http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ mirrored file For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== < Main Page Chapter 14 Growing Wealth When the full impact of developed agriculture was felt it resulted in wealth whose visible archaeological signs were monumental constructions like the temples, tombs and other monuments in Mesopotamia and Egypt and in Britain the magnificent megalithic monuments like Newgrange and great henges like Durrington Walls built during periods of conspicuous construction. When the second momentous revolutionary change took place - the spread of the use of metal - it sparked off an explosion of trade in the Mediterranean that eventually affected all Europe and encouraged the development of its dynasties and trade. The first full bronze culture of Central Europe was the classical phase of the Unetice culture which made its appearance in Czechoslovakia around c2300BC and spread to cover parts of Hungary, Germany and Poland by 1700BC. We do not know a great deal about the society of the Unetice bronze-founders since few of their settlement sites have been found but one at Brezno in Czechoslovakia contained nine rectangular houses measuring between 20m by 6m and 25m by 3m. A farming settlement, like most others at the time, its inhabitants probably grew emmer and/or bread wheat, barley, millet, peas and lentils and raised domestic animals with the emphasis often on cattle. Miners who produced the copper ore in adit mines like those of the Mitterberg in Austria were presumably full-time but it is not yet clear whether the early bronzesmiths were full-time craftsmen or whether they worked part-time during agriculturally slack periods. They probably were full-time by the end of the Bronze Age when large hoards or caches of broken and complete bronze artifacts seem to have been hidden all over Europe for future retrieval by travelling merchants and bronze founders who operated probably much the same way as the tinkers of later times. No doubt in the Bronze Age they would have been paid in food and lodging for their work and the new artifacts would have been exchanged for broken ones. New lamps for old! Most of the Unetice metal we have today has been found in graves and in hoards. Some of it found its way to other parts of Europe and influenced the bronze founders in those areas: craftsmen in the cultures of Holland, the Rhineland, in the Straubing culture in Lower Bavaria, the Rhône culture, the Polada culture in Italy, and cultures in Brittany, Saxony and southern Britain were all recipients of Unetice artifacts. In several of these areas, so-called 'princely graves' probably belonged to a wealthy aristocracy who may have controlled the importation and production of metal goods. Representative of the Armorican Culture, the barrow at Kernonen-en-Plouvorn near Finisterre (Bretagne) is a good example. Fifteen metres across, it covered a chamber built of dry-stone enclosing the remains of an individual and a number of flanged axeheads, flint arrowheads, three bronze daggers decorated with golden nails and amber beads. Some thirty similar burials have been found in the same area and amongst the finds are a fair number of gold artefacts. The Leubingen barrow and four other rich barrows close by in the Saale region of Saxony and Leki Male in western Poland are examples of the same sort of wealth further east. Timber funerary houses cover the dead who are accompanied by gold and bronze objects. Southern Britain supported the Wessex Culture, the name given to a hundred or so barrows which represent the burials of the richer folk of the period from before 2100BC until 1700BC. Besides the bowl barrow, familiar since the Beaker period, the bell, the saucer and the pond were in use during the first 150 years or so. Wessex I, (the early phase), is richer in grave goods than the subsequent two hundred years. At this time, Bush Barrow, a so-called princely burial overlooking the shallow basin which encloses Stonehenge, was built to contain the body of a large man who was clearly someone of importance for his grave goods included both bronze and golden objects. In the same area are a number of rich female graves, some characterised by miniature pottery cups and necklaces made with amber, shale and faience beads. Less richly furnished graves contain metal knife/daggers and shafthole stone axeheads and are referred to as warrior graves. By Wessex II inhumation had been replaced almost entirely by cremation. Warrior graves are still present and new is an Unetice-inspired dagger with an ogival-shaped blade and a rivetted handle. Of similar inspiration are crutch-headed pins. Female graves contain necklaces made up of spacer plates and amber and segmented faience beads. The pottery is now mainly cinerary pottery, the collared and biconical urns but, in the few inhumation graves of the period, pottery of varied types can be found. The best illustration of this contemporaneity is in Co Tyrone in Ireland where a burial at Kilskeery, Corkragh contained an 'encrusted urn' (a large decorated food vessel), a pygmy cup of the Wessex type, an Irish-Scottish vase (a member of the food-vessel family) and a cordoned urn! Some of the barrow burials in both Wessex I and Wessex II contain only a few beads, bone pins and small bronze knife-daggers. Paradoxically, they are more difficult to understand than the richer ones for, although in the case of the richer