by Paul Elliott
One theory suggests that a Beaker ‘package’ or Beaker culture spread across the Channel from Europe, but the changes that occurred through the Early Bronze Age are so striking that an influx of newcomers seems very likely. The Amesbury Archer, a Bronze Age man buried close to Stonehenge around 2300 BC, probably grew up in the Alps according to oxygen isotope analysis on his tooth enamel.
The earliest Beaker burials were located some distance from the large henge monuments of Britain. It seems that Beaker folk were initially outside the mainstream of established Neolithic society. According to Mike Parker Pearson, ‘their lifestyle, their politics, their social structure, [were] so very different to the host culture within Britain’. Beaker immigrants came from parts of Europe that did not have great communal projects and collective power structures, they were not prepared to work en masse for the good of the community. Things were changing. With their new metals and new social order, the Beaker people brought with them a dispersed, decentralised social structure. The whole rationale for the henges and other communal monuments quickly disappeared.
Early Bronze Age dagger complete with its wooden hilt that has been decorated with bronze pins and rivets. From a burial at Milston, Wiltshire. (J. F. S. Stone)
For reasons still unknown, Britons soon abandoned their rectangular, Neolithic houses and instead began building round houses. This form of domestic dwelling continued in use through to the Roman invasion, 2,000 years later. Still, the remains of houses are relatively rare during this period, leading many archaeologists to suggest that the Neolithic emphasis on cattle rearing, supplemented by wheat and barley production, continued into the Early Bronze Age. The grand burial of a Beaker man, excavated at Irthlingborough, Northamptonshire, seems to add weight to this theory. He was buried in true Beaker fashion, with a pottery Beaker (of course), a flint arrowhead and flint dagger, a stone wrist guard, a boar’s tusk, an amber ring, a couple of pebbles (one of them chalk), and a few flint tools. Most remarkable, though, was the mountain of cattle bones above the body which included 184 skulls, fifteen pelvises, thirty-three shoulder blades, and thirty-eight jawbones. When analysed, the bones told researchers that the cattle had been young bullocks, at their prime for meat yield. Most likely, these bones represent the remains of a great funerary feast and the cattle brought to the burial site from the herd of the dead man’s family, or assembled by mourners each bringing their own offering. However it is interpreted, it is clear that huge numbers of cattle were available in the Nene Valley at that period.
Beakers are wonderful things, certainly of a size to be used (and probably owned) by one person alone. They are of a sinuous form, with an S-shaped profile and many are eggshell thin. All are intricately decorated with impressed geometric designs made by bird bones, cord, or sharp twigs. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the Beakers and Beaker culture, is the fact that pollen grains from lime flowers were found in a beaker excavated in a grave near Fife, Scotland. The beaker had probably been filled with mead—a drink of fermented honey—that was placed with the body of the deceased as an offering. Did alcohol arrive with the Beaker people? Or did it signify a new social trend that had alcohol at its heart? Whatever it meant, the Beaker was the drinking cup of an individual, whereas the pottery and bowls of the Neolithic were for communal consumption only.
Gradually, the evidence for the cult of individuality that arrived with the Beaker intensified. The Early Bronze Age is famous for the erection of the immense sarsen trilithons at Stonehenge. Although this marks the last hurrah for that important and incredibly ancient henge, it signals a whole new era of monumental construction. Stone circles, standing stones, stone alignments, and elaborate grave mounds were all being erected by the new elite of bronze owning, Beaker-using, leaders.
