CHAPTER TWO BRONZE AGE ENCOUNTERS: VIOLENT OR PEACEFUL? Anthony Harding I start from the now universally accepted premise that the Bronze Age was a time when frequent interactions were taking place in Europe: encounters between people, from near and far, occurred on a regular basis. While I do not go as far as some in accepting all the possible sources of evidence, or at least all the individual pieces of data that are said to prove these interactions, there are still plenty of reasons not to doubt that links between groups of people, large and small, stretched over longer and shorter distances in the Bronze Age. These include: • The evidence of boats, such as the Dover boat (Clark 2004); this does not include log canoes or coracles, but refers to plank-built boats, or possibly skincovered boats, if that is what the Scandinavian rock art shows. Clearly, the technology existed for transport by sea or river and must have been frequently used. • Overland transport, although this is more difficult to demonstrate. Of course, there were wheeled vehicles and draught animals pulling them. Route networks have often been hypothesized based on find distributions (Sprockhoff 1930: Taf. 45). • The transport of raw materials, notably metals but also amber. While the movement of copper has long been demonstrated, the movement of tin is usually assumed rather than proved; the Uluburun wreck showed that tin was moved around the East Mediterranean (Yalcin, Pulak and Slotta 2005: 572–575), and 16 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Exeter, on 13 Jan 2020 at 12:42:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316884522.003 BRONZE AGE ENCOUNTERS: VIOLENT OR PEACEFUL? 17 the new finds from Salcombe, Devon, with many tin ingots among a collection of Bronze Age objects, show that the assumption of movement is justified.1 • The movement of manufactured goods: in the case of the Uluburun, pottery of many different origins; in the case of amber, spacer beads travelling to Greece from Central or Western Europe (this was a form that was probably only invented once: Harding and Hughes-Brock 1974). • The movement of people: early work on Beaker people is now confirmed by, among others, the Amesbury Archer (Fitzpatrick 2011); in a Bronze Age context, the cemetery at Neckarsulm contained thirty-eight individuals, all young males, of whom twelve had non-local isotopic signatures (Wahl and Price 2013). • Such isotopic work might eventually confirm the picture of ‘Fremde Frauen’ (women moving in marriage) suggested by Jockenhövel (1991). In other words, there is abundant evidence that people were moving themselves, the materials they needed, and the goods they were producing. In this sense, we can argue that the Bronze Age world was indeed one of encounters between individuals, groups and possibly even larger groupings of people, although the latter is not easy to demonstrate until relatively late in the period; this bears directly on the question of warfare. It is also unquestionably the case that major changes involving technology and subsistence occurred in the Bronze Age, but also – most evident archaeologically – changes in material culture. Such changes have often been taken to indicate population movements, although one must be aware that they may simply reflect changes in ideology or worldview. Examples include: • The Beaker period. A period in which it is commonly assumed that a population spread rapidly and widely across Europe. This is perhaps now backed up by isotopic support (Price et al. 2004). • Upheavals in the East Mediterranean in the later thirteenth and twelfth centuries bc which saw the decline and fall of the palace civilizations of Greece, Anatolia and the Near East, and the movements of the so-called Sea Peoples. • The start of the cremation rite as represented by the Urnfield phenomenon. Here one recalls Wolfgang Kimmig’s suggestion that there was a connection between the rise of Urnfields and the activities of the Sea Peoples (Kimmig 1964). These are important matters because the arrival of ‘new’ people, in whatever form and by whatever means, brings with it the possibility of conflict between the new and the old. Is it possible to associate episodes of violence with the idea of new arrivals? In this, the evidence of violence on particular sites is potentially 1 The finds are not yet published; some images are available on the Internet, e.g., http:// news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/02/photogalleries/100224-shipwreckbronze-agetreasure-salcombe-britain-pictures/. Earlier finds from the sea off Salcombe: Needham, Parham and Frieman 2013. