Thread by @chrisschmitz

The core nature of war never changes.

This is the one of the most brutal battlefields you likely never heard of, the "Tollense Valley Battlefield".

Do not repeat the past, but learn from it.
Short thread:

Let me explain quickly what we have here.

We have a river valley, that has NOT changed materially since the battle took place, you have to assume it was more forested though.

This battle was a huge one, especially considering the sizes of population back then, around 1300 BC.

The overall amount of combatants and nature of the conflict, about 3.300 years ago, can only be derived from corpses found.

Scientists are doing an amazing job though, and allow us knuckle draggers to get the information we need to paint a picture that makes sense to us.

The first important element, that was already alluded to in the initial Google Maps/Paint draft that I did, was a BRIDGE.

3.330 years ago, so good, that parts were still found, not a commodity back then.
If you ever swam across a river, you know the value of that.

The other element that we can see, is that the battle area was VERY focused.
The finds suggest that the battle was mostly fought with arrows, and focused on this area.
Less than 1000m/1100yd across, thats tiny, especially since people back then were likely good runners.

Numbers of corpses found are in the 100s, no bronze weapons were found (yes, bronze age, no iron or steel yet!), yet cutmarks of swords were found on bones.

Corpses were at times even piled up.

As the weapons indicate, there were at least two materially different classes of troops present.
One was identified to have been using standardized equipment and weapons, the other was identified using cruder weapons, like "baseball bats".

Arrowheads were plentiful in bones.

I have my own theory about this. I am going from this pattern of injuries, the "Survivorship Bias" of the Bronze Age.

The most important information to me, to complete my theory puzzle, is the fact that they have found arrowheads and equipment consistent with southern Europe.
Let us look at that Battlefield again. To me, thats a classical ambush of an invading force at a bottleneck.

I would presume that the ones with the standardized equipment are the native troops of the invading force, accompanied by secondary "baseball bat" troops are either enslaved soliders, mercenaries or simply their disposable grunts.

You dont march that size of force about 1000km/700 miles as rag tag gang, that was an organized, ranked force, the bronze age equivalent of an army.

Size: 3000 to 5000, so comparing the few people alive to a modern population, thats an entire army in todays logic.