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Cardiff's 5000 Year Old "Battlefield"

Discussion in 'Military History' started by GRW, Aug 16, 2014.

  1. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    If it was a special place for meetings etc, could the broken arrowheads be evidence of target practice rather than conflict? Just a thought.
    Surely they wouldn't just make bows without trying them out first, same for trading them.
    "Archaeologists hoping to discover Roman and Iron Age finds at a Welsh hillfort were shocked to unearth pottery and arrowheads predating their predicted finds by 4,000 years at the home of a powerful Iron Age community, including flint tools and weapons from 3,600 BC.
    Caerau, an Iron Age residency on the outskirts of Cardiff, would have been a battleground more than 5,000 years ago according to the arrowheads, awls, scrapers and polished stone axe fragments found during the surprising excavation.
    “Quite frankly, we were amazed,” says Dr Dave Wyatt, the co-director of the dig, from Cardiff University.
    “Nobody predicted this. Our previous excavation [in 2013] yielded pottery and a mass of finds, including
    five large roundhouses, showing Iron Age occupation, and there’s evidence of Roman and medieval activity.
    “But no-one realised the site had been occupied as far back as the Neolithic – predating the construction of the Iron Age hillfort by several thousand years.”
    Oliver Davis, Dr Wyatt’s colleague on the CAER project, says the ditches date from the early Neolithic period when communities first settled and farmed the landscape."
    “The location and number of Neolithic finds indicate that we have discovered a causewayed enclosure – a special place where small communities gathered together at certain important times of the year to celebrate, feast, exchange things and possibly find marriage partners,” he believes.
    “Such sites are very rare in Wales with only five other known examples, mostly situated in the south.
    “What's fascinating is that a number of the flint arrowheads we have found have been broken as a result of impact - this suggests some form of conflict occurred at this meeting place over 5,000 years ago.”"
    http://www.culture24.org.uk/history-and-heritage/archaeology/art494194-Archaeologists-shocked-find-year-old-battlefield-prehistoric-Cardiff
     
  2. Skipper

    Skipper Kommodore

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    Excellent finds indeed!
     
  3. phylo_roadking

    phylo_roadking Member

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    That's a very mid-20th century way of thinking...I thought the trend nowadays was towards seeing ritual destruction in religious offerings? Swords blunted or bent in two, torcs broken etc....

    Also...in the absence of effective body armour - and shields in Celtic use was still some way off - the nature of the damage would be more interesting than the fact that they were damaged I.E. broken on purpose (see above) or the kind of damage seen by grating on bone...

    Yes, but with stone arrowheads being tiny works of the napper's art all on their own, they wouldn't waste a headed arrow making sure the bow worked.
     
  4. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    Aye, I suppose not. Raises the question of what would they have practised with.
    We seem to have gone full circle from being reluctant to contemplate signs of violence as being possible conflict, to assuming that they all are.
     
  5. phylo_roadking

    phylo_roadking Member

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    Just an untipped arrow? There wouldn't have been that much weight difference between the two - and it's the feathers/flights that are important...IIRC there's not much difference at all between the flight characteristics of a thrown spear with just a firehardened tip, and one with a point of some type attached.

    A bow just has to fire, so to speak - it's the skill of the archer that makes it a good or bad weapon!

    I doubt they had the science to accurately tailor the weight of draw to a person, but an archer would of course want the heaviest that he could draw - so he'd be more interested in testing that aspect.

    Didn't the "archer in the glacier" have an early "compound" bow? Not recurved, but reinforced with bone and sinew...


    We seem to have gone full circle from being reluctant to contemplate signs of violence as being possible conflict, to AGAIN assuming that they all are...

    Can't help remembering that 1960s footage of Sir Mortimer Wheeler and his great portrayals of the now regarded as possibly non-existent fighting at Maiden Castle standing in the back of a moving landrover...
     
  6. KodiakBeer

    KodiakBeer Member

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    A hill fort, to my mind, is just that - a place that a scattered agricultural community would seek shelter and defend when the guys from the next valley were raiding. You might meet there for ceremonies also, but its primary function would be defense. I'd think broken arrowheads would indicate misses more often than breaking on a bone. You'd have timber or stone walls which would break arrowheads striking them.
     
