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Archaeologists unearth a Bronze Age warrior’s personal toolkit

RedSwirl

RedSwirl

Member
Oct 25, 2017
10,056

I haven't read the whole story yet but this find comes from that bronze-age battlefield someone uncovered in Germany a while back. It's dated to around the 1300's or 1200's BC.

The basic jist is that based on the number of bodies found and what they were carrying, it was a large number of professional soldiers that had come there from very far away, forming the strongest evidence of advanced civilization in Europe during the Bronze Age. They left behind no writing, but these guys would've been contemporaries of like, New Kingdom Egypt and the Mycenaean Greeks.

Three-thousand years ago, at least 140 fighters died in a battle along the banks of Germany's Tollense River. One of the fallen dropped a small kit containing tools and a handful of bronze scraps. Based on the types of artifacts archaeologists found in this kit, they've concluded that at least some of the combatants in the prehistoric battle probably came from hundreds of kilometers away in Central or even Southern Europe.

According to University of Göttingen archaeologist Tobias Uhlig and his colleagues, that suggests that large-scale battles between far-flung groups began long before people in Europe had developed a system of writing to record the history of their conflicts.
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The ancient kit contained a bronze knife with a curved blade, an awl decorated with ladders and rows of triangles, and a bronze chisel, along with an assortment of bronze scraps and small ingots. Wear marks on the chisel suggest that someone probably used it to cut bronze fragments like the ones in the kit. The curved blade of the bronze knife, with structural reinforcement on the back side, looks as if someone recycled a sickle to make it. There were also a few tubes made of rolled bronze.

Essentially, the kit looks like the kind of thing you'd carry if you wanted to keep a small stash of scrap bronze for trade or recycling into other things. People in Europe hadn't started using coins yet, but ingots and scraps of bronze and copper were starting to become an early form of currency—the idea of using small bits of metal for exchange was catching on, but it would be centuries before people decided to standardize them. Carrying around some scrap metal as spending money probably wasn't unusual anywhere in Bronze Age Europe, but the kit's long-vanished container suggests its owner wasn't local.
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WascallyWabbit

WascallyWabbit

Member
Oct 25, 2017
10,420
That's amazing we found it. I'm sure this guy thought he was fighting the most important battles the world would ever see and yet we don't even know what tribe or country he fought for. Shit is wild
 
Stinkles

Stinkles

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
20,459
So it had money in it effectively. And he was visiting Germany from somewhere else - possibly Italy or Spain.

I think they found the first Fanny Pack.

No wonder they were defeated.
 
Inugami

Inugami

Member
Oct 25, 2017
14,995
The concept of bronze scraps as currency is something I'm surprised I hadn't thought or heard of, though it makes perfect sense as proto currency.

The fact they literally chiseled bronze scraps from an actual ingot? That's just so cool and incomprehensible from today's thought process.
 
Morrigan

Morrigan

Spear of the Metal Church
Member
Oct 24, 2017
34,356
This is incredibly interesting. I didn't know about bronze scraps being proto-currency either.

I love this kind of history. A lot of it is conjecture but reasonable enough based on various pools of evidence that we keep unearthing, like a puzzle. Bronze Age Europe in particular seems to be so full of mysteries still. Still so primitive, despite civilizations flourishing to great heights in Egypt and Mesopotamia thousands of years priors.
 
Shy

Shy

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
18,520
Good stuffs.

I salute you bronze age warrior. (hopefully you weren't the bronze age equivalent of a cunt)
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Morrigan said:
This is incredibly interesting. I didn't know about bronze scraps being proto-currency either.

I love this kind of history. A lot of it is conjecture but reasonable enough based on various pools of evidence that we keep unearthing, like a puzzle. Bronze Age Europe in particular seems to be so full of mysteries still. Still so primitive, despite civilizations flourishing to great heights in Egypt and Mesopotamia thousands of years priors.
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As a species we have amnesia.
 
HardTimesFamilyPride

HardTimesFamilyPride

Member
Oct 26, 2017
8,055
Appalachia
Bronze Age history is my favourite. IIRC we don't know much at all about Bronze Age Europe so this is really awesome to me. Might have to go trawling the 'Net later to see what all we've uncovered!
 
Akira86

Akira86

Member
Oct 25, 2017
19,587
so basically a standard loot pickup from your average low level bandit?

metal scraps for 3 gold.
 
HStallion

HStallion

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
62,262
So all those videogames where I can trade scrapmetal in for all kinds of stuff at the vendors were on the money.
 
OP
OP
RedSwirl

RedSwirl

Member
Oct 25, 2017
10,056
Akira86 said:
so basically a standard loot pickup from your average low level bandit?

metal scraps for 3 gold.
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HStallion said:
So all those videogames where I can trade scrapmetal in for all kinds of stuff at the vendors were on the money.
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Bakercat said:
Low tier loot, not worth the quest to find it tbh.
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Dennis8K said:
He dropped some phat loot.
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Exactly what I was thinking.
 
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