Ancient artifacts show brutal past

An arrowhead firmly lodged in the skull of an ancient fallen warrior, a voluptuous woman’s form carved from ivory and the mask of a Roman river god are among more than 1,000 major archaeological discoveries being brought together for the first time.

The exhibition opening Friday at Berlin’s Gropius Bau museum reveals how war, art and migration have left their mark in Germany since the Stone Age.

The show spans more than 300,000 years, starting with a sleek wooden spear used by one of the pre-human species that once roamed the continent long before homo sapiens arrived.

Neanderthal hand axes show how our ancient cousins fled the approaching ice age southward — the first tangible evidence of climate refugees — while the ivory “Venus of Hohle Fels” and similar etchings on slate dated to between 40,000 and 35,000 B.C. attest to early Europeans’ fascination with the female form, pursued by artists ever since.

“The basis of Europe’s common cultural heritage can be found going back thousands of years,” said Christina Haak, deputy head of the Berlin State Museums that helped bring the objects together from museums across Germany.

Often, the exact nature of the objects is unclear: The Nebra sky disk, a plate-size object of gold and bronze, depicting the sun, moon phases and the Pleiades star cluster, is considered one of the first astronomical depictions in history but may also have had religious significance.

Dated to around 1600 B.C., the disk is only a few hundred years older than three spectacular hats made from sheet gold first believed to have been worn by early Celtic priests, but whichmay also have served as primitive calendars.

Many of the artifacts in the exhibition, which runs until Jan. 6, show how strongly progress was linked to the movement of people, goods and ideas into and across Europe.

“Migration is not the mother of all problems. It is the beginning of all innovation,” said Matthias Wemhoff, director of Berlin’s Museum of Prehistory and Early History.

Wemhoff cited the wealth of objects found during the recent construction of a new subway line in Cologne, where artifacts from all over the Roman Empire prove the city was an early melting pot of cultures.

MARKUS SCHREIBER—ASSOCIATED PRESS The Sept. 20, 2018photo shows human skulls and bones of the battle of Tollensetal about 1250BC. displayed at an archeological exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau museum in Berlin. The new exhibition showcasing more than 1,000major archaeological finds from the past 20years shows reveals how Germany has been at the heart of European trade, migration, conflict and innovation since the Stone Age. The exhibition runs from Sept. 21, 2018until Jan. 6, 2019.