It's like the start of a Civ game come to life.
I will raise the discourse by noting that the site is about 15km from Stolpe on the Peene, part of the Lower Peene Valley.
In context, to be clear, Vandkilde is talking about what people thought before the 1990s - from the 1990s onward, it's been accepted (grudgingly in a lot of cases) that ancient peoples lived very violent lives. See Keeley, "War Before Civilisation" (1996) for example.
The Tollense battle, just going by its scale, was not, however, the sort of pre-state battle that Keeley is talking about. Pre-state societies can't put armies of thousands of men into the field for a pitched battle; they will deploy warbands of a few dozen men at best, and they're far more likely to raid, and to kill women and children as well as men.
I don't know anything about Tollense except what's linked, but if they're right about there being 750 dead, then there must have been at least 1500-2000 wounded, and that implies to me that there must have been 8,000 and maybe as many as 12,000 soldiers on the field (assuming a maximum of 25% casualties). That's a colossal engagement.
There were some female bones found - so at least one side was an army on the march with camp followers, rather than a group of locals. (If you're out to defend your town in a battle just outside it, you'd leave the wife and kids at home.) But we knew that anyway; the size of the forces implies that they were gathered from a huge area and marched together.
This is close to a Roman scale of operations - a single legion was 4-5000 soldiers, and a consular army would consist of two legions, two legion-sized wings of allied troops, and two cavalry brigades, for a total of 18,000 soldiers. That's fighting men alone. Add on 4,000 more non-combatants (a very lean-tailed army) and you have "a mid-sized town or city moving across the landscape". The Romans could do this because they were incredibly good at logistics and operations. (For immensely more detail see here https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-i-the-problem/)
But the Tollensian armies could have been getting close to that level! Armies of four thousand soldiers plus at least another thousand non-combatants (and probably a lot more; that's where those female bones come in) are very difficult things to manage. And this is from societies about which we know almost nothing compared to Rome.
So you're saying they've always been violent. But were they as maladaptive and antisocial as investment bankers?!!
Good lord, no. You can't have a functional army that's 20% sociopath, and that was our best estimate for senior managers and above at major international banks.
They probably weren't all that violent, either - at least not compared to pre-state societies.
Delurking to say: There was an episode on the Tides of History podcast about it in November last year. I recommend both that episode and the podcast in general.
What about the senior managers in an army?
Bronze-age tools to build a bronze-age boat. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-65561744
I had heard of this site, but didn't really know any details. It's pretty fascinating.
"What about the senior managers in an army?"
In my extremely limited experience, it varies from army to army. Mental illness of some kind seems to be an actual advantage for promotion boards in some armies, in particular those with high value placed on "martial virtues" or those whose most respected generals have historically happened to be as mad as a boxful of badgers. In most armies reliable sanity is your best bet.
I walked in and sat down and they gave me a piece of paper, said, "Kid, see the psychiatrist, room 604."
And I went up there, I said, "Shrink, I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL." And I started jumpin up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL, " and he started jumpin up and down with me and we was both jumping up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL."
And the sergeant came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down the hall, said, "You're our boy."
And where did they find all those people? Outside the Mediterranean basin, European populations were thought to be tiny at that date, so assembling two armies that size would involve bringing in contingents from five hundred miles away. Why would they care about a spat between communities they were hardly even on trading terms with? As Ajay points out, this was warfare on a Roman (late iron age) scale. Compare the size of the armies implied in Homer, or the quasi-historical books in the Bible: they were tiny. And those were from what passed for sophisticated societies right at the end of the bronze age.
Speaking of large Roman battles, when I drove past a sign in Scotland saying BATTLEDYKES I learned about the following surprisingly large battle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battledykes
You should have left it to a process of pure reason to figure out what the sign was referring to.
Compare the size of the armies implied in Homer, or the quasi-historical books in the Bible: they were tiny.
Well, a lot of the biblical ones are implausibly large and generally assumed to be massively inflated.
And those were from what passed for sophisticated societies right at the end of the bronze age.
Really after the Bronze Age, and it's become increasingly apparent that the Bronze Age itself in the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean was a lot more complex than the societies that followed. The Tollense site hints that there may have been something similar going on north of the Alps but in a very mysterious way.