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Exeter, on 13 Jan 2020 at 12:42:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316884522.003 18 HAR DING crucial. Among the places which deserve particular attention in this respect, the site of Velim, Czech Republic, is especially important, although other sites suggest that aspects of what occurred there took place at other key spots. The evidence from Velim, although only partially published, is particularly telling (Harding et al. 2007; Hrala, Šumberová and Vávra 2000). The presence of numerous human skeletons lying in disorder in ditches and pits; the fact that the site, situated on a low hill, was enclosed by a series of ditches; and the presence of significant numbers of arrowheads on the site all suggest that Velim was the location of special activities which have plausibly been interpreted as war-related violence. Numerous human individuals were represented in both articulated and disarticulated form, young and old, male and female; that this was no normal burial site is indicated by a number of considerations including the practice of collecting crania and placing them in pits. A proportion of the human bones (a relatively small number has been studied so far) show pathological features, including stab and cut marks. Pottery indicates a date at the transition from the Tumulus period to the Urnfields – in Reinecke terms Br C2 to D, while the few available radiocarbon dates centre on 1400 cal. bc. Parallels to Velim are few, but one site that appears markedly similar is the Cezavy hill at Bluč ina (Moravia) (Tihelka 1969; subsequent excavations by Milan Salaš are published in numerous interim reports); here, ditches contained plentiful human skeletons lying in disorder from a very similar time period, Br D (the early Velatice culture). Too little is in the public domain so far to explore the parallels more closely, and there are certainly differences in detail, but the overall effect is similar. Other sites that might be included, such as the mass burial at Wassenaar in the Netherlands (Louwe Kooijmans 1993), are passed over in this paper, but the extraordinary situation in the Tollense Valley in Mecklenburg with its bronzes and human bones, some with notable trauma, cannot be ignored (Jantzen et al. 2011). Radiocarbon dating indicates the late thirteenth century cal. bc: a somewhat later date than Velim. Are these situations one-offs? Certainly they are not the norm; one could not say that they appear as a frequent or recurrent element of the Central European Bronze Age. Yet they occur close to the time when we are witnessing the major shift that is represented by the change to Urnfields. So what is going on? Are these obviously violent encounters symptomatic of a wider ethos that pervaded the Bronze Age, or at least one part of it, in the time from the midsecond millennium onwards? Here, we can bring in a range of other individual pieces of evidence that are often used to support the idea of violent encounters, what we might call war (or at least conflict), as typical of the Bronze Age: the development of weaponry, trauma on human skeletons, and the rise of fortifications are all things that have been used to suggest the rise of first the warrior and later the war-band, with at least some of them involved in Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Exeter, on 13 Jan 2020 at 12:42:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316884522.003 BRONZE AGE ENCOUNTERS: VIOLENT OR PEACEFUL? 19 recurring episodes of violence (review of the evidence, with references: Harding 2007). Now, you might think therefore that I have already answered the title of this paper: there were indeed peaceful encounters in the Bronze Age, and there were also violent ones. That much is obvious. But can we take this a bit further by contextualizing the encounters and thereby indicate some way of explaining why violence occurred at some periods and places and not at others? In considering the period 1400–1200 bc, where all three sites I have mentioned fall, as well as the time leading up to the collapse of palace civilizations in the southeast of Europe, we could bring a number of factors into the argument: the increasing number of weapons (especially those that were specifically designed to hurt humans, notably swords and spears) and, conversely, the armour which was presumably intended to mitigate their effects, or the very large number of hoards which characterize the period immediately following the first century or so of Urnfield life (Ha A1 in south German terms) in the twelfth century bc. For this, the usual range of explanations are advanced, with most people nowadays preferring the ritual to other causes. But why this period in particular should have seen so very many hoards deposited has not been satisfactorily explained. It does, however, seem a big coincidence to find such a phenomenon present at a time when a big change in cultural practice was taking place. If we are looking at ritual here, should we be considering other aspects of ritual practice that characterize the period, including those that are war-related? Many authors have suggested that many of the encounters depicted on Swedish rock art are ritual in nature; some believe that much weaponry and armour was never intended for real fighting but rather for parade or display, perhaps ritually focused. In what sense, then, was violence incorporated into Bronze Age life? While my sense that violence became an integral part of Bronze Age life during the course of the Bronze Age is based on the archaeological evidence I have mentioned, I am aware that such a sense is not an argument in itself. Here, I am indebted to a number