In the Neolithic, land had formed the basis for wealth and communities could generally provide for all of their needs. Bronze, however, was dependant both on highly skilled specialists as well as access to supplies of copper and tin. Trade and travel, therefore, assumed greater and greater importance. Families who controlled trade routes, or who had alliances with tribes rich in bronze, were able to flaunt their wealth. Personal items fashioned from bronze or gold became status symbols amongst these families. The Beaker folk had introduced the concept of wealth to Britain and this had inevitably brought with it inequalities and social divisions; the Irthlingborough burial perfectly illustrates this new social order. Buried in the ground, just before the barrow was erected, was the body of a young man, and his only grave good was a single bone needle, quite a contrast to that of the man buried above him in the round barrow. Was he a servant? Was he a son or another family member? The grave goods of the primary burial indicated the growing complexity that the Beaker culture had brought with it. The finger-sized chalk pebble had come all the way from the Stonehenge area, while the flint dagger had been manufactured in Norfolk. The amber had been imported from the Baltic Sea and the jet buttons from Whitby, on the Yorkshire coast.
Beaker burials occur singly within round barrows or cairns and number some 30,000 in Britain alone. These barrows have no chamber, there was no access to the bones within once the dead were buried; the concept of a large communal tomb was abandoned. Wealthy individuals were now buried alone. Yet communities are still represented within these monuments. Often ‘secondary burials’ occur, where the remains of a cremated body is placed within an urn and then buried within the upper levels of an existing round barrow. In addition, many Beaker barrows are usually found in groups of between four and forty, so-called ‘barrow cemeteries’. What does this mean? Round barrows probably represent a single family, and serve almost the same purpose as a family chapel within a church, or as a private mausoleum. The rest of the population were either put into unmarked cremation cemeteries or into an existing round barrow as a secondary cremation burial. Where once the tribe had worked collectively, now power and influence was held by the heads of wealthy families.
Bush Barrow, excavated in 1808, illustrates well the type of burials occurring at this time. Located only 1 km from the freshly erected sarsen stones of Stonehenge, the occupant of Bush Barrow was a man who had been laid to rest with three bronze daggers, one of which had a hilt studded with hundreds of gold nails. Accompanying the daggers was a bronze axe, a stone mace, a golden belt buckle, and a remarkable lozenge-shaped golden sheet. Bush Barrow man was obviously someone of status and influence. The number of metal daggers in his possession and the presence of so much gold illustrate his wealth, while the mace (complete with decorative bone inlays for the handle) is a testament to his rank or influence.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Early Bronze Age is that, amidst all of the turbulence and change, the great monuments of the Neolithic continued to be used. Not only that, but many were extended and dramatically upgraded with stone circles. The final phases of Stonehenge and Avebury in Wiltshire, are the most spectacular examples of this process, and they form the heart of a rich religious complex. Marking a crucial change from a Neolithic community of equals to one dominated by elite families and competition, the Early Bronze Age is incredibly important. It ushered in not just new materials and technologies, but a new society. It also set a trend in prehistoric Britain that would be played out over the course of the next 2,000 years.
Early Bronze Age grave at Kellythorpe, near Driffield, East Yorkshire. The grave contained some of the key pieces of the ‘Beaker package’ including an archer’s wrist guard, Bell Beaker drinking vessel, copper dagger, and amber buttons. (J. R. Mortimer)
Middle Bronze Age (1500 BC to 1000 BC)
Subdividing the Bronze Age might seem to be splitting hairs, but the fact is that the system of ‘metal ages’ is not a neat and tidy one, it was originally devised by the early antiquarians who required a method for sorting and categorizing their growing collections of ancient artefacts. It was Christian Jurgensen Thomsen, a Dane, who established in 1836 that the age of iron had bee
n preceded by an age of bronze, which had in turn been preceded by an age of stone. Difficulties arose when later archaeologists began to see social developments that overlapped or occurred within the three-age system. It has been clear for some time that a major farming revolution occurred in the middle of the Bronze Age, a century or so either side of 1500 BC.
Bronze is seen in predominance during the Middle Bronze Age, flint axes are replaced at all levels by a myriad of bronze types, and tools other than axes also begin to be manufactured from this now long-established alloy. Cross-Channel vessels like the extraordinary Dover Boat, dating from 1500 BC, facilitated this accelerating trade in axes. The evidence suggests that bronze was now in common circulation and no longer in the hands of certain powerful families.
Metalwork from the Middle Bronze Age.