I can't prove it was Gondor, but it was Gondor.
Not sure if I'm repeating myself about this, apologies if so. David Reich (archaic human population geneticist) writes about what analysis of human remains tells us about past human society, a complex and quickly evolving field. One aspect that comes up again and again is that populations in the distant past, even before the end of the most recent ice age, were not static, one group of people replaced by another apparently happened many times before any written history or steady agriculture. The genetic approach doesn't shed light on where any of the changes happened unless there are numerous remains available before and after a change. His book Who we are and How We Got Here is really good, dense, like an extended review article with expanded motivating sections. Covers European human origins quite well.
I'd have to look to see if he includes anything this recent, can't today.
18, no Gondor was the corded ware people, earlier.
One aspect that comes up again and again is that populations in the distant past, even before the end of the most recent ice age, were not static, one group of people replaced by another apparently happened many times before any written history or steady agriculture.
Yeah, the rise of ancient DNA techniques especially has shed light on all sorts of previously hidden dynamics. Not just human DNA, either; there's lots of cool stuff going on with the genetic analysis of domesticated animals and even pathogens.
Turns out there were multiple pandemics of Bubonic plague in prehistoric Europe! That probably affected some aspects of society.
I bet there's a hidden downside to massive, pandemic-driven death.
But at least they avoided the horror of vaccination and minor inconveniences to control the spread.
WE TAUGHT THEM A LESSON IN 1277 BC AND THEY'VE HARDLY BOTHERED US SINCE THEN.
Interesting! I hadn't seen 23 when it came out. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18633
And where did they find all those people?
Ancient aliens.
there may have been something similar going on north of the Alps but in a very mysterious way.
Ancient aliens.
the rise of ancient DNA techniques especially has shed light on all sorts of previously hidden dynamics. Not just human DNA, either
ANCIENT ALIENS
@19 As I recall, there was much pushback (at least initially) against the thesis that changes in the archeological record reflected changes in ethnic groups, rather than changes in technology or culture.
29. quickly evolving field. Many of the populations that can be roughly characterized with even badly degraded DNA are represented by only a few individuals and have no clearly associated artifacts. More remains. more detail. The same techniques can also be used to assess younger populations which did leave stuff when there are bones. Seriously, read up the Noldor like Moby says.
It's a longstanding debate in archaeology in general. Genetic data adds an additional line of evidence to try to synthesize with the others. Sometimes it confirms older theories and sometimes it undermines them.
||
About an hour ago I was (I thought) making some minor revisions to finally get drawings approved for a business that should've been grandfathered all along. Then I realized I was wrong (or possibly consciously lying in the past) about something important, and I thought maybe my client was screwed. Took 20-30 minutes to figure a reasonable solution, but it took another 20 minutes for me to actually release the tension. Whew.
It's not all NEOM galas, people.
|>
It was ancient aliens humming All Along the Watchtower. I saw a documentary.
The post title makes me wonder if modern archeology isn't going to come to the conclusion that Hitler wasn't nice enough to Himmler's side interests. It might also make a good Indiana Jones sequel. Harrison Ford realizes he's 80 and that he should maybe practice a more standard type of archeology, so he gets a job inventorying bones in Tollense.
Speaking of Roman, I just bought her cookbook. I know she's problematic but it still seemed like a good one.
And where did they find all those people? Outside the Mediterranean basin, European populations were thought to be tiny at that date, so assembling two armies that size would involve bringing in contingents from five hundred miles away.
Well, maybe. There are two questions here: what population base is needed to support a 4,000-man army? And what land area would be needed to support that population base at the population densities we expect from Late Bronze Age Germany (1200 BC)?
The first one is obviously going to be an uncertain estimate, but a 1% standing army to population ratio keeps coming up as an estimate for the militarisation ratio in ancient societies, so let's go with that. That means that 4,000-man army was the result of a 400,000-person population (or, more likely, 20 20,000-person populations, each contributing a 200-man contingent, or something).