burials the grave-goods match the effort and expense put into the construction of the barrow, in the poorer graves they do not. The `aristocrats' of the Wessex I phase were responsible for the erection of the final stone phase of Stonehenge but it is not clear that the monument was ever completely finished. By 2,300BC large sarsens had been used to build the ring of thirty uprights with an inner horseshoe of five trilithons. The earlier bluestones were re-used inside this sarsen structure. Later on the bank-and-ditch avenue that led out of the monument was extended down to the River Avon. Most of the various European communities developed their own bronze metallurgical traditions during the first half of the second millennium BC. In some cases it is difficult to understand how the supplies of copper and tin were obtained in each of the industrial areas but both could have been obtained from alluvial sources. In Cornwall, copper and tin are known to occur in association, copper was being mined in Ireland as it was in Central Europe and tin could have been mined in Spain, Saxony and Poland. Another problem for archaeologists is to understand the basis of the wealth of the people who were buried in such style. It could not have come solely from an interest in the metal trade. Perhaps a clue is offered by a study done in Denmark where bronze and gold grave-goods are found. The study suggested that in most regions surveyed the quantity of bronzes was greater where there was the best farming land so it could be that the bedrock of prosperity was a superior yield from the basic agricultural activity. This is not likely to have come from improved farming methods for we have no evidence for it from study of tools, animal bones or soil analysis. It could have come from an increased landholding, an agglomeration of land obtained either by taking over other holdings or by bringing new or marginal areas into cultivation. There might be evidence of this in the landscape and it is the beginning of a trend that is more obvious later in the Bronze Age and is the result of an improvement in the climate which was gradually getting warmer and wetter. In the Danube region, starting at the beginning of the Bronze Age, we get a glimpse both of the gods that were worshipped and the sorts of costumes worn. Clay figurines have been discovered in sites dating between 1700BC and 1000BC. Some of the deities are modelled in bronze and are travelling in model chariots, reminding us that the wheel was now regularly in use in Europe. The most amusing of these, in the Belgrade Museum, came from Dupljaja; the three-wheeled vehicle is drawn by ducks! Clothing depicted on the figures shows us that the women's dresses of the period were likely to be embroidered, perhaps with coloured threads. It is difficult to explain the lack of identified ritual buildings in Bronze Age Europe but rituals could have taken place in ordinary houses or in the open air for religion was part of everyday life. One building was identified at Bargeroostervald in Drenthe in northern Holland where a small timber structure was surrounded by a circular stone enclosure which was located in the middle of a marsh some distance from dry land. The fact that it was placed in that situation is an indication of the growing preoccupation with watery places which is also apparent from the deposition of metal hoards and even human bodies in them, a practice which finds its most obvious manifestation during the Iron Age. It is still not clear where and when the horse was domesticated although most archaeologists suspect that it happened on the grass plains of Eurasia near the end of the Stone Age but they were in widespread use in Europe by the third millennium BCE. They were used for traction and the spoked wheel was developed to enable them to pull light wagons and, later on, chariots. At the same time the snaffle harness became common. A chariot was an expensive acquisition since it was subject to hard usage and had to be continually repaired by a skilled mechanic and suitable horses had to be selected and trained to work together. Our first evidence for their use appears in Mycenaean Greece where chariots were used for parades and races although not yet for warfare. It was not until the first millennium BC that mounted warriors appeared and the eastern armies of chariots began to disappear although the wagon/chariot continued to be used by army commanders and other leaders throughout Europe and appear in the graves of members of the upper class. Military equipment in later Bronze Age Europe echoes the splendour of the mailed heroes of Mycenae shown on the famous warrior vase. Hoards of weapons have been found in many places dating from various times during the period like the U"netice hoard found near Prague and the Hajdúsámson hoard in north-eastern Hungary which belonged to c1500BCE and a collection of swords and a spear in a hoard at Kehmstedt in Thuringia that dates from 8^th/9^th century BCE. Graves too produce similar evidence, the wealthier ones sometimes containing swords and axe- and spearheads. Only lacking the spearhead was the extraordinarily rich Hagenau burial in Germany of around 1300BC which, as well as a variety of weapons, contained gold spiral armlets and other personal items. Bronze body armour has been discovered in the river Saône in eastern France dating from the 13^th century BCE and other examples at Fillinges (Haut-Savoie) belong to the period of the 8^th to 9^th centuries. Shields of various later periods come from Denmark, Sweden and Ireland while greaves of much the same time come from Italy and Germany. Helmets are not very common: a crested example was in the river Meurthe in France dating from some time in the 12^th to 9^th centuries, a bell-helmet has been found near Mecklenburg from the same time and a splendid burial at Cher in eastern France contained not only a helmet and other objects, but an elaborate dress accessory that must have been part of the military regalia and belongs simply to the `Late Bronze Age'. Weapons also figure largely on the Middle Bronze stelai of the western and south-western Iberian Peninsula. The stelai do not commonly represent the human body but are simply monoliths on which the representations of weapons are carved or engraved. They show axes, halberds and swords as well as an enigmatic object usually described as `anchor-shaped' and are usually taken to have been carved on gravestones. It has been suggested that the weapons were in reality the property of the deceased and their display on the gravestone obviated the necessity of burying the actual (?expensive) items with their owners. Further evidence of clothing is found in coffin-graves like Egtved and Borum Eshoj that first appear around 1400BC in Jutland where enormous tumuli cover stone or oak coffins. Either the size of the tumuli or the tannin in the wood led to organic materials being preserved to an unusual degree. Skin, hair, fingernails and clothing remain. The women wore skirts, socks and sweaters made from black wool, the basic textile of the area derived from a breed of sheep presumably like the modern Soay. Men had not yet graduated to trousers but sported a hooded long cloak over a blouson and a loincloth with a hat and sandals and socks. It is in these tombs that a wide range of wooden tools, vessels and utensils was found, proving that the Bronze Age carpenters were fully the equal in skill of their metallurgical contemporaries and textile makers while the coffins themselves offer an unparalleled opportunity for exact dating them between 1268 and 1396BCE. Jewellery becomes commoner during the Bronze Age, usually fashioned from precious metals and bronze and provides information about regional fashions and social status. Graves, statuettes and wall paintings yield this data as well as information about the manner in which it was worn and its gender-specific use that indicates that it was more commonly worn by women. The Danish culture is one of a host of regional groupings of the middle Bronze Age period. Collectively they are known as the Hugelgraberkultur or Tumulus culture with mounds reminiscent of those of the earlier Bronze Age and is a phenomenon of central and northern Europe. The Danube grouping has already been mentioned, there was also a Bavarian grouping, a north German grouping, a Hercynian grouping in the Rhineland and a society who constructed the mounds of the Haguenau Forest in Alsace. These latter mounds covered bodies laid flat on their backs accompanied by grave goods and food offerings of which the most popular was pork, perhaps because the main agricultural activity of the forest was pig-breeding, a trade that endured there until the sixteenth century AD. A whole range of beakers, bowls, cups and pitchers was placed in the graves. The vessels were decorated with incised designs (kerbschnitt) of simple zigzag or chevron motifs which is reminiscent of wood-carving. Metal goods included axeheads, knives, bracelets and, above all, pins in a variety of designs. Various kinds of bracelets were also made; the finest examples are spiral leg-pieces worn on the calf. In Britain during the Middle Bronze Age 'poor' graves became the norm. Cremations with occasional beads were not provided with their own barrows but pushed into existing Beaker and Early Bronze Age tumuli. Three new forms of cinerary urns appear, the bucket, globular and barrel, products of the Deverel-Rimbury culture of southern England. Urnfields become common, some of the early ones like those at Deverel and Rimbury in Dorset, laid out around the barrows in whose existing mounds the first cremation burials were made. An interesting excavated example of a large urnfield is at Kimpton in Hampshire in southern England where more than three hundred burials were placed in a flint platform over a period of fifteen hundred years. Burials from the first (round about 1800BC) were focussed on a group of large sarsen stones, the cremations being grouped in clusters under flint cairns. During the early use of the site, cremations were accompanied by barrel and bucket urns but the last few burials, made in the seventh century BC, were nothing more than a handful of cremated bone together with a single potsherd which seems to suggest either a descent into poverty or a decline in ritual belief. In the middle Bronze Age the warmest and driest period was from 1250 to 1000BC and it made farming possible on uplands in the north and west of the British Isles. Divisions of the landscape by stone walls whose remains are known as reaves have been identified on Dartmoor together with pastoral enclosures as at Shaugh Moor, unenclosed villages as at Stanton Down and isolated farms like the one at Rippon Tor. As the climate declined from the optimum, becoming colder and wetter, the upland farmers were forced off their land. They