‘Europe’s Oldest Battlefield’ Just Got Stranger With New Evidence of Outsiders Involved

Northeastern Germany’s Tollense Valley hosts what is known as the world’s oldest battlefield: an archaeological site bearing the remains of some 150 individuals, dating to the 13th century BCE.

Now, analysis of arrowheads found on the site reveal that the weaponry was not produced in the area, indicating that the conflict involved people from elsewhere in Europe. The team’s research was published today in Antiquity.

“The arrowheads are a kind of ‘smoking gun’,” says lead author of the research, Leif Inselmann, a researcher at Freie Universtät Berlin and lead author of the study, in an Antiquity release. “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 site was first proposed to be a battlefield in 2011, though the parties involved in the conflict remain unclear. According to the release, based on the number of human remains left on the site, some researchers estimate over 2,000 people were involved with the battle itself. Now, the recent team has determined that at least some of the combatants were not locals to northern Germany.

Inselmann has collected nearly 5,000 arrowheads from across Central Europe and discovered that different types were present at the battle site. The arrowheads were flint and bronze; though the flint arrowheads were typical from the area, the bronze arrowheads were a combination of local and non-local types. Many of the arrowheads were found in the Tollense area, but others—namely those with straight or rhombic bases—are more generally associated with regions farther south, like Bavaria and Moravia.

The foreign arrowheads have not been found in tombs in the Tollense area, indicating that the arrowheads from elsewhere didn’t simply make their way to the region through trade. The barbs, it seems, were brought to Tollense for the purpose of conflict. One set of remains on the site makes that clear: a human skull cap, punctured with a bronze arrowhead.

“The Tollense Valley conflict dates to a time of major changes,” Inselmann said. “This raises questions about the organization of such violent conflicts. Were the Bronze Age warriors organized as a tribal coalition, the retinue or mercenaries of a charismatic leader ‒ a kind of “warlord” ‒, or even the army of an early kingdom?”

Though the arrowheads do not clear up the parties involved in the conflict, they show that the large-scale violence (for the time) involved groups from farther afield than previously known. As the team noted in their paper, no helmets and breastplates typical of the time have shown up from archaeological excavations of the site, so more digs may be necessary to reveal more about the ancient combatants at Tollense, the remains of many of whom remain on the site.