of people, notably Helle Vandkilde and David Fontijn, for insights which they have developed and presented in recent years. Fontijn, for instance, asked exactly the same question as I have about Bronze Age warfare in the Low Countries, concluding that the larger number of weapons that can now be demonstrated to have existed does not necessarily reflect an increase in warfare (Fontijn 2005). It does, however, reflect the social values behind the weaponry, an ‘ideology of martiality’. But, in his view, sheer numbers are not a good guide to the prevalence or otherwise of warfare. The rise of the warrior – not just the fighting machine that is evidenced by the weapons and depictions, but the particular role within society and thus the identity that being a warrior represented – is something that several writers have argued took on its characteristic appearance during the Early Bronze Age, Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Exeter, on 13 Jan 2020 at 12:42:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316884522.003 20 HAR DING perhaps emerging from the role of the hunter equipped with bow and arrows that we can see represented so vividly in the Copper Age. Being a warrior was much more than that, however. The notion of martiality has been explored a number of times, and its connection with, for instance, the use of the sword has been a particular theme. Fontijn and Fokkens (2007) suggested that the deposition of swords was rather rare (in comparison with the number that were in use) and perhaps happened at the end of a warrior’s life or when he became an elder – at some notable transition point in any case. Fontijn (2005) has also suggested that an identity as a warrior (i.e., warriorhood) was not something fixed, but a fluid thing, perhaps temporary, and perhaps dependent on context. This is an interesting suggestion, although hardly one that is provable through archaeological evidence alone. What happens if we juxtapose the warrior ideology, the notion of martiality and the major changes we think happened in Europe around 1300 bc? One question would be, how far advanced was the notion of warriorhood at this stage? I and others have argued that the process by which a hunter became a warrior was gradual (Harding 2007) and, furthermore, that the rise of fortified sites, along with the large quantities of weaponry that appear in the later Bronze Age, can be taken as an indicator that war-bands were becoming prevalent. But I would regard it as quite uncertain that this development had occurred prior to the start of the Urnfield period – yes, there were enclosed sites in the Early Bronze Age and much has been made of them; but hill forts in the sense we usually understand them are really a Late Bronze Age phenomenon (here I discount sites such as Spišsky Štvrtok in the Spiš area of Northern Slovakia, which I believe has been misinterpreted, although it is certainly true that some tells on the Hungarian Plain were surrounded by ditches). Could we then argue that what we call the Urnfield culture is driven by a new sense of martiality in which the individual warrior becomes part of a larger entity? It is now a commonplace that war and warriorhood are powerful agents for social change. Apart from anything else, war is waged against the ‘other’, people who are somehow different, whether in appearance, language or simply beliefs. The ‘otherness’ of the Urnfield culture is most obvious in their burial rites, but it may have extended to other spheres that we cannot easily spot as well. In the context of what happened at Velim or Tollense, this may be critical. This scenario at Velim might play out like this: the low hill was occupied from the Early Bronze Age with some indications of domestic dwellings and ordinary domestic debris on the site. The major period of occupation, however, was the later part of the Middle Bronze Age (Tumulus culture, but here without tumuli). At some point towards 1400 cal. bc, a series of violent events took place. Some people were injured with bladed implements (swords?), others suffered trauma from pointed weapons (arrowheads or spearheads) and still others suffered blunt trauma. Those who delivered these blows must Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Exeter, on 13 Jan 2020 at 12:42:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316884522.003 BRONZE AGE ENCOUNTERS: VIOLENT OR PEACEFUL? 