Warriors from the south? Arrowheads from the Tollense Valley and Central Europe

There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Abstract

Investigations in the Tollense Valley in north-eastern Germany have provided evidence of a large and violent conflict in the thirteenth century BC. Typological analysis of arrowheads from the valley (10 flint and 54 bronze specimens) and comparison with type distributions in Central Europe, presented here for the first time, emphasise the supra-regional nature of the conflict. While the flint arrowheads are typical for the local Nordic Bronze Age, the bronze arrowheads show a mixture of local and non-local forms, adding to the growing evidence for a clash between local groups and at least one incoming group from southern Central Europe.

Related collections

Most cited references 37

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: not found

A Bronze Age battlefield? Weapons and trauma in the Tollense Valley, north-eastern Germany

Karlheinz Hauenstein, Jurgen M.J. Piek, Detlef Jantzen … (2011)

Chance discoveries of weapons, horse bones and human skeletal remains along the banks of the River Tollense led to a campaign of research which has identified them as the debris from a Bronze Age battle. The resources of war included horses, arrowheads and wooden clubs, and the dead had suffered blows indicating face-to-face combat. This surprisingly modern and decidedly vicious struggle took place over the swampy braided streams of the river in an area of settled, possibly coveted, territory. Washed along by the current, the bodies and weapons came to rest on a single alluvial surface.