Age of Heroes: elite warfare during the Eurasian Bronze Age

Summary

The Eurasian Bronze Age has been in focus of archaeologists, historians and linguists at least for last 50 years for the rich and striking records of Indo-European origin and movements. Important topics, strongly attached to this theme, are horse utilization and emergence of battle chariot. However, previously they have not been analyzed statistically and rarely treated from the positions of anthropological archaeology. This paper examines the modern level of knowledge of archaeological records through their quantitative analysis, results of experimental tests, and re-examination of chronology in light of radiocarbon dates. One of the results is an attempt to show that during the Bronze Age warfare caused emergence of social complexity and shaped it by producing military professional class of elites, later reflected in such written sources as Rig Veda, and yet elites in order to preserve their social privileges kept to create necessity of warfare and required means. This military class was directly involved to warfare; however, due the examinations of archaeological records, it is not seen as the endemic wars, but as rare "elites"-related events.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

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