I hate to admit it but that the effete, arrogant, pompous, intellectual, asthmatic and snobbish Frenchman Marcel Proust (above) was right about at least two things - first, when he observed that “We learn from history that we do not learn anything from history”, and second that “A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.”
Both of those profound insights struck me again recently when I stumbled upon an article in the archeology magazine "Antiquity", which illuminated a forgotten memory of the work of a quiet rock hound named Gerald Clark Bond. It may seem a complicated train of events, but please bear with me, while I try to explain how my mind works. I hope you enjoy the ride.
Professor Bond collected and cataloged rocks from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean between North America and Bermuda. This may have once seemed an esoteric pursuit, but in that seemingly meaningless me'lange of bottom cores, which Professor Bond drilled through, were thin layers of limestone pebbles, which had nothing to do with the ocean floor nor the great rivers which dumped their detritus onto the Continental Shelf in that region.
How did they get thousands of miles south and hundreds of miles off shore into of the Atlantic Ocean? Professor Bond concluded the only delivery method that made sense was that an ancient glacier had ground against limestone cliffs, scrapping off pebbles and holding them trapped in its grip.
When the glacier then calved icebergs into the Atlantic, these floated south until they melted, and then dropped their limestone pebbles into the abyss. With extraordinary perseverance, Professor Bond matched those pebbles with a specific limestone cliff along the Canadian coast. And when other rocks from the same drill cores were identified as coming from nearby areas to those cliffs, the professor's suspicions were confirmed, and with it a way to measure climate change.
More pebbles in a given core layer indicated more melting ice bergs, which hinted at warmer temperatures and rising sea levels. Fewer pebbles thus meant cooling seas, and more water locked up as ice in glaciers. What was amazing to Professor Bond was that there have been eight cooling periods, now called Bond Events, since the last ice age ended about 11,000 years ago.
Bond Events come in roughly 1,500 year intervals, giving an almost respiratory aspect to our planet's atmosphere. And like a smoker who develops a cough, the deposits on the sea floor, as well as ice cores drilled in Greenland and the Antarctic have recorded the increasing impact of humans burning fossil fuels on our planet's health, from wood fires to coal to oil. But they also record something else, equally as ominous.
See, when the weather cooled for Bond Event Seven -about ten thousand years ago - it seems that humans responded with the invention of agriculture.
Bond Event Four occurred about six thousand years ago, and it seems humans responded with the domestication of sheep and the invention of bronze.
And Bond Event Three, which came four thousand years ago, brought on the collapse of great empires in Asia and Egypt, and, of more interest to this story, in an act of war at a crossing of a slow, meandering river about 80 miles northeast of Berlin, Germany.
The river is the somnambulist Tollense (above). For more than ten thousand years, beginning in its namesake lake, the Tollense has followed a sinuous 58 mile course through forests and bogs, winding this way and twisting that, as it hesitantly approaches the Peene River, which winds another 30 miles to the Baltic Sea just below the island of Usedom.
In the peat bogs lining its banks and the mud of it's bottom, the Tollense has preserved for the last 3,200 years a record of one day, an example of humanity and inhumanity, and a desperate battle for survival in the high summer of about 1250 BC.
The invaders were from the forests and mountains to the south, and were members of the Unetice culture. They were armed with bronze daggers, spear heads and hand axes. They were adorned with engraved bronze bracelets and wooden shields, and their robes were held together with bronze pins. They came mounted on horses, which ate millet, which did not grow this far north. That suggests rations, which suggests an organized raiding party, perhaps what would one day be called an army.
The Frisian villages close to the Baltic coast were the likely target of the Unetice. The Frisians buried their dead in stone crypts, and prayed to the earth god Inguz, who drove his chariot across the sky as easily as he dived beneath the sea. The villagers enjoyed probably the best diet in Europe, with plenty of surf and turf. They fished in the lakes and the sea from long plank canoes and hunted the forests with curved bows. They raised cattle corralled behind their village palisades. But their weapons and tools were stone axes and baseball bat like wooden clubs.
The bronze age was late in coming to the Frisian Baltic coast. Copper and tin had to be heated to 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit before they would form bronze, and that takes a lot of wood, and a knowledge of ceramics. A culture cannot afford that technology unless it has something to sell. And it was not until recently that these proto-Scandinavian tribes had organized and improved the production of their “metallum sudaticum”, amber.
With each successive Bond Event, with each successive glacier pulse, the level of the Baltic Sea rose and then fell, Over and over great coastal pine forests grew, matured and were then drowned in the Baltic basin. And with each storm tide more fossilized pine tree sap from those long dead forests washed up on the sandy Baltic beaches as amber.
Villagers gathered the amber in hand held nets, then carved it into beads, rings, bracelets or even Venus religious figures (above), and then traded them southward, up the "Amber Road" that reached all the way to Rome and Egypt. On the return trip traders brought ceramics, bonze rings and gold pins. But few weapons.