Now, there are disagreements about regional population densities back then. The Science article cites less than 5 people per sq km and 5-10 is probably the highest reasonable estimate. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/56680286.pdf So that means that you need at least 80,000km2 to support that army - that's a circle of 160km radius. A long way - but not 500 miles.
(Each of those little polities of 20,000 people could inhabit a circle of 35km radius - a couple of days' march.)
If this was an unusually militarised society, or one making a special push to raise an unusually large army for a temporary period, the area might be half or a quarter of that.
Why would they care about a spat between communities they were hardly even on trading terms with? As Ajay points out, this was warfare on a Roman (late iron age) scale.
Trade networks are far, far larger in this period than you might think. Mesolithic (Mesolithic!) traders in Scotland travelled immense distances - read Steven Mithen, "To The Islands". And the distances are smaller than 500 miles. Not impossible to imagine alliances of little polities all within 200km of each other.
One of the things I've taken away from a lot of the stuff I've read over the last few years, is that late Neolithic and Bronze Age civilisation north of the Alps wasn't necessarily just a bunch of mud huts. Look at the size and sophistication of things that were happening in ostensibly remote places like Orkney in the Neolithic period.
Presumably the populations fighting at Tollense didn't live in stone-built urban cities or we'd have more archaeological evidence, but that's compatible with quite high population density and sophisticated social structures.
Speaking of Romans in Scotland, I didn't even know this was a thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gask_Ridge
Even though I grew up just north of the Antonine Wall, and used to (literally) play on the site of Roman fortlets on the Roman Road that ran north of Torwood towards Stirling.
Fascinating. Never heard of that either - though I knew about the Roman remains up on the Moray coast.
I don't envy some poor Hispanic legionary who gets posted to a tiny fort up near Aboyne...
I am spending my afternoon designing posters in several languages to inform refugees about how they can best obtain their free state-funded abortion advice, so I think that balances out any residual right-wing ickiness derived from discussing Bronze Age military logistics.
8: Thanks. (And hi!) Per that episode, isotope analysis suggests the belligerents were divided between locals and non-locals, the latter from roughly Czechia (contradicting wiki , but wiki source is from 2017, so), which is faraway, but upriver. Which suggests to me the non-locals had water transport, much mitigating the logistical challenge that has to be explained. Assuming also the site was a node in long-distance trade networks, we can gesture at a possible casus belli too.
I wonder how much less people would have attempted to reconjure up the spirit of ancient Rome if the Romans had not decided to build a bunch of monumental public buildings in stone. (Most of their buildings were wood - even public buildings were until Augustus, I read somewhere.)
44 Either that or:
non est hic locus honoris... nihil magni operis hic memoratur
44. Agreed that there are many horrible invokers/fans. Juvenal and Ovid are both pretty good, though. The aqueducts are something else too.
46: The aqueduct, I'll grant is one, but what else have the Romans ever done for us?
Agreed that there are many horrible invokers/fans.
Not sure I understand this comment. Do you mean the RETVRN types who post lots of statue and building pics as a gentle entrée to fascism-Twitter? I was thinking more of the people who instigated the Renaissance and how much they may have been motivated by the ruins around them to reread the texts.
42: in terms of time, in the limit where the farthest contingent comes from the 160km line, they could mobilize in a bit under a month. Quicker if you march harder or up the call from places nearer at hand.
The time scale is spookily close to 1914. Telegrams on the 31st July, reconnaissance is in the fight mid month, all hell is loose a bit later.
48.1 Yes, basically.
48.2 Hmm, not sure about that one. From Boethius to Aquinas, a foundation of pre-Renaissance intellectual history is an attempt to mash classical and biblical sources into a common framework, it's not as if people weren't paying attention without an arch or dome to remind them. IMO scholars and manuscripts fleeing Constantinople after 1453 had a pretty big effect. The ruins are something else though, maybe things would have been quite different if there weren't so many impressive visible remains.
47, everyone's apparently forgotten how to prepare stuffed dormouse, so evidently not enough.
From Boethius to Aquinas, a foundation of pre-Renaissance intellectual history is an attempt to mash classical and biblical sources into a common framework, it's not as if people weren't paying attention without an arch or dome to remind them.