1. Socketed axe (from the Taunton hoard).
2. Socketed punch (also from the Taunton hoard).
3. Chisel from Sparkford, Somerset.
4. Flanged palstave, Barton Bendish, Norfolk.
5. Knobbed sickle from Edington Burtle, Somerset.
6. Side-looped spearhead, Stump Bottom, Sussex.
7. Palstave from Edington Burtle.
C. Burgess)
Yet the transformation that occurred was not material, but social, religious, and economic. Throughout the Early Bronze Age the population had been increasing and communities had been evolving rapidly to cope. By 1500 BC this population pressure had reached crisis point, and the farming economy that had been established by those first Neolithic immigrants needed a complete overhaul. Perhaps the most dramatic change was the total abandonment of the great henges, the long cursus monuments and even the ubiquitous round Beaker barrows. The mechanics of belief took a dramatic turn, away from grand solar alignments and vast ritual landscapes, to small-scale water cults. A warmer climate encouraged the cultivation of previously inhospitable uplands; Dartmoor, the Pennines and the Peak District, the North Yorkshire Moors, and western and central Scotland were all colonized by Bronze Age farmers. When the climate then deteriorated around 1200 BC, these upland pioneers were forced back down to the lowlands.
Farming was not just spreading outwards and upwards, but there was also a degree of intensification. The Middle Bronze Age provides evidence in abundance for the widespread laying out of field systems, not just for the grazing of sheep and cattle, but also for the growing of crops. While arable farmland has been identified within the Neolithic period, it appears piecemeal and difficult to identify. Now field systems become extensive, the land parcelled up and subdivided with boundaries that have persisted (in some places) through to the modern day. Communal labour on the large ritual henges was instead redirected toward these new field systems.
Society changed too. The earlier Beaker barrows had sat in rows, often on ridges, with their high-status occupants looking out over the landscape that they had dominated in life. After 1500 BC, small cemetery clusters replace barrow building, these are local affairs with very little outward presence. Communities were being reorganised around the new field systems with the result that farms and roundhouses from this period proliferate in the archaeological record. Gatherings also become local affairs. Perhaps with the move away from cattle rearing and pastoralism the Britons no longer needed big community gathering places such as henges. Communication with one’s neighbours (and, one would imagine, one’s cousins and more distant relatives) was now a matter of routine. Ritual gatherings were now conducted at the family level, rather than the tribal. Trade may have also been conducted at a local level, goods being exchanged with neighbouring communities or received as part of a marriage arrangement or other social obligation.
Flag Fen, near Peterborough, has proven to be a treasure trove of Bronze Age artefacts. Sat on the edge of ancient fenland, the Flag Fen site enjoyed great religious prestige. A timber trackway extended for 1 km from dry land over an inland sea, where it ended at a timber platform. From there objects of value were cast into the black waters below. Hundreds of bronze artefacts have been recovered from the mud around both the trackway and the platform including spears, tools, swords, daggers, axe heads, and even a pair of shears. Nearly all of these objects had been bent or broken, making them useless in this world, but not in the next. In 1937, workmen from the Trent Navigation Company were dredging the river at Clifton and came across a similar timber platform and a scatter of bronze items, including swords and daggers, all dated to around 1100 BC.
Prehistoric communities had always made offerings to the gods or the spirits, but in the Neolithic these had often been quern stones, ritual meals, pottery, human or animal bones, or simple pieces of jewellery. The very bones of the ancestors themselves served as objects of veneration. Now, with bronze and gold now on the scene, worshippers could offer the gods something spectacular. Most Bronze Age offerings were deposited into pools or rivers, rather than be buried in the ground as they had been in the Neolithic, and artefacts recovered from places like Flag Fen and Clifton were deliberately damaged to put them beyond the reach of man. Three of the Flag Fen swords, for example, were purposely and repeatedly smashed against a rock to blunt them, tips were broken off and the hilts removed. Some of these items show wear, and were almost certainly owned and used by the worshipper, while others seem to have been made especially for the ritual. This act of ‘breaking’ an object before giving it to the gods persisted into the Iron Age and is no different from the practice common throughout the ancient world of sacrificing an animal in honour of the gods. The spirit of the slaughtered beast, and the spirit of the broken sword (if you will) had to be sent on its way before the ancestor spirits or the gods could receive it.