  7. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    Modern thinking is that at least some were probably proto-towns, since some of the perimeters were too big to be defended by the estimated population density of the times.
     
  8. KodiakBeer

    KodiakBeer Member

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    This "Cerro de Trincheras" (hill fort) is on the hill nearest my new house in Arizona. Below it is a seasonal creek where they probably grew corn and beans while they'd terrace the hill above and live there for defense. Same problems, same solutions across the world.

    [​IMG]
     
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  9. lwd

    lwd Ace

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    The effect of the fletching is very dependent on the center of gravity of the arrow. I once made a crossbow bolt from a broken arrow with a target point and used 125 grain blunt as a cap on the rear end. The bolt flew straight for about 30 feet then made an abrupt 90 degree turn to the left followed by a verticle spiral "sort of down range". An untipped arrow is likely to have significantly different fight characteristics than a tipped one.
     
  10. phylo_roadking

    phylo_roadking Member

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    Crossbow bolts are usually significantly shorter than "normal" arrows, which IIRC has a great impact (sic!) on the effect of the fletching... It's been years - decades even! - since I read anything on this, but I seem to remember that medieval period crossbows also had a very abrupt drop-off in their flight.Their flights began with a far greater velocity than an arrow - but an arrow's flight was more predictable and thus "aim-able" in the second, "dropping" half of their trajectory.

    But there is after all a practising archer in the thread - time for some of that good old experimental archeology, Gordon!

    Generally speaking - in the UK, "occupation" of these sites seems for the Late Neolithic to have been transitory but regular - feasting remains in pits etc. - making them initially gathering places for social and religious reasons rather than defence. But at the end of that period, from the start of the Bronze Age, then there are the beginnings of forticiation and development of the sites...timber walls, defended gates, piling up of earth to create turns in the paths up to the gates etc...so that by the Iron Age many of the larger "hill forts" had indeed become forts, and were as well developed as some of the major Gallic towns...but it seems they started out as seasonal or religious gathering places, and their use in different forms and ways lasted for several thousand years.

    In many cases, the "use" of the hill forts as gathering places greatly predates the idea of tribalism in Britain...and in many cases too it seems that those who gathered there for whatever ritual reasons could trvel from quite considerable distances. You actually have to be "bound" to a particular piece of real estate to want a refuge close at hand to it...which means that the use of UK hill forts as refuges and later forts dates from after various social changes including the advent of farming to the British Isles...AND the landscape becoming full enough with people to require refuge from others! Tribalism, and the resultant idea of boundaries and borders, was quite a late idea in the UK, as late as the Late Bronze and Iron Ages.

    Nearly forgot - another typical "use" of these sites in their early days, together with them being ritual gathering places, was that the dead were exposed to the elements there, and their bones flensed/allowed to defleshed...at height/altitude - and the change in the nature of the use of "hill forts" seems to date from the big religious change in the British Isles that also saw the closing of long barrow/chambered graves, burning or burying of the dead etc..
     
  11. KodiakBeer

    KodiakBeer Member

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    Interesting stuff. It may be that in Britain, as an island, the culture was more uniform - same religion, same language, same culture, therefore less warfare and more negotiating in that early period. I wonder if the change to a need for fortifications would be roughly in the period when small seagoing craft might bring new peoples and raiders from Ireland and the continent?

    There's been remarkably little work done on this Trincheras culture in the SW US and Mexico. It is only in the last 75 years with aircraft to see these hill forts that we've even become aware of them. There's very little to see on the ground, it's only from above that you can see that it's not a natural formation. These too, seem to have a central religious site, surrounded by trenches and earthworks that seem to be defensive in nature. Now, satellite technology is revealing far more of these sites than were previously suspected. They are still arguing about how old these might be. There is distinctive pottery in some of teh newer sites that date them back to about 200 AD. The earlier sites, without pottery, have yet to be dated. Only a tiny percentage of these sites have even been looked at.
    The one above is noted in the Google earth view of the property I just bought. I'm eager to hike up the hill and get a look at it.
     
  12. phylo_roadking

    phylo_roadking Member

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    I don't know exactly what the current thinking is on how heterogeneous the population was then - obviously we have no written records, no linguistic records...nothing to indicate what language or languages they spoke, let alone what they spoke about.