By 3,400 years ago the Amber Road was a well established trade route, increasing the wealth of the villages on the namesake lake of the Tollense river, where Baltic amber could pause, be collected and worked, before moving on. And the wealth of these artisans, fishermen, farmers and herders,
attracted the interest of the Unetice forest peoples to the south and east.
After a generation or two of escalating raids , about 4,125 years ago, shortly after the summer solstice, perhaps a thousand occupants of the scattered Frisian villages along the Tollense valley decided to gather their tools and their children and flee north, beyond the reach of the raiders.
The logical place to rally the farmers was on the western bank of the Tollense, where a 10 foot wide causeway (above), had been built and maintained for over some 300 years, about 7 miles south from where the Tollense' river joined with the Peene River.
For a wooden causeway to have been maintained for so long (above), the western bank must have been a traditional gathering place, perhaps with religious connotations.
It seems likely the Frisians waited for the indecisive or the cautious to join up. Perhaps the old were too slow. But it seems the farmers and herders were slow in discovering the causeway across the river and bogs represented a bottleneck in their line of retreat. Because it was here the raiders with their bronze axes fell upon the famers and herders with their stone arrow heads and wooden clubs.
The first indication of the death along the Tollense saw daylight in 1996, when a human femur surfaced. Jutting from the base of its ball joint was a stone arrow head (above). Rarely does archeology find such conclusive proof of a murder. Early excavations uncovered more human bones and wooden clubs.
In 2007 massive excavations were begun, and have continue up and down the valley. By 2018, after the bones of at least 100 individuals had been uncovered, it was estimated at least 5,000 men were caught in this battle, mostly young men of draft age - between 20 and 40 years old. The estimated death toll ranges from 750 to a thousand souls.
Most of the bones carry injuries inflicted shortly before death; broken faces, damaged skulls, bronze arrow heads embedded in arm and leg bones , even one penetrating a skull (above). One fractured thigh bone was discovered displaying an injury still commonly suffered by horseback riders.
A genetic sample of the bones uncovered so far show that none of the adults possessed the thymine nucleotide which would have allowed them to digest the lactose in cows' milk, something which only developed in European humans some 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. In addition, five horse skeletons have been found, with bronze bridle fittings, hinting at an officer class among the invaders.
The fighting at the causeway was desperate, with bodies left along the riverbank, and no quarter given. The Frisians stone daggers and wooden clubs killed some of the first attackers, but the heavier bronze swords allowed the Unetice warriors to maim from a greater distance, and for longer. Gradually the invaders cut down the outnumbered defenders.
As with all battles before firearms, once the shield wall was broken the slaughter truly began. Running for their lives, the Frisians were struck down from behind, or, if they turned to fight, they were overwhelmed. Many of the bones show the cutting slices of bronze swords - although no bronze swords or axes were left on the field. The bodies lay were they fell, later being stripped of any metal of value, as the pursuers murdered their way up the valley toward the Peene.
Using ground penetrating radar to locate likely dig sites (above), a mass of human bones were found downstream a mile north of the causeway site. It seems the bodies were left unclaimed and unattended until a storm washed them downstream to a bend in the Tollense, where the current buried and preserved about 140 bodies in the mud and peat (above), "... like an ancient memento left between the pages of a forgotten diary".
But we can safely assume the Uentice and Frisian story tellers (above) sang about the honor and courage of those who fought, and the sacrifices of the brave men who died along the ancient banks of the Tollense. And we know the battle of the Tollense Valley had a major impact on the lives of people in the region. But, why in God's name were these young men murdering each other? Was it amber or gold? Was it slavery or freedom? Was it fish or faith?
Marcel Proust (above) began his most famous work, with the following words; "I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive... in some inanimate object...until the day...when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognized their voice...We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life. "
But Proust wrote something else, while confined and working for three years in what would become in 1922 his death bed (above). "Remembrance of things past", he wrote, "is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” The same can be said of the warriors of the Tollense valley.
The latest thinking by the archeologists digging along the banks of the Tollense is that the battle was not a war but a robbery on a large party of traders. Academics will likely argue the issue for decades, But to call it a war or a robbery is a game of semantics. Three thousand years after the event such definitions have little meaning.
Whatever the reality along the Tollense 3,000 years ago, we can be certain the elders of the Uentice and the Frisians both sang of the honor and courage displayed by the participants. But their religion, their nations, their cultures, their languages, their homes, their hatred and their love, all they murdered and died for has long since turned to dust. They no longer matter. They are all dead and gone. Until we dig them up.
Excavated, they live again, because we choose to make them live. We choose to resurrect their bones and recreate their world in our minds and our hearts. And in doing so, we recreate our own world. As Proust put it, "A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.”
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