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The Beaker People: everything you wanted to know
00:39:58
Mike Parker-Pearson answers listener questions on the prehistoric people famed for their brilliant metal ornaments – and credited with transforming Britain 4,500 years ago
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- [01:31]
Mike Parker Pearson
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Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Who were the Beaker people? What was their contribution to the building of Stonehenge? And did their arrival in Britain really lead to the obliteration of the indigenous population? Here in conversation with Spencer Mizzen, Mike Parker Pearson answers the most pressing questions on a prehistoric culture that changed Britain for good.
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Advertiser 1
So Mike, I'd like to start by giving our listeners a quick introduction to the Beaker people. So I wonder if you could tell us who were and where do they get their distinctive name from?
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Mike Parker Pearson
Right. Well, they lived in Western Europe more than four and a half thousand years ago, and we call them Beaker because of the type of pots that they made. And the full name is Bell Beaker because if you think of a bell and turn it upside down, that's basically the form of their pot, except it has a flat base and a much narrower mouth than a bell would. So it's like an upside down bell. They also decorated them with horizontal lines, sometimes in size, just a straight line cut with a knife or a bone in the wet clay or impressing twisted cord. So cord made from plant materials. So if you think of a kind of heavily twisted string, and it's a very distinctive pottery, it really is so completely different to the previous traditions across Europe for how they made pots. And archaeologists had noticed this, well, hundreds of years ago and wondered if this was made by a particular people or even a race. Now we know that it's a much more complicated story because the results of ancient DNA analysis are transforming our knowledge.
- [03:52]
Advertiser 1
On this great stuff. And we'll dig into that a bit more later in the interview. I think I'm right in saying that the Beaker people started arriving in Britain, was it about four and a half thousand years ago? We've had a question on social media from somebody called Derek Hoyton and he wants to know how radically did the Beaker people change these islands when they arrived?
- [04:15]
Mike Parker Pearson
Well, that's kind of really at the end of the whole story, because the story actually begins nearly 5,000 years ago, around 2800 BC in southern Portugal. And this was where the first beakers were made. They were decorated with horizontal incised lines. And we find them all the way from Morocco right up the Spanish coast into France. And then what we see somewhere a couple of hundred years later, these particular styles of beaker, we call them maritime because of this maritime distribution and the particular form of incised decoration, they turn up in the upper Rhine, so that's well inland in Europe, and that's really where Germany meets Switzerland and France. And it's there that those maritime beakers become transformed into a new style, because they start decorating with twisted cord instead of incised lines. And it's at that point that they're burying them with their dead. And we see this is the beginning of a population explosion, that people with beakers are moving out of that area to the east into Bohemia. So that's beyond Austria into the Czech Republic, for example, but also down to the Alps to southern France, back into Iberia where they started from, but also westwards into the Low Countries and then eventually into Britain. So Britain's very much at the tail end of this extraordinary movement, this migration of people coming out of that Upper Rhine area.
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Advertiser 1
So you've mentioned Germany there, you've mentioned Portugal, and obviously, as you say, they made it to Britain. But were they a distinct people or was the one thing, the one common thread in this, the fact that they produced these beakers?
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Mike Parker Pearson
Yes, we know that the population that were producing the first beakers in Portugal, in Iberia and into France and beyond that these were the descendants of Neolithic farmers. So that's the farmers of the new Stone Age, the first farmers in Europe. And these are their descendants from some 2,000 years after farming had already arrived. But what's interesting about the group in the Upper Rhine is that they have a slightly different ancestry. Yes, there's Neolithic farmer ancestry in there, but there's also ancestry that derives from far to the east in the steppes. So that's the area we call the Pontic Steppe, between the Black Sea and the Caspian. We all know that very well today because it's Ukraine and western Russia. And those populations had been moving westwards from those regions and bringing with them cord decorated pottery. And it's at their westernmost extent that those cord decorated pot users come into contact with this group in the Upper Rhine. And the pottery changes in style. So they keep the basic beaker form, the upturned bell and they add cord impression. So they're pressing twisted string into the wet clay. And that then becomes the definitive form of this second stage of beaker ceramics, which, as I was saying, expands right across Europe and people bring that style with them. We detect that steppe ancestry not just in the Low Countries and into Britain, but also this return migration back into Iberia, Spain and Portugal.
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Advertiser 1
So what do these people look like? Do we know?
