and a team of horses has yet to be found in Bronze Age temperate Europe. Also
pertinent is that in the late Bz A2 period and what followed in central Europe,
Scandinavia and northern Italy, bows and arrows were less important than swords,
spears and axes. It is therefore likely that soon after its arrival in the Carpathian
basin the chariot became more of a status symbol than a military necessity. The
reason, I believe, was that the inhabitants of the basin had no knowledge of war.
They had never seen an army, and had established no states for a chariotry to
conquer. Instead, there were villages, some of them large and on elevated sites,
but all of them unprepared for battle and even without weapons designed
specifically to kill men. It is quite possible that a small force from the east that
was bent on conquest—100 chariots on which rode archers carrying composite
bows, and a few hundred men on the ground with spears and leather shields—
would have been sufficient to take control of a metal-rich sector of the Carpathians
or the Apuseni range. Although the chariot would have given the aggressors the
confidence to set out on their expedition, on arrival at their destination they would
have discovered that chariots would seldom be needed to maintain their control
and to extend it in a society unfamiliar with combat.
What has recently been articulated as the military doctrine of “shock and awe”
seems to have been applied for the first time in the Early Bronze Age of temperate
Europe. The armed and organized intruders would not have intended to kill the
men of the villages or to capture their women and their livestock, but only to
establish a vague “control” over the villages and over the mining and refining of
metals. In return for this novel control, the intruders offered an equally novel
offensive capacity: against wolves, bears, wild boars and the occasional lion,
first of all, but also against any conceivable human enemy. They also offered
connections to a much wider world and access to exotic and beautiful things. The
conquest of western Transylvania may have been a bloodless affair, as the very
appearance of impressive military gear may have persuaded the indigenous
population to submit. To the northwest of Transylvania, along the Carpathians in
Slovakia and the Czech Republic, an elite may already have been in control, and
when the intruders ventured that far they must have encountered some resistance.
There too, however, because offensive weapons were not yet in use (even the
“princely” burials at Leubingen and Helmsdorf contained no weapons more
formidable than daggers and hatchets) and the concept of conquest was unfamiliar,
resistance may have been slight and brief. That the charioteers took over the tell-
settlements (evidently encouraging a gradual exodus of the natives) is fairly clear:
most of the cheekpieces were found in destruction (or abandonment) levels of the
tells, where the rulers evidently lived.^67
Swords in the Carpathian basin
The most obvious sign that militarism and a ranked society came to the Carpathian
basin along with chariots is the sudden appearance of swords, which from the
beginning were prestige weapons meant for display. Not a single sword has been
found in this region in Chalcolithic or Bz A1 contexts, but the Bz A2 period saw
146 Militarism in temperate Europe