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle (2016)

#43

Post by erik_seaberg »

nl wrote: post #32
c-smile wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not realize that Hacker News is that old ...

I don't know exactly when HN was founded, but it was quite large when I joined.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1 looks pretty plausible as the actual first post, though I can't remember whether postings always had ids (most pageviews used to have URLs with random names that pointed at expiring Arc closures).

Re: Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle (2016)

#44

Post by selestify »

jariel wrote: post #39
Zippogriff wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

It should be a revelation because war is a civilizational concept - it's a form of organized violence, 'organization' being the keyword here. If you're living in scattered, small tribes, then at most you can get into small tribal scuffles and vendetta ... but war requires planning, organization, support, possibly diplomacy, marshalling of resources - so it's hard to have proper war without the mechanisms in place to…

Indeed, the article itself says

> We had considered scenarios of raids, with small groups of young men killing and stealing food, but to imagine such a big battle with thousands of people is very surprising

So it's not so much the violence itself that's the surprise, as it is the scale of said violence

Re: Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle (2016)

#45

Post by poma88 »

EForEndeavour wrote: post #26

This article was impossible not to read all the way through. I really hope to be able to write in such a compelling way at some point in my life. Admittedly, the subject matter of an epic battle is probably intrinsically more interesting than what I'll typically write about in my career, but still, the author tells such a vivid story by diving into minute details only to zoom back out to a broader context.

Go for this book, it changed my life: "The Elements of Style was listed as one of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923 by Time in its 2011 list"

Re: Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle (2016)

#46

Post by flexie »

defen wrote: post #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…

Think about the organisation that an army involving hundreds of people must have meant:

You have to gather them. There is no written means of communication yet in that part of Europe. There are not many roads yet. They live on farms spread out over vast territories. The article says there were 5 people per square km. Most are probably kids and half are women, so to find 1 able bodied man of fighting age you might need 20 people, which would require 4 square km. Now, if like in later ages the soldiers were the second and third oldest sons, you might find 1 soldier per 10 square km. To gather an army of 500 men, you would need a territory of roughly 100*50 km.

You have to feed them for days, weeks, or maybe even months before or between battles. Crazy expensive at a time where just feeding yourself is not easy.

They have to sleep somewhere, even if just in tents.

You have to provide some weapons and equipment, even if merely wooden clubs and spears.

Unless they are slaves, which some might have been, you may have to pay them or they need to be convinced they fight for their own sake, for example because a foreign people is invading their land.

The most obvious way to organize all that is to imagine a strong regional rulers, a class of local nobles, taxes, some sort of manorialism. Structures that are known later in history (or much further south in the bronze age). But maybe Northern Europe was also organized like that already in the bronze age.

Re: Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle (2016)

#47

Post by schanq »

flexie wrote: post #46
defen wrote: post #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…

Think about the organisation that an army involving hundreds of people must have meant: You have to gather them. There is no written means of communication yet in that part of Europe. There are not many roads yet. They live on farms spread out over vast territories. The article says there were 5 people per square km. Most are probably kids and half are women, so to find 1 able bodied man of fighting age you might nee…

> The most obvious way to organize all that is to imagine a strong regional rulers, a class of nobles, taxes, some sort of manorialism.

Yes.. and/or religious leaders.

Re: Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle (2016)

#48

Post by arethuza »

nl wrote: post #30
arethuza wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about Germany, but the UK is full of ancient fortifications - from earthworks that would enclose a few huts to huge ruined stone fortresses. Almost all of these get very little attention.

I thought most of these fortifications are thought to be bronze age, not neolithic.

In fact they are probably later, but they are definitely "prehistoric" in the sense that for most (certainly here in Scotland) there are no records, written or oral, for most.

Re: Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle (2016)

#49

Post by philwelch »

arifleman wrote: post #12

Lindybeige did a great and relatively short video on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoYj4BZdB1w

As much as I enjoy Lindybeige, I would take his analysis with a grain of salt. There’s a rather infamous case where Lindybeige released a video filled with bizarre and misleading claims about the MG34 and MG42 German machine guns (which he bizarrely conflated with each other and incorrectly dubbed the “Spandau”) and their relative merits with the Bren, followed by a rather substantial rebuttal from Military History Visualized, to which Lindybeige issued a defensive counter-rebuttal, the comments of which contain further commentary from Forgotten Weapons. If you don’t really want to get invested in an argument between three youtubers, fair enough—my takeaway is that while Lindybeige often has some idea about the topics he presents, he also has strong biases and gaps in his understanding that often result in him confidently pontificating well past his actual expertise.

Re: Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle (2016)

#50

Post by Daub »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #27
srveale wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your second sentence contradicts your first sentence

It's a fringe viewpoint but some knowledgeable people have argued that Pan troglodytes is better called Homo troglodytes. Perhaps GP is among them. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2003/05/chimps-be...

GP is indeed amongst them, though I admit I was not clear in my original statement. Chimps (and our chimp-like ancestors) both developed culture, warfare And the beginnings of language. In this sense, ‘human-ness’ is a continuum. For culture see this fascinating material...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/animal-fashion-som...

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