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Mike Parker Pearson
We know what they look like in terms of the non perishable items that they wore. And they're metallurgists. They're coming from a long tradition of metalworking, been metalworking for many hundreds of years before the beginning of the beaker phenomenon, just after 5,000 years ago, they're wearing gold ornaments and it's mostly the men that have the gold rather than the women. And there are various items like belt hooks and other small bodily worn pins and the like. But otherwise, in terms of clothing, we've only got one part of Europe that gives us a really good idea, and that's in Switzerland where they carved grave markers in the form of humans, human shapes, and they actually give them these outfits. So you can see that they're wearing a tunic top and that has quite an elaborate sort of zigzag motif on would look like a decorated pullover that we might wear today, but sleeveless and then not trousers, of course, but a kind of Kilt like item.
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Advertiser 1
And do we know what drove their migration? Like, we say there was a wide geographical spread across Europe. They eventually made it to Britain. You know, what was the reasons that they eventually came here?
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Mike Parker Pearson
We haven't got any idea. What we can see is that this is a massive migration out of that particular zone in the Upper Rhine in all directions. And we're thinking that the most likely reason for this is that it's simply population growth. All you need is to have a low mortality level, lower than groups around you, and you can actually expand your numbers very rapidly. You can grow from a community of hundreds to one of tens of thousands within a century. Because, of course, we've got to remember that these events, these processes, are played out over huge periods of time. We talk very blithely about something happening, but it's taken 200 years to happen. It's not the immediacy that more recent history would give us.
- [10:19]
Advertiser 1
Okay, Roberta Alessandra on social media, she's asked if you can tell us a little bit about the people who occupied Britain before the Beakers arrived. I mean, how radically did they differ from the Beaker people?
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Mike Parker Pearson
We have a very strange situation going on in Britain before the Beaker People's arrival because for. For reasons that we're maybe just beginning to glean. Britain cut itself off from the continent, an absolutely ridiculous thing to have done, because it meant that they were not plugged in to the exchange networks of the whole of Europe. And given that metallurgy was available, given that knowledge of the wheel was also there on the continent, they were just blocking off all these potential innovations. And we can also see that there's absolutely no traded material going either way across the Channel. And the traditions that developed in Britain were completely different, both in architectural and small items like pottery to what was on the other side. So the people of Britain cut themselves off from the continent. And it's within that period of isolation that they built Stonehenge and other major stone circles, as well as the big henge enclosures, circular, ditched and banked structures, something that is entirely restricted to the islands of Britain and Ireland. So it's a community that is also without villages. We have just single farmsteads scattered across southern Britain. And there are key places, centers for ceremonial and monumental activity. Stonehenge and Avebury are the most famous, but there were over 70 of these spread across the country. People were not quite nomadic, but highly mobile. So they were living in different places at different times of the year, moving with their animals, their cattle, and their pigs to be at the ceremonial centers for particular times of year for feasting.
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Advertiser 1
But we don't have any idea then why they chose to isolate themselves from the continent. Are there any theories doing the range as to why that was?
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Mike Parker Pearson
Well, one of the really interesting results we're getting from DNA analysis is that we could see episodes of bubonic plague because the bacteria are resident within the human skeleton, within the teeth. When we analyze those teeth to extract the genome of the dead person, and we know that there were at least two cases of bubonic plague in Britain, one before the beaver people even arrived, around 2,900 2800 BC. So about four centuries earlier. And then we've got a second event some 300 years after their initial arrival from burials in different parts of Britain. So it is possible that we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg there and that. But the whole point about these large scale migrations is that they act as a vector for the spreading of diseases across the whole continent.
- [13:46]
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- [15:20]
Advertiser 1
Okay, so around four and a half thousand years ago, the beakers begin to arrive in Britain. What did that process look like? I mean, I've read headlines that have said, Dutch hordes kill off early Britons who started Stonehenge. And, you know, there's also headlines sort of referring to the complete obliteration of the indigenous gene pool. Is there any truth to that?
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Mike Parker Pearson
No.
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Advertiser 1
Right, okay, so tell us why. Tell us why.
