The Bronze Age was basically just one long bloodbath, made possible by the invention of new weapons forged from the copper-tin alloy that gives the era its name. While analyzing these ancient armaments using lab equipment can tell us a great deal about their histories, there’s really only one way to figure out how effective they were at killing – by using them in a fight.
In the name of experimental archaeology, researchers have spent years stabbing, slicing, and thrusting with replica prehistoric weapons, and a pair of new studies shed fresh light on the ways in which these razor-sharp tools of war were used during the Bronze Age.
The first of these, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, aimed to settle a long-standing dispute over whether Bronze Age swords from Bohemia and Moravia – in modern-day Czechia – were intended for use in battle or merely ceremonial. After analyzing the use-wear patterns on 47 ancient swords, the study authors then created four bronze replicas to fight each other with.
Getting straight to the point, so to speak, the researchers found that the type of damage seen on their blades after a dust-up mirrored that on the ancient swords, indicating that they were probably not just for show. To discover just how much damage the ancient weapons could inflict, the archaeologists also had a go at disfiguring the body of a pig.
Reporting their results, they reveal that “stabbing strikes left indentations on ribs, with some blades piercing through to the bone.” Attempting to deduce how Bronze-Age warriors might have used these swords in an attack, they found that “draw-cuts proved to be the most effective, causing significant soft tissue injuries leading to opponent weakening, bleeding out, and eventual death.”
The second study, which appears in the Journal of Archaeological Science, saw a team of researchers – who also happened to be martial arts experts – attack each other with replica Bronze Age spears, modeled on ancient weapons discovered in the Netherlands. In lieu of a pig, they used the body of a roe deer to assess the murderous capacity of these nasty pieces of kit.
Once again, the “wounding experiments showed the offensive potential of these weapons which were apt to inflict lethal wounds, commonly associated with ‘warfare’ or ‘fight for life’ situations,” write the study authors. To their surprise, the spears were capable of completely shattering the deer’s leg bones, suggesting that many ancient injuries attributed to blunt force trauma in the archaeological record might actually have been inflicted by spears.
At the same time, the researchers found that, when operated with sufficient skill, the spears could also be used to deliberately inflict “non-lethal bleeding wounds.” As such, the weapons appear suitable for use in ceremonial combat as well as genuine warfare.
As with the sword study, the spear-wielding researchers found that the patterns of use-wear left on their weapons as a result of their experiments matched those seen on actual Bronze Age blades, suggesting that these lethal implements were used in an array of different contexts to produce “a wide range of injuries.”
