With this discovery, the Bronze Age truly arrived in Britain, and over the next thousand years, bronze gradually replaced stone as the main material for tool and weapon making. Evidence for the Beaker in the form of pottery first appears in Britain around 2475–2315 BC along with flat axes and burial practices of inhumation (full burial of the body instead of cremation).īeaker techniques brought to Britain the skill of refining metal, with copper being smelted until the discovery of smelting bronze (a mixture of copper and tin and a much harder metal) around 2150 BC.
These 'bell-beakers' quickly spread across Europe. The people who brought this culture with them are sometimes called the Beaker People, but where did they come from? Around 4,500 years ago, a new, bell-shaped pottery style appeared in Iberia, in present-day Spain and Portugal. The photo (left) shows a characteristic beaker from Sierentz in France, and further down the page you can see one from Warwickshire. This should have said that he was buried in around 2300 BC.A distinct new culture appeared in Britain at the start of the Bronze Age, the Beaker culture named after the distinctive beakers which appear in the archaeological record from this culture. The original said that the Amesbury Archer was buried about 2,300 years ago.
“There is some evidence of a declining population and increased growth of forests, suggesting that agriculture was in decline. “It’s not necessarily a story of violent conquest,” Armit said. In Britain the puzzle remains of what happened to the pre-Beaker population: people who had no metal tools but were capable of stupendous communal projects such as the construction of Stonehenge and the giant artificial hill of Silbury. Geneticist David Reich, of the Harvard Medical School, said: “This is the first clear example from ancient DNA that pots do not always go hand-in-hand with people.” The earliest carbon-14-dated beakers come from the Iberian peninsula, but the study showed that DNA from burials there did not match the central European samples. Many questions remain, including where the Beaker culture originated. Photograph: Dave Webb, Cambridge Archaeological Unit The study included remains of 155 individuals who lived in Britain between 6,000 and 3,000 years ago. It turns out the Amesbury Archer, as with the teenagers, was a Beaker man from central Europe. The scientists’ success in extracting ancient DNA has now pushed the evidence for ancestry generations further back. The isotopes in his teeth proved that he grew up near modern Switzerland, but that technique can only give evidence for the individual’s own life, not their ancestry. He was buried with no fewer than five beakers, gold hair ornaments, an archery wrist guard – another object found in many Beaker burials – and a dagger. His grave is the richest ever found in Britain from the period. There was no obvious cause of death, but the study proved they were cousins.Īnother was the famous Amesbury Archer, described by Armit as “the poster boy for the Beaker people”, buried near Stonehenge in around 2300BC and rediscovered on the site of a new housing estate in 2002.
The individuals studied included an enigmatic double burial from Trumpington in Cambridge – a teenage boy and girl, each with a beaker. The study included remains of 155 individuals who lived in Britain between 6,000 and 3,000 years ago, with many samples taken from skeletons which have been in museums since the 19th century. In the centuries after the Beaker burials the DNA shows that the earlier Britons did not just come slipping back out of the woods.” The people buried with the beakers did not have the same DNA as those from an earlier period, and the effect endured. “The picture is more confused on the continent, where we have not been able to match DNA closely to the Beaker burials in all cases, but in Britain the effects were dramatic.
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