    What we DO know however is how there was a considerable commonality in religious practices and symbols - the constant recurrance of the three-lobed spiral incised on stonework, the defleshing of bodies, often the separation after this of the skull from the rest of the mortal remains (possibly indicating some sort of ancestor worship? The same was found in the "culture" that built Gobleki Tepe in Turkey...)

    There may actually have been very little to negotiate about ;) It would have been a very empty landscape at this point - only a couple of hundred thousand so very little competition for any resource. And still partly hunter-gatherer, farming seems to have appeared from the continent along with a migration wave - IIRC the DNA record from this time shows a considerable influx of Near Eastern genes I.E. farming arrived with farmers who ultimately came from the Fertile Crescent many generations before.

    There would only have been small communities at this point; with no real settlement or reason to settle - yet - these would have been periodic comings-together, like, say a Mountain Men's rendezvous 150 years ago... if there was ANYTHING to negotiate about, it would have been a period for "seeking new DNA" for the group LOL

    No; Ireland was at this time still undergoing its own "waves of invasion", preserved in Irish legend; the Irish didn't IIRC start crossing west to east and raiding until recorded history. Nor was there raiding from the Continent - only the later settlement wave of farmers...

    Archeologists and historians are pretty certain that the period of initial fortification of these traditional meeting spots came after the growth of tribalism...and of course farming and settled living - for farming means ensured food levels and together with a settled life means larger populations in a given area...thus it was after the arrival of THIS innovation that population pressure arrived - or rather, settled communities bumping up against each other.
     
  13. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    Was wondering when you'd get to that!


    Archaeologists now think there may have been an invasion of some kind into Southern Britain around the 12th Century BC, but there's no hard and fast evidence for it yet-
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age_Britain

    Here's a bit about DNA in Britain which also mentions the Bronze Age migrations-
    http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/64120/1/BAR1_2008_2_Brown.pdf

    There was also a change to a wetter and colder climate around the Bronze Age, which must have impacted on resource availability-
    http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/64120/1/BAR1_2008_2_Brown.pdf
     
  14. phylo_roadking

    phylo_roadking Member

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    That's the one that began with 16-18 years of concentrated bad weather, isn't it? At the very start of the Bronze Age? IIRC one possibility put up for that was that the Earth passed through the tail of a comet, and the atmosphere accreted a lot of comet "dust"..



    I thought that was the "classic" hypothesis - and that most modern archeologists were veering towards a much less "hostile" takeover...Britain still wouldn't be crowded enough at that point for competition...
     
  15. KodiakBeer

    KodiakBeer Member

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    People will fight for anything. Hunting territories, slaves, women, material goods, food, general feuds... I think we tend to think little of basic material goods today, because mechanization and trade have made such things plentiful. Think how much just a clay pot might be worth in the bronze age when you consider how much effort went into finding and cleaning the grit out of even the right clay (a LOT of work), then building a stone furnace, gathering wood to fuel that furnace that could only make a few pieces at a time. If one village had a lot of pots, perhaps a store of tin (needed to make bronze), a winter food store and any number of women... well, why not raid them and take all their stuff?

    In some ways I think modern researchers view things through the prism of their own humanity - they wouldn't do that (or so they think), and that colors their view of what life might have been like in much more brutal times.
     
  16. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    Aye, most of these hypotheses were forumulated after WW2 when invasion seemed to be the answer to every unsolved archaeological riddle.
     
  17. phylo_roadking

    phylo_roadking Member

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    Slavery seems to have been a product of the Bronze Age in britain - hence would post-date the events in question...

    But read that again ;) Hunting territories...slaves...women...material goods...food...general feuds....

    Feuds need large, usually settled communities to become wars - or else they're just arguments between individuals. But hunting territories, food, material goods? Once again you need there to be competition for the competition to occasionally become violent - I.E. you need a landscape filled with people.

    There's an error in there - it didn't actually take a stone furnace to fire clay. Clay itself I.E. rough "field" clay can be used to form a "press" around a piece or several pieces while they're fired - Bronze Age clayworking sites are usually marked out by the remains of several broken-open clay furnaces - as they couldn't be reused. Or indiviual pieces could be fired in a hearth. And like flint knapping, once it DID arrive in the British Isles the ability to make at least rough fired pots would have been relaitively widespread quite quickly.
     
