[HN Gopher] Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronz...
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Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle
(2016)
Author : lighttower
Score : 63 points
Date : 2020-09-07 05:21 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sciencemag.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencemag.org)
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11383601
| c-smile wrote:
| I did not realize that Hacker News is that old ...
| daveslash wrote:
| 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...
| sho_hn wrote:
| Woosh.
| mcguire wrote:
| Ouch.
| arifleman wrote:
| Lindybeige did a great and relatively short video on this
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoYj4BZdB1w
| yread wrote:
| Same battle as in this recent article
| https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/warrior-skeletons-re...
| yread wrote:
| Also this one
| https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2019/10/puzzling-...
| charlieflowers wrote:
| The article claims something I found surprising -- that the
| written word was not common near Germany until about 1000 AD.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Some writing was around 1700 years ago -
| https://archive.archaeology.org/1207/trenches/frienstedt_ger...
| brnt wrote:
| That's true for nearly all of nonRoman Europe.
| marshray wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)#/me.
| ..
| marshray wrote:
| They weren't called the Dark Ages for nothin'.
| defen wrote:
| > 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?
| Zippogriff wrote:
| 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.
| codezero wrote:
| I was surprised when I first read about that theory (that pre-
| historic people were largely free of warfare) and it seems
| really unintuitive, but I also kind of get why it may have been
| easy to paint that picture even with some science. It's nice to
| see us trudging forward and making sure to correct our records
| :)
|
| I think this is where I first ran into the concept:
| https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/08/archaeologists-uncov...
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Yeah, sounds like p-hacking.
|
| Still, supporting a proper army is a massive economic
| undertaking, so it seems likely that army sizes (and battle
| sizes) started relatively small and grew over time. Maybe this
| new finding actually does suggest that scale-up happened
| earlier than most previous legitimate estimates.
|
| My money's on p-hacking though.
| kwillets wrote:
| It may be more the level of organization. Warfare was common
| but thought to be more on the family/clan scale.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| This is my understanding. Most of what I've read suggests
| that there was lots of "tribal raiding" going on, but
| "warfare" pretty much by definition requires larger polities
| such as city states or nations which are thought to be a more
| recent development.
| arethuza wrote:
| 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.
| Daub wrote:
| I would say that the ability to declare war is one of the
| things that distinguishes us as humans. Even chimpanzees
| declare war, and for the same reasons we do.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
| srveale wrote:
| Your second sentence contradicts your first sentence
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| 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...
| curiousllama wrote:
| Cmon, a guy with a sword as the first graphic? This is the Bronze
| Age - a club is a better weapon at that point...
| EForEndeavour wrote:
| 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.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| The pictures are staggering.
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