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Mike Parker Pearson
Part of the problem is that, as I said earlier, we're looking at huge periods of time, many centuries, and it's very difficult to understand what that means in terms of actual process and events. What we can see from studying the isotopes in people's teeth is we can to some extent map their lifetime journeys, because we can study the strontium isotopes to find out what sort of geology they were living on when those teeth were forming and then contrast it with the geology where they were buried. And this is particularly the case for the Amesbury Archer, who was buried just three miles away from Stonehenge round about 2400 BC. And we know that he grew up somewhere in the foothills of the Alps, So he's very likely to be a direct mover from the Upper Rhine to Britain. But it's interesting that at that time he's the only one. It's a couple of hundred years later that we have just one other who moves from that region to what is now Derbyshire in the middle of Britain. So there are very few long distance movers in that single lifetime. What we seem to have is a series of really quite short journeys that people are making generation after generation after generation. So many may have just made short trips and eventually just crossed the Channel at some point, but I think we have to realize that because the Derbyshire case is centuries later, this is not a massive horde all at once. This is a trickle of people, families and individuals moving relatively short distances, because that's how we explain the other 350 individuals that we've analyzed that don't show any of this long distance migration like the Amesbury Archer and the other one. So it's long term, it's small groups moving. And this is the same picture that our colleagues are finding in mainland Europe as well. Small groups, small journeys. And I think the other point is that as we know from so many cases of migration, people go back again. They go back and forth to and from the homeland. And we have some evidence of this in northern Germany, because shortly after the building of the big Stone circles like Woodhenge. We see that there are examples of Woodhenges being built there and they have to be directly influenced by what people had seen in Britain. So it's a very complicated picture back and forth. I'm afraid the journalistic reporting has been completely wrong. And then of course, I think there's a second point that was in that question, which is what actually happened to the Neolithic people in Britain, the people who actually built Stonehenge? And, and ultimately we know that within some 16 generations of the initial beaker arrival, we're seeing the very large replacement of the gene pool, so that the population, 400 years later, 16 generations later, they've really got only about 10% of that British farmer's DNA in their genome. So we can talk about a near replacement. But of course, this is a very long term process. Now all it takes is for one particular community, let's say, who use beakers and have that steppe ancestry, if their rate of fertility is to produce, let's say, 1.4 children per adult female, and the indigenous population of Neolithic farmers, they've only got a rate of 1.2 babies, then they will out compete the indigenous population over a matter of centuries like that. So it's something that could happen very, very gradually and it may just come down to slightly better care for infants to ensure that they survive into adulthood and themselves have children. We've got some very interesting possibilities there because we know that they did do unusual things with their babies, because we have skulls, their skulls, which show that they have been flattened to make them round headed. They've done this by fixing a baby to what we call a cradle board, so that the back of the head is continually pressed against a solid board. And this means that the baby is basically swaddled and is much more easily portable. So you can sling it over your back and go and work in the fields or tend to the animals, whatever it may be. And that raises the possibility that we've got different methods of caring for infants, which could indeed have been part of how you might actually have a population expanding as another population declines.
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Advertiser 1
Now, can you tell us a little bit more about the Amesbury Archer? I mean, when was he discovered and why was this such a kind of significant moment in shedding light on the beaker people?
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Mike Parker Pearson
Well, he was excavated during a commercial development in 2002 by Wessex Archaeology, the local commercial archaeology unit. And what's important about him is that he is the most lavishly provided of all the beaker burials from anywhere in Europe. So that amongst his grave goods, there are golden hair ornaments. He has two sets of an archer's wrist guard, so that's part of an assembly on the wrist to protect it from the backlash of the bowstring. And there's 17 arrowheads, I think it is scattered in his grave. And a huge number of items. He's got three copper daggers, all of them made from various different parts of Europe, and there are five beakers in there. Most people only had one, if they ever had any at all. So he's very elaborately provided. He's even got a special little anvil stone for working metalwork. And in this case, I think it must certainly have been gold that would have been hammered out on such an anvil.
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Advertiser 1
And he was found quite near to Stonehenge. Is there any significance to that?