  18. lwd

    lwd Ace

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    The Amerindians engaged in the above and my impression is that in the early colonial period the American landscape was hardly filled with people. Indeed that's how the state of Kenucky came by its name. Migratory tribes can claim some pretty extensive territories.
     
  19. KodiakBeer

    KodiakBeer Member

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    I used to volunteer at the local museum here. Making an actual clay pot that is waterproof - a pot that one could store grain or dried fish (whatever) through the winter is more complicated than simply fire heating clay. We have both types here in the village sites. A fire heated rough clay vessel as you describe had its uses, but it was simply a temporary item. It was not suitable for any kind of long term storage because it is porous and anything within will quickly mold and spoil.

    To make a real clay vessel you need to first find your clay and then take that material and go through a tedious process of mixing it with water, allowing the clay to settle then pouring off the muddy water residue. You had to go through that a number of times. Once you have that done, you have to get all the sand and grit (tiny stones) out of the clay because any of that material will make the pot crack when heated. You did this with water again, stirring it up and letting it settle then scraping off the layers from the top where lighter material settles, sand perhaps, then removing the clay and leaving the bottom layer where heavier grit settles. You had to repeat this process any number of times. It might take several days just to get a quantity of pure clay suitable for pots.

    But your work is just beginning. You had to get suitable hardwood that burns hot enough to properly fire clay - think about the labor of chopping oak or something without proper metal tools. Once you have a quantity of wood you need to build a furnace. Around here, they used mud/turf to do that - perhaps another days work. They must have used some kind of bellows arrangement, but whatever it was nothing has ever been found here - any sort of wood/leather arrangement has long disappeared so they don't know exactly how that was done. The practiced died when the Russians came with metal and glass and pottery to trade.

    The same would have been done in Great Britain. But remember, all of that work might just yield one large pot to store grain through the winter. Moreover, there was an excellent chance that nothing at all would be produced. Some flaw might make the pot crack and you'd have to start all over to make another one.

    When you consider all this, a few good pots become very valuable loot indeed.
     
  20. phylo_roadking

    phylo_roadking Member

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    But there's a difference between hunter-gatherers or very early communities....and migratory tribes, both of which words are important. Tribalism needs to have developed - much later in the UK than the flint arrowheads that were found at the top of the thread...and migratory tribes need migration ranges, hundreds if not sometimes thousands of miles in the round annually...

    And they were migrating to follow certain criteria - continuously available foraging for their herd animals etc. Which means a very early divergence away from the option of settled agriculture. To the end of their days as free peoples, Amerindian migratory peoples remained very much hunter-gatherers when it came to providing for anything for themselves apart from what they obtained from their herds.

    But by the time the inhabitants of the British Isles were doing this - wood for firing WAS at a premium...as the primeval forests were being cleared rapidly by then. In effect, providing wood for the clay furnace was a win-win activity - you got the wood AND you got cleared land ;)

    This is where "experimental archeology" comes in again. I take it you've never got the British television series "Time Team" on PBS???

    ...which is why a "clay pipe" with good, almost pure clay was a valuable resource - but also why Samian ware for example became and remained for hundreds of years a very popular import even when domestic production continued under the Romans.

    Firing clay in a "press" - whether slow-burning to fire brick, or bellows-driven to fire clay pots - hasn't actually gone away as a technology ;) As late as WW2 it was used to mass produce cheap brick for the huge wave of building for military purposes in the UK...ever noticed colour pics of "wartime" brick? And how it's all different colours?...thats because when fired stacked up around a slow-burning fire, then the whole thing covered with clay, the sides or ends facing the fire bake harder, sometimes change colour, sometimes come out permanently stained with soot...

    Also - Bronze Age Britons weren't using clay pots for longterm storage; right into the Iron Age they were storing grains etc. in ground pits because of the amounts ;) One of the advantages of settlement and agriculture. Clay pots were used mostly for cooking or carrying rather than storage.


    THIS is what I mean by Bronze Age clay furnaces in the British Isles...

    https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=bronze+age+pottery+kilns&num=100&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=ah_1U_KJMoWp0QXfo4DYBw&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAQ&biw=1360&bih=671
     

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