21 have been in possession of warlike implements, including bows and arrows and swords; to that extent, we can affirm their warrior identity. Now volleys of arrows can hardly have been fired by one or two individuals, so we must be talking about groups or bands of people. Is this the point at which we see the transformation of the individual fighting man into the more lethal warrior band? These were, of course, violent encounters. But, at present, we cannot tell at what scale such encounters took place over the wider canvas of Europe as a whole; in other words, whether the transition to the Urnfields was a matter of many small-scale conflicts – as Velim and Tollense might indicate – or a whole continent in upheaval, as the Kimmig model seems to suggest. Whether this has anything to do with hoard deposition after 1200 bc is unclear, but the practice of placing goods in the ground was certainly well developed in the preceding centuries; it just took off in quantitative terms after that point. Indeed, the massive number of hoards in Ha A is almost a hallmark of the earlier Urnfield period and should probably be seen as part of the same ideological package that produced the war-band; both were indissolubly part of Bronze Age life. Just as warfare and warriorhood are agents in social change, so the deposition of hoards – especially of weaponry – was a practice that was socially embedded and impacted on the ability of groups to wage war – or at least to continue waging war. After all, it is hard to defend yourself if you have thrown your best sword into the river. Forts, weapons and armour continued to exist and to multiply. We can still see the forts in the landscape today; the number of weapons appears large but is essentially an unknown quantity. In other respects, the presence of large undefended settlements during the Urnfield period would appear to indicate that, for many in the countryside (in other words, peasants), any encounters were peaceful. Reconstructing the ethos of an age is a task from which we might justifiably shrink. Yet the twofold character of the period we are dealing with seems to suggest lines of enquiry that give us answers to which we might agree. There were indeed both peaceful and violent encounters in the Bronze Age, but our interpretation of them – deciding which was which – is very much an ongoing task. Given the advances that have been made in recent years in our understanding of how the archaeological record relates to human behaviour, the omens are good that we will succeed in unravelling this key aspect of past human societies. BIBLIOGRAPHY P. Clark (ed.), The Dover Bronze Age Boat (Swindon: English Heritage, 2004). A. P. Fitzpatrick, The Amesbury Archer and the Boscombe Bowmen – Bell Beaker Burials at Boscombe Down, Amesbury, Wiltshire (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2011). Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Exeter, on 13 Jan 2020 at 12:42:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316884522.003 22 HAR DING D. Fontijn, ‘Giving up weapons’, in M. Parker Pearson and I. J. N. Thorpe (eds.), Warfare, Violence and Slavery in Prehistory (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2005), pp. 145–154. D. Fontijn and H. Fokkens, ‘The emergence of Early Iron Age “chieftains’ graves” in the southern Netherlands. Reconsidering transformations in burial and depositional practices’, in C. Haselgrove and R. Pope (eds.), The Earlier Iron Age in Britain and the Near Continent (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2007), pp. 354–373. A. Harding, Warriors and Weapons in Bronze Age Europe (Budapest: Archaeolingua, 2007). A. Harding and H. Hughes-Brock, ‘Amber in the Mycenaean world’, Annual of the British School of Archaeology at Athens 69 (1974), 145–172. A. Harding, R. Šumberová, C. Knüsel, and A. Outram (eds.), Velim. Violence and death in Bronze Age Bohemia: The Results of Fieldwork 1992–95, with a Consideration of Perimortem Trauma and Deposition in the Bronze Age (Prague: Archeologický ústav AV CR, 2007). J. Hrala, R. Šumberová, and M. Vávra, Velim. A Bronze Age Fortified Site in Bohemia (Prague: Institute of Archaeology, 2000). D. Jantzen, U. Brinker, J. Orschiedt, J. Heinemeier, J. Piek, K. Hauenstein, et al. ‘A Bronze Age battlefield? Weapons and trauma in the Tollense valley, north-eastern Germany’, Antiquity 85 (2011), 417–433. A. Jockenhövel, ‘Räumliche Mobilität von Personen in der mittleren Bronzezeit des westlichen Mitteleuropa’, Germania 69 (1991), 49–62. W. Kimmig, ‘Seevölkerbewegung und Urnenfelderkultur. Ein archäologischhistorischer Versuch’, in R. v. Uslar and K. J. Narr (eds.), Studien aus Alteuropa, Teil 1 (KölnGraz: Böhlau Verlag, 1964), pp. 220–283. L. P. Louwe Kooijmans, ‘An Early/Middle Bronze Age multiple burial at Wassenaar. the Netherlands’, Analecta Praehistorica Leidensia 26 (1993), 1–20. S. Needham, D. Parham and C. J. Frieman, Claimed by the Sea. Salcombe, Langdon Bay, and Other Marine Finds of the Bronze Age (York: Council for British Archaeology, 2013). T. D. Price, C. Knipper, G. Grupe and V. Smrcka, ‘Strontium isotopes and prehistoric human migration. The Bell Beaker period in central Europe’, European Journal of Archaeology 7 (2004), 9–40. E. Sprockhoff, Zur Handelsgeschichte der germanischen Bronzezeit (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1930). K. Tihelka, Velatice Culture Burials at Bluč ina (Prague: National Museum, 1969). J. Wahl and T. D. Price, ‘Local and foreign males in a Late Bronze Age cemetery at Neckarsulm, south-western Germany. Strontium isotope investigations’, Anthropologischer Anzeiger 70 (2013), 289–307. Ü. Yalcin, C. Pulak and R. Slotta (eds.), Das Schiff von Uluburun. Welthandel vor 3000 Jahren. Katalog zur Ausstellung (Bochum: Deutsches Bergbaumuseum, 2005). Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Exeter, on 13 Jan 2020 at 12:42:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316884522.003