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Mike Parker Pearson
Well, he's a latecomer. When he was discovered, we hadn't actually accurately dated Stonehenge's stage two. That's the way that it looks today, with the great big sarsens, the uprights with the lintels on them. And it was thought that, well, maybe he was the architect of Stonehenge. Unfortunately, we know now that the probability is that he wasn't even born by the time that that stage of Stonehenge went up. But it's intriguing that he is there. But we do know that there must have been beacons, people with beaker pottery, already in the vicinity, long before either he or any others were buried in Britain. So their burial rite doesn't start until, What, a good 50 years after that stage of Stonehenge was built. And yet what we can see with the indigenous people of Britain was that they're starting to use the impressed cord and other motifs on their local pottery, what we call grooved ware, so that they're obviously intrigued by it. They know about the pots, so they must have met the users. And what I think it really shows us is that that second stage of Stonehenge was erected in a contact situation, a period of contact with people from across the sea. And given that they had been in pretty much complete isolation to the rest of Europe for so many centuries beforehand, that may have been the actual trigger as to why Stonehenge was constructed. We're learning so much about Stonehenge from its stones now, and the realization that none of them were local. They were coming from Wales, from Scotland. We've got others that we've recently been located as coming from even the south coast of Britain. So it seems that the whole purpose of that monument was really to bring people Together from across the entire island of Britain, a monument attempting unity. And perhaps that's the very reason why they tried to build it. Then in that second stage was because that unity was basically falling apart, because there were new people coming in and it all had to be reworked and readdressed, whether the incomers were being included or even excluded.
- [25:07]
Advertiser 1
So that second stage could have been a direct response to the arrival of beaker people?
- [25:12]
Mike Parker Pearson
Yes, I think so. Although they weren't bringing their burial traditions with them at that point, we could tell that they were certainly in Britain because of the sharing of the styles of beaker with the local styles.
- [25:27]
Advertiser 1
And speaking of those burial practices, what were they? And do they give us an insight into the beaker's religious beliefs? Do we know much about that?
- [25:35]
Mike Parker Pearson
The archaeologically most visible one of these is what we call inhumation. So you bury somebody lying on their side, and typically with a pot and with some of their dress items, but they're also cremating their dead. And of course, when they arrive in Britain, they're confronting a culture that not only cremates, but also exposes the dead so that the body is simply left to the elements, pecked clean by the birds and disintegrated. So they're more interested in keeping the body whole. But that said, they do have practices of cremation that are brought from the Rhine Valley. And also we do see that disarticulation, that exposure of corpses, so that only their bones and skull parts that have just been left out somewhere and then collected together. We know that even so, these are only a tiny minority of the full range of how they disposed of their dead. The vast majority of people have left no archaeological trace at all. And I think that's probably because exposure was probably the main right of them all. I don't know that it necessarily tells us a lot about the actual beliefs. It tells us a great deal about the formalization of gender distinctions among speakers people. Because what we see certainly early on, is that there's a very strict conformity about how the body is laid in the grave, depending on if it's male or female, that males are laid on the ground in the bottom of the grave, lying on their left side, whereas women are placed on their right side. So this is something that we see across Europe at that time, and only later does it start to break down as these gen gender categories are no longer quite so stereotyped.
- [27:38]
Advertiser 1
Great stuff. Thank you for that. Now, we've obviously mentioned Stonehenge, but I wonder if you could tell us about the geography of where they got to in Britain, because they actually established settlements, didn't they, also in what are now the islands of Scotland?
- [27:52]
Mike Parker Pearson
Yes, we find that they're occupying the Inner Hebrides quite early on. And in fact, if you look at all the earliest beaker burials, there are really very large numbers, particularly along the north east coast of Scotland and then down the eastern coast of Britain. I've just helped to compile a map of this, and we've got many more instances in Scotland than we have in England for the earliest beaker arrivals. It's partly an accident of our sampling. There's been more money put in by the National Museums of Scotland to getting the dating done than has been happening in England. But nonetheless, I think it does show that this is an explosion of settlement right across Britain. The other interesting thing is that many of the areas that were, if you like, the kind of heartlands of those Neolithic farmer populations were largely avoided by these earliest beaker arrivals. So we see them settling in landscapes which were relatively sparse in terms of previous settlement. And it's the lower river valleys, it's the coastal plains where I've been working for many years in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, that is where we see pretty much abandoned landscape, completely reoccupied by beaker users. So it looks like they're searching out the margins, the areas of land that aren't heavily settled. And although it may seem odd to say so, somewhere like Stonehenge is also occupied because we've come to realize that Stonehenge wasn't actually built as the center of something. It's a peripheral location, looking as though it's between different territories, a kind of no man's land. The other point about that settlement is that they have a slightly different system of farming, which is that whereas the Neolithic farmers were raising cattle and pigs, particularly the pigs, for their feasting role, what we see with beaker users, it's cattle, but it's sheep. And of course, sheep are well adapted to the dry uplands of the chalk areas like Wessex, and they don't need the sources of water that pigs and cattle as well need. So I think it's saying that they're fitting into ecological niches as well as population low points where they can live their lives.