Also, like, the ruins were there in Medieval times too. Indeed, they were probably less ruined and more impressive. I think there may be something to what Minivet is saying but it's probably not a huge factor. More of an explanation of why other societies with more ephemeral remains (Mesopotamia?) didn't survive as well in people's memories as Rome did, perhaps.
IMO scholars and manuscripts fleeing Constantinople after 1453 had a pretty big effect.
This, OTOH, is an old theory that IIRC has been largely debunked. There were some such scholars but they probably didn't have a huge effect relative to other factors.
Didn't they use the Roman ruins for building supplies?
Yes, and they also built right on top of a lot of them. But if there were enough left for the Renaissance people to get excited about there must have been more earlier.
I was thinking about how continuously occupied cities rise in level over time, Roman ruins are mostly underneath modern cities, and the mechanism is apparently all the trash and detritus gradually becoming new soil.
Will modern garbage collection break this beautiful natural cycle?
The internet says New York City is sinking.
It's because they stopped throwing trash in the street.
A few months ago, maybe? They're a little behind the times.
Whoa there cowboy, it's just a pilot.
Ah, okay. Even further behind than I thought.
It's hilarious how slowly they're implementing this. One block! In the entire city!
I think the rats are secretly running the city.
Good comment on that article:
"This is ridiculous. Instead of buying cheap off-the-shelf sealed bins and trucks that can automatically empty them -- things that are available now, from multiple vendors -- we've instead decided to let a politically connected "local business" get several million dollars to put lipstick on a pig.
These things do not solve the problem and in fact they make it worse by slowing down collection. But god forbid that we ever look at a working system that some other city has and say "yes, one of those, just in extra-large."
Why does America have to reinvent every wheel at ten times the cost?
These days, I'm just delighted if we don't accuse the old wheel of sodomy before reinventing it.
The crazy part is that this is essentially a solved problem that every other (comparably wealthy) city in the world manages to do effectively. New York just refuse to emulate any of them and came up with its own not-quite-good-enough version. Note that there were still bags piling up outside one of the containers because it isn't big enough.
See also the unique San Francisco trash can and the unique LA bus stop shade.
A few days ago I was looking at life expectancy stats as the World Bank has 2021 numbers for most countries now. Change from 2019 to 2021:
Euro area: men -0.8, women -0.5
US: men -2.8, women -2.1
Russia: men -4.0, women -3.4
I conclude from this & from vibes that the US is somewhere above Russia but below the EU in general functionality of society.
66 last- the caption says those buildings didn't realize they were supposed to be using the bins.
66 last- the caption says those buildings didn't realize they were supposed to be using the bins.
An additional problem! The text mentions that but also mentions (other?) bins that were too full.
Dealing with local government here can be frustrating, but then I look at other cities and it seems like we've got it pretty good.
Hey look it's Armsmasher!
(on La Sombrita)
The NY street bins thing is extraordinary. Combination locks, which the bin men have to fiddle around with to collect your rubbish? Why on earth would you put a combination lock on a bin? To stop people putting rubbish in it?
And why not have wheeled bins? Put locks on them if you must. This is a locked cupboard full of heavy bin bags which need to be lifted out by hand... doesn't NY have health and safety at work laws? Compensation for work-related injuries?
I saw an episode of "Dirty Jobs" tv show once where they followed a NYC trash collector around on his rounds and it was amazing how idiosyncratic it was. At this building you enter, go up a flight of stairs with a big tarp, gather all the trash collected at the bottom of the chute onto your big tarp, bring the corners together, hoist it over your shoulder, down the stairway, out to your truck, on to the next building. Systems that have worked since the 1800s and persist pretty much unmodified beyond (much of, not all) the trash arriving at the bottom of the chute in plastic bags.
76: That's surprising that at no point in NYC's decades of financial hardships did they put it on owners to get it out to the curb. That seems where most other cities have landed.
(I mean, they can take it out of owners in garbage fees, but you'd think it could be done cheaper overall by owners, and not just because they hire non-union.)
Putting garbage out to the curb the night before with general half-assedness, animals, wind, and assholes sometimes seems like littering with extra steps.