But where did these gods or spirits actually dwell? In the Neolithic period, knowledge of solar alignments existed, particularly those that occurred at the summer and winter solstices. Yet the burial offerings of the period seem to suggest that the land of the dead existed below the ground, perhaps even within the earth itself. It has even been suggested (quite plausibly) that the excavation of the great ditches and embankments of the causewayed enclosures, henges, cursus, and barrow mounds were an integral (if not the central) part of the worship. A community came together to dig. If the tribal spirits or gods dwelt below the ground, then this activity made perfect sense.
Something radically changed in the century either side of 1500 BC. Britons quickly switched from burying objects in the ground to dropping them into sacred pools and rivers. Did this mark a change in religious thinking? Had the entire cosmology of Bronze Age Britain changed? Or had the new bronze offerings required some new method of disposal? Perhaps burial just was not the most effective way of sending an object to the gods. Reflective pools and still water could be seen as portals or windows into the underworld. Or (the cynic in me says) burying a bronze sword, worth a dozen head of cattle, was not thought to be safe. Dropping these objects into a pitch black pool or a swift-flowing river, however, certainly put the object beyond the realm of the living, making it extremely difficult for anyone else to recover it. It reached the gods, and was out of the easy reach of men. Prehistoric life was no idyll; poverty, hunger, and desperation would strike the population from time to time, just as they did during the Middle Ages. We have an image of uneducated peasants in ancient history kowtowing to the religious laws of their leaders. Yet the evidence from dynastic Egypt illustrates the lengths to which ordinary folk were willing to go to plunder the vast fortunes hidden away within the tombs of the Valley of the Kings.
During the Middle Bronze Age, some communities established themselves within hill forts. These fortified hilltop enclosures (like Harrow Hill and Norton Fitzwarren) were not the same as the causewayed enclosures of the early Neolithic. Ram’s Hill, Berkshire, for example, dates from 1300 BC and features a heavily defended gateway that allowed entrance into an interior filled with roundhouses. Mike Parker Pearson believes that these early hill forts dominated the farmsteads
and villages around them and probably acted as a local market for pottery, bronze work, and agricultural surplus. As the Bronze Age progressed these hill forts began to proliferate.
Metalwork from the Early Bronze Age, part of the Killaha East hoard, found in County Derry. (C. Burgess)
Late Bronze Age (1000 BC to 700 BC)
After 1000 BC the dead were first cremated and then buried in shallow pits without even a pot to hold the ashes. This was a new development. By 800 BC even these cremation burials vanish from the archaeological record, leaving us with no clue as to how or where the dead were disposed of.
Across the land, hilltop settlements were being constructed that must have served a defensive function. Gateways and ramparts are much in evidence, but it is suspected that they also played a role in social activity. Sheep and cattle may have been gathered there for fairs, marriages arranged, goods traded, religious rites observed, and meetings held between clans. We do not know whether these hill forts were built and controlled by the communities around them, or were owned and inhabited by a wealthy chief.
The pinnacle of Bronze Age development is characterised with the construction of defensive hill forts, and with the production of increasingly sophisticated weapons. Warfare had arrived in Britain and along with it a Bronze Age arms race. Daggers had been the fashion during the Early Bronze Age and eventually superseded as a status symbol by rapiers, long thin bronze swords, suitable only for stabbing. By the Late Bronze Age heavier bronze swords with leaf-shaped blades, typified by the Ewart Park type, were introduced and these could be used to hack and chop at an opponent as well as stab. Other styles of bronze swords, like the Carp’s Tongue design, belonged to a European tradition. Spearheads follow their own train of development.