at least ten bronze swords and fifty-one bronze spearheads. The spearheads were
blunted. The dedicators treated the swords with respect, keeping them intact but
“killing” them by annealing, rapidly quenching, and then U-bending them.^3 The
swords and spears were evidently the weapons of a defeated force, and although
still very serviceable were made into a precious sacrifice that the victors presented
to the gods and buried forever in a flowing stream.
Even more recent is the discovery of a battlefield along the Tollense river in
northeastern Germany, more than 500 airline miles from Pila del Brancon. In a
two-mile stretch along the banks of the Tollense, and in the river bed itself,
archaeologists from Mecklenburg have found bronze spearheads and bronze and
flint arrowheads. In the small area thus far excavated they have also found the
bones of more than 100 men, most of whom were in their twenties or thirties, and
of five horses.^4 This was a battleground, not a burial ground, and their bones lay
where the men and horses fell. Carbon dates indicate that the battle was fought
ca. 1250 BC. Skulls and bones were cracked by swords, axes and spears, and
arrowheads were imbedded in the bones. On the basis of what has been found,
and what remains to be dug, the archaeologists suggest that the Tollense battle
may have involved several thousand men.
The battles at the Tartaro and the Tollense show how bellicose parts of Europe
had become by its Late Bronze Age. But it had not always been so. Chapter 3
pointed out what little evidence there is for any military presence in Europe before
the late stage of the Bz A2 period. This chapter will explore the evidence for a
radical change toward the end of that period.
The advent of militarism in temperate Europe seems to have been a result of
the chariot revolution, and it happened first in the Carpathian basin. The intro -
duction of chariots into warfare obviously had enormous consequences in the Near
East. The Shaft Graves at Mycenae and tholos burials elsewhere show that in
Greece the advent of chariots coincided with the advent of militarism. In the
Carpathian basin we have nothing like the Mycenaean Shaft Graves, but it is
becoming clear that two or three generations before the end of the Bz A2 period
(the Bz A2 period in central Europe is roughly contemporary with the MH and
MM periods in the Aegean) there were innovations here of fundamental import -
ance for military history. Here too the change came with chariots. In 1998
Nikolaus Boroffka published a catalogue and description of the many bone and
antler cheekpieces found in Bronze Age Romania, and his meticulous work is
essential for the argument of this chapter.^5 For archaeologists focusing on
continuity and evolution, the military innovations may not be of much interest.
The decorative motifs on pottery in the Carpathian basin gradually evolve from
zigzag to meander and the techniques of incision change slightly, but in many
respects the pottery stays the same because that is what pottery does.^6
Although chariots made their appearance in the Carpathian basin late in the Bz
A2 period, along with swords and spears, the archaeological evidence alone does
not connect those innovations to conquest or to any other event (no destruction
levels in the Carpathian basin are dated to the second half of the Bz A2 period).
Events in prehistory by definition remain beyond our ability to describe, but the
132 Militarism in temperate Europe