Both types of bow fired arrows tipped with iron. During sieges, flaming arrows were also used. Another simple but deadly weapon was the sling, capable of throwing stones the size of a billiard ball up to a quarter of a mile.
Sling stones found among the ruins of Lachish, a Judean city destroyed by the Assyrians in B. Horse-mounted cavalrymen were usually armed with long wooden lances, and sometimes also with a bow and arrow. Because the latter were difficult to fire from a moving horse, the men usually operated in pairs, with one firing while the other controlled both horses. Assyrian chariots had two metal-rimmed wheels, and were drawn by up to four horses. Each chariot carried two or three archers in addition to the driver.
Chariots were a sign of power and prestige, and Assyrian kings are often depicted riding in them as they lead their troops into battle. Assyrian reliefs of their sack of Lachish in the British Museum give a vivid picture of the way the Assyrians conducted a siege.
The main offensive weapon was the battering ram. While not as sophisticated as the siege engines of the Roman and medieval periods, the Assyrian weapon was effective against the relatively weak defensive structures of the time. It consisted of a large wooden frame on four wheels, covered with damp leather to protect it from fire, and armed with a pair of huge "spears" -- essentially tree trunks tipped with iron points.
In addition to the muscle power needed to operate it, each battering ram was supported by one or more defensive archers. Andrew May has more than 25 years of experience in academia, government and the private sector. Adzes can be made of a wide variety of materials: ground or polished stone, flaked stone, shell, animal bone, and metal typically copper, bronze, iron. Adzes are generally defined in the archaeological literature as distinct from axes on several bases. Axes are for hewing trees; adzes for shaping wood.
Axes are set in a handle such that the working edge is parallel to the handle; the working edge of an adze is set to be perpendicular to the handle. Adzes are bifacial tools with a pronounced asymmetry: they are plano-convex in cross-section.
Adzes have a domed upper side and a flat bottom, often with a distinct bevel towards the cutting edge. In contrast, axes are generally symmetrical, with biconvex cross sections. The working edges on both flaked stone types are wider than one inch 2 centimeters. Similar tools with working edges of less than an inch are generally classified as chisels, which can have varied cross sections lenticular, plano-convex, triangular.
Without the handle, and despite the literature defining adzes as plano-convex in shape, it can be difficult to distinguish adzes from axes, because in the real world, the artifacts are not bought in a Home Depot but made for a specific purpose and perhaps sharpened or used for another purpose. A series of techniques have been created to ameliorate, but as yet not resolve, this issue.
These techniques include:. All of these methods rely on experimental archaeology, reproducing stone tools and using them to work wood to identify a pattern which might be expected on ancient relics.
Adzes are among the earliest type of stone tool identified in the archaeological record and recorded regularly in Middle Stone Age Howiesons Poort sites such as Boomplaas Cave, and Early Upper Paleolithic sites throughout Europe and Asia. Some scholars argue for the presence of proto-adzes in some Lower Paleolithic site—that is, invented by our hominid ancestors Homo erectus.
In the Upper Paleolithic of the Japanese islands, adzes are part of a "trapezoid" technology, and the make up a fairly small portion of the assemblages at such sites as the Douteue site in Shizuoka prefecture.
Japanese archaeologist Takuya Yamoaka reported on obsidian adzes as part of hunting toolkits on sites dated approximately 30, years ago BP. The Douteue site stone trapezoid assemblages as a whole were basally hafted and heavily used, before being left behind broken and discarded. They make up small but important parts of hunter-gatherer toolkits. An experimental study on them by U. They are very common on Dalton sites, and usewear studies show they were heavily used, made, hafted, resharpened, and recycled in a similar fashion by several groups.
Yerkes and Koldehoff suggest that at the transition period between the Pleistocene and Holocene, changes in climate, particularly in hydrology and landscape, created a need and desire for river travel.
Although neither Dalton wooden tools or dugout canoes from this period have survived, the heavy use of the adzes identified in the technological and microwear analysis indicates they were used for felling trees and likely manufacturing canoes. While wood-working—specifically making wooden tools—is clearly very old, the processes of clearing woods, building structures, and making furniture and dugout canoes are part of the European Neolithic set of skills that were required for the successful migration from hunting and gathering to sedentary agriculture.
A series of Neolithic wooden-walled wells dated to the Linearbandkeramik period of central Europe have been found and intensively studied. Wells are particularly useful for the study of traceology, because water-logging is known to preserve wood. In , German archaeologists Willy Tegel and colleagues reported evidence for a sophisticated level of carpentry at Neolithic sites. Four very well-preserved eastern German wooden well walls dated between — BCE provided Tegel and colleagues an opportunity to identify refined carpentry skills by scanning high-resolution images and producing computer models.
They found that early Neolithic carpenters built sophisticated corner joins and log constructions, using a series of stone adzes to cut and trim the timber. A study on Bronze Age use of a copper ore deposit called Mitterberg in Austria used a very detailed traceology study to reconstruct woodworking tools.
The photo-realistic images of the 31 wooden objects that made up the sluice box were then scanned for tool mark recognition, and the researchers used a workflow segmentation process combined with experimental archaeology to determine that the box was created using four different hand tools: two adzes, an axe, and a chisel to complete the joining. Bentley, R. Alexander, et al. Buvit, Ian, and Karisa Terry. Elburg, Rengert, et al. Tegel, Willy, et al.
Yamaoka, Takuya.
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