Coming in Swinging: The Initial Bronze Age

For millennia before the Bronze Age, combat was dominated by a limited range of bodily motions to inflict injury using material culture. Weapons such as clubs or axes would be swung in arcing motions and bladed objects like knives or daggers would follow closely the motion paths of empty-hand attacks like punches.

Spears could be used with a greater variety of movements, though lethal injury was most commonly through linear thrusts. The weapons used were made from combinations of polished or chipped stone and organic media like wood, bone and string. Projectile weapons like bows and slings were also used. Taken together, the bodily techniques of combat - essentially the ways in which people moved using particular forms of material culture - were a combination of fighting styles using weapons and techniques drawn from hunting and craft activities. There was thus a strong similarity underlying the engagements with material culture and the intended effects of these tools - splitting, piercing and breaking.

By the end of the fourth millennium bce this began to change. Metal weapons such as halberds, daggers and axes begin to be manufactured in Mediterranean Europe, and by the early third millennium bce they occur throughout central Europe.^{^[214]} The fundamental advantage of metal over stone tools lies in the balance between hardness and toughness. For bladed weapons hardness may be loosely defined as a measure of the ability of one material to cut others. Stones can be very hard and sharp, but they have extremely limited ability to flex and so long bladed objects are impractical. Metal tools and weapons, on the other hand, can have hard cutting edges and be very sharp, but they have higher toughness values, allowing objects to absorb shocks more effectively through flexing or ductile deformation like bending or indentation, thereby resisting chipping, fracture or breakage.

This highlights perhaps the most revolutionary thing about metal; its ability to be intentionally manipulated to focus different degrees of hardness and toughness on distinct parts of an object through thermal and mechanical treatments.^{^[215]} In this way metal-smiths were able to explore and exploit the balance between hardness and toughness for weapons, and in turn this paved the way for casting long weapons like swords and beating relatively thin weapons like shields by the FBA. The malleability of copper alloys also allowed for easier repair, and thus increased the longevity of weapons. These qualities were recognised and began to be exploited in the first tentative steps towards metal daggers, spears and halberds in the IBA.

The halberd was the first unequivocal weapon designed for interpersonal violence. Halberds had double-edged blades hafted perpendicularly on a wooden shaft. They show that since the first widespread use of copper, that metal was employed for innovations in warfare. Combat with halberds can be seen to be rooted in the bodily techniques of preceding periods using multifunctional tools. However, they introduced the capacity of piercing as well as slashing (percussive/lacerating) and cutting (slicing) action in one weapon, thus establishing a social context for designing objects for the principle purpose of fighting other people. IBA daggers were short triangular blades mounted on a metal or organic hilt. For fighting, these were used in more or less the same way as their lithic predecessors, though a greater emphasis on slicing or lacerating cutting attacks was emerging. In the Nordic sphere, possibly as a testimony to their effectiveness in fighting, flint daggers were used into the second millennium bc e but came to mirror the general shape of metal ones.

The earliest spearheads were commonly small in size, usually less than 25 cm, such that most fell within the size range possible for lithic spearheads.

Ground stone axes continued in use, in some regions occurring in aesthetically pleasing and elaborate forms. Archery had a strong Neolithic heritage - for example, the embedded arrowheads from Eulau, Germany (grave 90) - and continued to be important across Europe with arrowheads made from lithics in most areas throughout the IBA.^{^[216]} Finds of human remains with injuries from arrows, for example from Tollense, Poulnabrone and Armenoi, support the possibility that archery was employed in conflict in different parts of Europe in the Bronze Age. Stelae from Petite Chasseur, in Switzerland, appear to depict schematised humans armed with bows and daggers,^{^[217]} which may be intended to represent warriors.

Fortifications

The portable material culture of war tells us much about how people fought, but fortifications can inform us about some of the ways they prepared for conflict or averted it. Stone-built fortification walls, many with clear bastions, emerge in the later third millennium at sites such as Kastri on Syros, Koukounaries on Paros or Lerna in the Greek islands and mainland in particular, and settlements in Crete were often located in defensible positions.^{^[218]} Defensible hilltop settlements including walls were established in south-east Iberia, for example at La Bastida. Elsewhere in Europe fortifications are rare despite their occasional presence in parts of Neolithic Europe. Recent dating of a fort with three rings of defensive walls and complex gate systems at Monkodonja in Croatia places its construction around 1800 bce, some three centuries before the wave of fort building in this region and over four centuries before the well-known forts of the Mycenaean world in Greece.

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Source: Fagan Garrett G., Fibiger Linda, Hudson Mark, Trundle Matthew (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 1: The Prehistoric and Ancient Worlds. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 756 p.. 2020

Coming in Swinging: The Initial Bronze Age

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