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But the numbers and proportions of bones found in the tombs suggest that some purposeful movement of certain elements was going on. And some arrangements seem very deliberate – such as the finger bones stuck into the nasal aperture of the skull from Belas Knap in Wiltshire, or the careful arrangement of skulls around the edge of a chamber at Lanhil

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But against that background picture of health and disease was unequivocal evidence of violent injury around the time of death. Skulls had been smashed in with blunt weapons – probably adzes; legs had been hacked at, fracturing fibulae and tibiae. That focus on the legs suggests the attackers were not only interested in dealing fatal blows to their

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both Schöneck-Kilianstädten and Asparn/Schletz appear to have been communities of around thirty to forty people, suggesting that, in each case, a whole hamlet was wiped out by a vicious, lethal attack. The scale of the violence at these places must surely have left deep psychological scars. Professor Rick Schulting of Oxford University has spent ma

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However, as we have seen, soon after 1200 BC, the Bronze Age civilizations did collapse in the Aegean, Eastern Mediterranean, and Near East, and they exhibit all of the classic features outlined by Renfrew, from disappearance of the traditional elite class and a collapse of central administrations and centralized economies to settlement shifts, pop

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In terms of assigning a date to these events, one can in fact argue that 1177 BC is to the end of the Late Bronze Age as AD 476 is to the end of Rome and the western Roman Empire. That is to say, both are dates to which modern scholars can conveniently point as the end of a major era, though they are simply chronological placeholders. In fact, Ital

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In writing about the situation at the end of the Late Bronze Age in his book Scales of Fate, Monroe describes the interactions of the various powers in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean as an “inter-societal network,” which agrees with the picture presented here. He points out, as I have, that this period is “exceptional in the treaties, laws, d

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In 1987, Mario Liverani, of the University of Rome, laid the blame for the Collapse upon the concentration of power and control in the palaces, so that when they collapsed, the extent of the disaster was magnified. As he wrote, “the particular concentration in the Palace of all the elements of organization, transformation, exchange, etc.—a concentr

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However, the second invasion by the Sea Peoples, ending in their cataclysmic fight against the Egyptians under Ramses III during the eighth year of his reign, in 1177 BC, is a reasonable benchmark that can be taken as representative of the entire Collapse and allows us to put a finite date on a rather elusive pivotal moment and the end of an age. I

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“black swan” events—defined as “unexpected and low-probability events with massive repercussions.”13 Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the best-selling author who popularized the term, points to the Harry Potter books, the spread of the internet, and calamities such as WW I as examples of events that were nearly impossible to predict but have had huge impacts

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