76: That is not conventional. People who work in each building take the trash out to the curb, and the city sanitation workers get it from there -- they don't enter each building. Not sure what was going on with the show you watched.
But yes to everything else about how trash collection should not be this hard for a civilized city. One of the mayoral candidates last election used to be the commissioner of the Sanitation department (actual motto: New York's Strongest! The "smelling" is implicit) and I had a lot of hope she was going to rationalize things. But instead we got our current loon.
Why on earth would you put a combination lock on a bin? To stop people putting rubbish in it?
Not sure about combination locks per se, but when I worked at an office in an area where there were many office parks and few people around - large buildings with small staffs - there was an ongoing problem of random people showing up at odd hours to dump crap in some other company's dumpsters. My employer was late to understanding the situation and there were a couple times we couldn't take out our own trash because someone else filled the dumpsters. Eventually we did what most neighboring companies did: locked up the dumpsters and put a chain at the entrance to the parking lot. Some angry person dumped stuff on our loading dock a day or two after we locked the dumpsters, but before we closed off the parking lot during off hours.
I'm not sure how trash collection worked. Either they had a key and the locks were worked out with them or someone at my building opened things up on trash collection day. I was never the first person at work in the morning (though among the last to leave) and never had to deal with the bins.
The other problem they're trying to solve is people tearing open the trash bags to look for stuff inside them. To quote again from the comments on that article:
"I am super that lives on the block dsny spent past yr talking to us get us ready lots of meeting and flyer good. We very excited many homeless rip bags cause trash fines now bags secure in clean curbs"
I actually enjoyed collecting Bradford's rubbish. Sure, it stinks, but I rarely had quite the same sense of doing something absolutely necessary, and being shameless king of the street was fun. No, you're not stopping us putting the 16 tonne truck where we want, you're definitely waiting while I dash across the four lanes of traffic and haul three of the things back with me, and if you fill your wheelie bin with builders' rubble sure I'll waltz off with it but we'll leave it on the back of the truck, take it half a mile away, and why don't *you* drag it all the way back, boy genius? The perk that you got paid for the day if you finished early was also nice. It helped to be young and savage.
Speaking of putting out the trash, if you drop and shatter a bottle of olive oil and clean it up with paper towels and put those paper towels in the a paper bag, everything in the trash can below the paper bag will be coated in olive oil after a few days.
AIHMHB, I was the garbage man for the small resort community of St. Mary, Montana for a summer. It was a great job: I had to go in the various locations -- kitchen, gift shop, grocery store, gas stations -- and collect the trash, then drive it out to the dump, and then come back. Several visits a day to the same locations. There was sometimes cool stuff at the dump, but what really made the job was flirting with the women at the various places.
I live in one of the parts of Boston where we have no bins and just put garbage bags out on the sidewalk twice a week, because we don't have alleys behind us and our front sidewalks are narrow and brick. It's not so bad, although it's annoying when they don't get around to collecting them until late afternoon or evening, or in weeks where we have an unusually large or smelly amount of garbage we have to keep inside until the designated time. The businesses on the busy street around the corner still use actual bins, so we're not NYC-level dysfunctional.
A scavenger always comes around and takes all the bottles and cans out of our recycling bags, but then ties the bag back up neatly and sometimes consolidates the remnants of multiple bags back into one. It's impressive how careful he is.
We don't have recycling scavengers, but just tonight I saw a guy grab a thrown away end table.
"DSNY spokesperson Vincent Gragnani said containerization will be a "massive undertaking for a diverse city of 8.8 million people."
I honestly don't think the diversity of the city is your problem here, Vinnie. "There's white rubbish, there's Black rubbish, over here you got Puerto Rican rubbish, kosher rubbish, halal rubbish, Dominican rubbish... so complex! The rich cultural mosaic!"
One of the characters Howard Stern would have on his show was an NYC garbageman who would sometimes expound on his views on the quality (or lack thereof) of trash from different ethnic groups.
What's so dysfunctional about NYC garbage?
Separately: does anyone have ttaM's email? and mind sharing it w me?
re: 91
It's the first seven letters of my surname @gmail.com
m*c*g*r*a*t*t*@gmail.com (without the asterisks)