Lehoërff Anne. A Call to Arms: The day war was invented

Sidestone Press, 2022. — 226 p.One day, sometime around 1700 BC, a bronzesmith made the first sword. This marked a technological turning point, giving rise to an arms race that has never since ceased. Soon, over a vast area between the Baltic Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, thousands of weapons were manufactured. They were used in combat, then laid to rest, whole or broken, often during complex rituals that are still hard for us to understand.Through the sword, the Bronze Age brought war into being. The warrior became an important figure. Societies were transformed, and came to revolve politically and economically around warfare. Western Europe developed new social structures, a new kind of civilization involving neither towns, nor writing.By tackling the subject ‘a call to arms’, Anne Lehoërff investigates war’s long-term development. She focusses on oral societies which have for a long while remained poorly understood, passed over by a historical tradition that saw the world of Classical Antiquity in a different light to that of ‘primitive’ peoples. But our European ancestors have their own history, and this book tells it.Anne Lehoërff is an archaeologist, archaeometallurgist and historian. She has an "agréation" in history, was member of the Ecole française de Rome, and director of the European ‘BOAT 1550’ project (2011-2015) investigating cross-channel navigation between the continent and the British Isles in the second millennium BC. Until 2020 Anne Lehoërff was a university professor at the university of Lille. She is now professor of ‘Archaeology and Patrimony’ at the University of CY Cergy Paris-Université, specialising in the European Bronze Age.