Ancient Ancestors: The Bronze Age Bell Beaker Culture in Britain and Europe (2800-1800BC)
Channel: Celtic History Decoded
Date: 2023-04-16

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Ancient Ancestors: The Bronze Age Bell Beaker Culture in Britain and Europe 

Nealy 5,000 years ago in Iberia, present day Spain and Portugal, a new bell shaped pottery vessel appeared. Within less than 100 years, the ancient culture named after these Bell Beakers had spread across much of Western and Central Europe and into the British Isles, including reaching islands such as Sardinia and Sicily, in addition to parts of northern Africa.

This Bell Beaker culture had a profound impact on the genetic makeup of the British Isles. Within a few hundred years, this Beaker culture introduced high levels of steppe-related ancestry and was associated with the replacement of approximately 90% of Britain’s gene pool, according to a study published in Nature in 2018. 

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The Bell Beaker Culture refers to an archaeological culture that gets it’s name from the shape of their distinctive bell beakers found all across Europe from thousands of years ago,  drinking vessels in the shape of inverted-bells. They were often decorated in horizontal zones by finely toothed stamps.  

The Bell Beaker culture arose around 2800BC, and it lasted in Britain until 1800BC. In continental Europe however, the culture lasted around 500 years until 2300BC, when it was replaced by the Unetice culture. The Beaker culture replaced and interacted with previous archaeological cultures in Europe, such as the earlier Corded Ware culture and the Funnelbeaker culture. 

One stunning site associated with the Bell Beakers is the Pömmelte ring sanctuary in Germany today. Built with wood and dated as far back as 2300 BC as the earliest phase of the ritual centre, it is thought to have had an astrological significance and many parallels have been drawn with Stonehenge. 

The people associated with this culture are known as the Beaker people. Probably from a warlike stock, they were known as bowmen mainly, but also carried daggers and/or spearheads. Beaker people are often described as being tall and heavy boned.Their extensive search for copper (and gold) greatly accelerated the spread of bronze metallurgy in Europe, and it’s though that there expansion was in part fuelled by the search for metals. In fact, the earliest copper production in Ireland, identified at Ross Island in the period 2400–2200 BC, was associated with early Beaker pottery. Here, the local ores were smelted to produce the first copper axes used in Britain and Ireland. 

The spread if the Beaker culture into Central Europe brought it into contact with the Battle-Ax (or Single-Grave) culture. The two cultures are thought to have intermixed. Although the Bell Beakers spread across much of Europe, there seemed to concentrations of Beaker culture in certain pockets, as this map from Barry Cunliffe’s book on the Ancient Celts shows.

Sources:

National History Museum, The Beaker people: a new population for ancient Britain https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2018/february/the-beaker-people-a-new-population-for-ancient-britain.html 

Nature (Olade et al.) The Beaker phenomenon and the genomic transformation of northwest Europe https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25738 

Britannica, Beaker folk https://www.britannica.com/topic/Oguz 

Bell Beaker culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Beaker_culture 

Barry Cunliffe (2018) The Ancient Celts (Oxford University Press) 

Corded Ware culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corded_Ware_culture 

Funnelbeaker culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funnelbeaker_culture ]

Ross Island, Killarney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Island,_Killarney 

#history #bellbeaker #bellbeakerculture