retreated to the lowlands, bringing pressure on the farmers there and the abandoned land was gradually covered with a layer of blanket bog. One of the most revealing aspects of the middle Bronze Age is the carvings on rocks which can be found all over Europe from Scotland and Sweden as far south as Italy. Some of them are obviously religious, others show everyday objects and even scenes of everyday life. They are, in fact, a picture-book of the European Bronze Age. The most commonly reproduced are the boats from the Malmo district of Sweden and the scenes on the slabs from the Kivik barrow which include a chariot and fish but others in the same area represent farmers ploughing, weapons and symbols. In Languedoc and the Pyrenees human figures and wheels appear, while in Portugal and Galicia human figures or gods are again predominant together with weapons. But probably the finest collection in the whole of Europe is in Italy at Val Camonica north of Lago d'Iseo in the upper valley of the river Oglia where the chronological succession of carvings stretches from the Neolithic down to the Etruscan Iron Age. Daggers, halberds, leaf-shaped swords and helmets document the development of European weaponry. Carts and ards, animals both domesticated and wild, including a large number of scenes with stags, a smithy, weavers, houses and house-building and perhaps even the earliest castles appear in this picture gallery. After the discoveries at Val Camonica, similar series of carvings were found at Mount Bego and the Val des Merveilles north of Nice on the French side of the Franco-Italian border. Part of the same tradition are the stelae and statue-menhirs which are carved with human attributes, weapons and war-chariots. Most of these are found in Italy, southern France and Iberia. Prominent amongst them are representations of the Mother Goddess figure. They are reminders of the carved stelae in the megalithic tombs of Brittany two thousand years earlier. In Scotland the mysterious cup-marks on natural boulders are the characteristic carvings. The urnfields in Britain mentioned above are a facet of the Urnfield culture of greater Europe which spread from the Danube region westwards to Normandy and the Pyrenees and south into Italy. From 1150BC this area, particularly in the Alps, becomes the classic European late-Bronze Age metalworking region. . In the Salzburg area and at Mitterberg copper mining was a thriving industry. At Mitterberg the mines spread along the valley for 1600m and the galleries were driven 100m into the rock. The objects displayed in the museums come from graves, from lake-dwellings and from hoards or caches of metalwork buried in the ground, either by bronzefounders or by merchants. Tons of socketed or winged axeheads, carpenters' tools, razors, personal knives, sickles, myriads of pins of various designs and hosts of trinkets for personal adornment have been recovered from these hoards. It is clear that there was a mass market for bronzes but there was a luxury market too. Helmets, elegant swords, breastplates, harness equipment, bronze wheels and chariot equipment attained the highest standards of bronze casting and decoration. Evidence for transport of metal in quantity round about 1200BC comes from the sea-bed off Salcombe (Devon) and at Langdon Bay near Dover, (Kent). From the latter shipwreck sixty kilos of scrap - axeheads, daggers, rapiers, swords, spearheads and chisels were brought up to the surface although there was no trace of the ship. But a vessel that could have been engaged in this trade to Britain was discovered not far away underneath the streets of Dover. It was plank-built, almost twenty metres long, and held together with yew withies. Despite all this industrial activity the basic business of people throughout Europe was still farming. But in some places there seems to have been a mixture of both activities. In the south of England, for example, a dozen large agricultural settlements each lie close to centres of metalworking. Sites like Rams Hill in Berkshire and Harrow Hill in Sussex could have played an important part in the economy by controlling both metal and pottery distribution in their regions. Bronze Age Europe has been described as `a world of villages' - large, independent communities in which all the activities necessary for life at the time could be found and interconnected by trade and family networks. Substantial rectangular farmsteads were the norm in lake villages, fortified villages, tell villages and villages situated in more conventional locations but probably with larger populations than in Britain.. Farmsteads in southern England consist of round huts constructed of timber and wattle-and-daub surrounded by palisades and ditches. Sometimes the farmsteads are grouped together in hamlets. The largest site so far found in Britain is on the outskirts of Reading in Berkshire. It is estimated to cover up to 100 ha. and may consist of as many as 150 round houses built of wattle-and-daub over eight metres in diameter arranged close together in parallel rows. Archaeologists estimate the heights of their conical thatched roofs as approximately five metres. Some appear to have had verandas or extensions. A large number of wells provided water for domestic purposes and, unusually, for pouring onto heated stones in a series of low tent-like saunas. By the end of the eighth century the site was abandoned, having been occupied for three