These 3,000-Year-Old Arrowheads Are Pivotal Clues in the Mystery of ‘Europe’s Oldest Known Battlefield’

Around 1250 B.C.E., two ancient armies fought with clubs, swords and arrows in northeast Germany’s Tollense Valley. The site is sometimes called “Europe’s oldest known battlefield,” as no earlier clashes of this scale have been identified. With no written records, historians have long wondered about its causes, results and participants.

Now, an analysis of arrowheads unearthed in the valley has revealed that Tollense is not only Europe’s oldest battlefield, but the site of the continent’s first known interregional conflict, according to a study published this week in the journal Antiquity.

“The arrowheads are a kind of ‘smoking gun,’” says lead author Leif Inselmann, an archaeologist at Germany’s Free University of Berlin, in a statement. “Just like the murder weapon in a mystery, they give us a clue about the culprit, the fighters of the Tollense Valley battle and where they came from.”

The battlefield was first discovered in 1996, when an amateur archaeologist found a human arm bone pierced with a flint arrowhead near the Tollense River. Since then, roughly 12,500 bones belonging to about 150 individuals—all of them young, physically fit men—have been uncovered, according to CNN’s Ashley Strickland. Researchers think the area may hold hundreds more victims.

In previous studies, scientists have focused on the valley’s skeletons, finding that the warriors who died at the site were both locals and foreigners. The new research builds on these analyses. But this time, instead of searching for clues about the fallen men in their remains, Inselmann and his colleagues decided to focus on their weaponry.

The battlefield contained many kinds of weapons, including bronze knives, axes, spearheads, a sword and wooden clubs. But the most common warfare artifacts were arrowheads: So far, 54 bronze and 10 flint arrowheads have been unearthed in the central valley, and 22 more have been identified both upstream and downstream. Researchers examined the handmade artifacts and compared them to thousands of other Bronze Age arrowheads found in Central Europe.

Many of Tollense’s arrowheads resembled others found in the same region of Germany, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, which indicates they were made locally. Meanwhile, other arrowheads found in the valley were quite different.

“While the flint arrowheads are a typical northern form and some types of bronze arrowheads appear in the north as well, other types … do not appear in northern Germany at all,” Inselmann tells Newsweek’s Aristos Georgiou. “This suggests that at least a part of the fighters in Tollense Valley probably derive from a distant region such as Bavaria or Moravia in southern Central Europe, where these types are distributed.”

The owners of these oddly shaped arrowheads could have been foreign warriors—part of an invading army. As co-author Thomas Terberger, an archaeologist at Germany’s University of Göttingen, tells CNN, they may have attacked Tollense Valley to take possession of a causeway that crossed the river, which could have been part of a trade route.

However, evidence of wealth (like metal or salt) in the area is scant, as Barry Molloy, an archaeologist at Ireland’s University College Dublin who was not involved in the research, tells the broadcaster.

He adds: “The causes of warfare were many, but it is likely in my view that this was about a group seeking to impose political control over another—an age-old thing—in order to extract wealth systematically over time, not simply as plunder.”

While the new research doesn’t provide answers about the warriors’ motivations, it does help correct a misconception about the Bronze Age: For many years, historians assumed that large-scale battles were rare during the era. But as Terberger tells National Geographic’s Tom Metcalfe, the Tollense Valley site shows that “large, violent conflicts were a part of Bronze Age life.”

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.