- [30:24]
Advertiser 1
With that in mind, can you paint a picture for us of what beaker settlements look like and how they differed from Neolithic farm settlements?
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Mike Parker Pearson
Yeah, Again, there are no villages. This is continuing that landscape of scattered farmsteads. The houses tend to be the technical term Curvilinear. So they might be oval, but certainly round and sometimes circular. Whereas what we see with the late Neolithic architecture is it tends to the rectangular. Though of course there are circular plans in there as well. But these are quite small. These are almost what you might call cab. They're no more than maybe 5 meters across and 8 meters long. And they're simply built with stakes to secure the walls. We imagine they would have had wattle walling. So they're very temporary. We're looking at a society that is extremely mobile. By later comparisons, you know, I think we may live as mobile a life as they did now, but we've got cars and buses and TR do it with. So we may be regularly popping the sorts of distances that they might have taken on just once or twice in a year.
- [31:44]
Advertiser 1
And would these people, the ones based in the British Isles, would they have remained in contact with those on the continent?
- [31:51]
Mike Parker Pearson
I'm sure that that's part of the whole beaker network. Because of course as we go into the Beaker period, what we see happening is the increasing knowledge of, of the metal sources within Britain and Ireland. Initially in Ireland at the very southern point near Killarney, but also we see central Wales becoming a major source of metal. And also the West Country, Dartmoor and Cornwall, not just for copper but also for tin. And once we see bronze becoming that key metal with the addition of tin to the copper, and that is a pan European phenomenon which started just before 4,000 years ago. That is when Britain really is plugged into an industrial production process and continent wide market. So of course you've got metal trading which is going in all directions. Principally the focus would seem to be the Calais Straits, but basically between Dover and Calais. So you have that. But at the same time we're seeing an increasing provincialization of their beaker pottery styles. So what emerges just around, well, exactly 4,000 years ago is that there's a particularly British way. So we see an increasing regionalism so that British beaker pottery starts to look different to pottery from other parts of Europe. And it's to do with the introduction of panels which are infilled in different ways rather than merely the the series of horizontal lines of impressed cord or comb impressions or just incised lines. So it's greater variety of motifs and also the shapes of the beakers. We see for example, the extension of the neck that it becomes longer than it had been. And of course there are also changes just in that style itself. So that ultimately people in Britain were still using beakers at the point that they, they had gone out of fashion in Europe.
- [34:08]
Advertiser 1
Are these beakers very much seen as status symbols to those who made them?
- [34:13]
Mike Parker Pearson
I don't think so. I don't think it's about status. We know that there are differences and many of the beakers are buried with individuals. We can see that there are rules, if you like, of who is buried with what. And the realization that in Britain, quite a number of of our funerary beakers must have been made for the funeral and for the person. So that there are very slight differences in form between those buried with men and with women. And also those buried with children tend to be a fair bit smaller. So there's a sense that the beaker is used at the funeral almost as a representation of that person who's being celebrated in death. So it's not about prestige, it's about identity.
- [35:05]
Advertiser 1
And so the beaker people are extremely, extremely skilled at metalworking. Does their arrival in Britain in some ways kind of represent the transition from what we call the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, or is that still yet to come?
- [35:20]
Mike Parker Pearson
No, that is at that moment. But of course, this had already happened hundreds of years before in the rest of Europe and continental Europe. So we see people working copper and gold in Eastern Europe 1500 years earlier. It's a very long time. And of course part of it is this problem of Britain's self imposed isolation from Europe.
- [35:46]
Advertiser 1
And so when did the age of the beaker people come to an end? Is it possible to give a sort of definitive endpoint?
- [35:54]
Mike Parker Pearson
Well, it's to realize that we're talking about a style of pottery, and that's a style that goes out of use around 1800 BC and already in use from three centuries beginning before that. We see new types of pottery and they have peculiar names like food vessels and collared urns, but these are really just British variants. But I think the important point that the geneticists have been discovering with the ancient DNA is that those beaker people continued to be the main populations of Britain, Ireland, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, all the way through and effectively right up until the modern era, so that they form the genetic base of the entire Western European population. And it's to realize that if anybody would consider themselves having ancestry which is rooted in their ancestors having lived in any part of Europe, they will have that steppe ancestry that is such a clear marker right from that time, nearly 5,000 years ago.
- [37:16]
Advertiser 2
That was Mike Parker Pearson, an archaeologist specializing in the step study of Neolithic Britain. He was speaking to Spencer Mizzen. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.