hundred years. In northern Britain the tradition of building in stone continued, the houses and courtyards like the striking examples of Bronze Age buildings at Jarlshof in Shetland being very similar to those of the Neolithic period at Skara Brae. Sites with defensive banks and ditches appear in the period from the tenth to the eighth centuries at Mucking and Springfield Lyons in Essex and Thwing in Yorkshire. Other defended sites are crannogs: artificial islands built close to lake shores or in marshland and connected to the dry land by causeways. Constructed of timber and stone, some of them, like Flag Fen with its Continental-style three-aisled building in the English Fen District, represent enormous investments in effort and time. Flag Fen flourished between c1400 to c900BC. A later settlement of the same sort at Eastbourne in East Sussex is much smaller, dating provisionally from c800 to c600BC. Finds of imported bronzes on the site suggest that its coastal situation allowed trade across the Channel as well as the raising of animals in the surrounding salt marshes. The appearance of these defended sites in Britain is part of a Europe-wide phenomenon starting shortly after 2000BC. Examples can be found at Spisský Stvrtok in Slovakia, a settlement with stone walls and a bastioned entrance, at Blucina in the Czech republic where the defences are associated with evidence of a massacre, and at the Wasserburg in the Bronze Age Feddersee in southern Germany. The Wasserburg was a fortified island on which stood a farming settlement surrounded by a palisade of over 15,000 posts. A substantial amount of the diet of inhabitants came from hunting deer, wild boar and beaver with the aid of wolfhounds. Nearby settlements on the lake shore were linked together by timber trackways like those in the Somerset levels or in the Erith marshes in northern Kent in England of the same period. Elsewhere, the lake districts of Switzerland, Italy and eastern France produce evidence of the so-called lake dwellings. This evidence is much clearer in dry years when the lake levels are lowest. Wooden stakes appear above the surface to mark the sites of the villages and underwater excavation has produced evidence of organic materials like basketry, wooden bowls and food as well as the plans of the buildings and numerous examples of the carpentry of the period. Aerial photography on calm days has made it possible to produce extensive plans like those of Auvernier on Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland which demonstrate the similarity of these villages to settlements of the Neolithic period. At Hallstatt in the Salzkammergut (the salt country) of upper Austria, salt was extracted from galleries dug into the hillsides from the late Bronze Age onwards. In these tunnels wooden objects and organic materials are preserved in the salty environment. Even textiles survive and demonstrate the high standard of spinning and weaving which appears to be typical of the period. The salt, always a desirable commodity, was used to buy luxury objects from elsewhere, particularly from the Mediterranean world. Along a ridge above the village the dead miners and their families and their imported luxuries were buried in a cemetery in which the earliest burials are at one end and the latest at the other, an example of horizontal stratigraphy. Cremations and inhumations are almost equal in number and they span the late-Bronze Age and the early-Iron Age and give the name 'Hallstatt' to European archaeology as a label for the prevailing culture of the time. The first phases of their metal technology as shown by the grave goods, A and B, belong to the late-Bronze Age and the latter two, C and D, to the early-Iron Age. Neither iron nor the earliest forms of steel were harder than bronze and they were more difficult to process so there was a reluctance to abandon the older metal. But there were changes in the sourcing of the copper ore. Chalcopyrite, which had been used for hundreds of years, was becoming short and gradually it was being replaced by antimony tetrahedrite (grey ore) which required more skill to process. This change is documented in England and other parts of Europe by analysis of artefacts and begins around 1100BCE and the fact that it is taking place at the same time over a wide area indicates that the supply of the new copper was organised from a few major deposits probably in central Germany and the northern Alps. So it is suggested that tin ore was being paid for by copper ore and this brought about the introduction of the `grey ore' into England and Brittany. However, after mid-900BCE this exchange stopped for no more `grey-ore` from central Europe reached the tin-mining areas of Brittany and Cornwall. Whether this means that the return trade in tin ore ceased as well is not known. It in this period that the so-called 'midden' sites of southern England appear. Excavation of a site at Potterne in Wiltshire revealed a rich deposit of metalwork, bone, antler, beads of amber and glass, shale bracelets and parts of some 600 vessels, a significant collection of pottery, probably the finest collection of late-Bronze Age domestic ware in England. Similar sites appear at East Chisenbury, in the same county and at Blagdon Hill in Somerset and must represent the remains of considerable trading and market centres. The First Metals in the British Isles [LINK] main page [LINK] The Iron Age in Europe [LINK]