Archaeologists in Italy have unearthed a Copper Age necropolis that contains nearly two dozen tombs and a collection of weapons.
The discovery was made in November at San Giorgio Bigarello, a municipality in northern Italy, during the construction of a community garden. However, researchers had no idea how extensive the 5,000-year-old burial site was until excavations earlier this year revealed 22 tombs containing human remains. Many of the burials included flint weapons, including daggers, “perfect arrowheads” and blades, according to a translated article in ArchaeoReporter, an archaeology-focused newspaper based in Italy.
Archaeologists noticed that many of the skeletons were buried on their left sides “with legs bent to their chests and heads oriented to the northwest,” according to ArchaeoReporter.
“The positioning of the bodies suggests that there might have been some correlation with another Copper Age culture from northern Italy known as the Remedello,” Sestito said. This is because members of that culture buried their deceased in a similar fashion, thus “leading to some parallels between the two societies.”
I wonder what northwestern feature is special enough to orient toward for them. None of the articles seem to speculate.
France!
From the picture I thought the skeleton had a health bar for a second.
“maybe from ancient warriors.” Who else would they be from? Some kid who was really into Naruto and went shopping at the bootleg sword store in the ancient necropolis mall?
People used to own very few items, and it was common for them to have multiple functions. Knives were both a weapon and a utensil all the way into the middle ages. Axes were used to fell trees, build items, and wage war. So yes, a lot of people carried weapons.
I think we would define them as “tools” then, and not weapons. Anything can be a weapon if you use it like one. Calling them “weapons” tells me that these are designed to be used as such.
