The Bell Beaker Culture and Ancient Genetics
North Hill, Priddy, Somerset, England
Embedded Files
Homework
Homework
Read the sections below. Use the Table of Contents above to navigate if you wish.
In this chapter we will switch our focus from the Pontic-Caspian steppes to western Europe during the third millennium to study the emergence of a totally new culture: the Bell Beakers. The arrival of the Beaker Folk with their burial kurgans (or barrows as they're called in Britain) have long puzzled archeologists. Where did these people come from? What was the basis of their economy? Why were they so successful? In the past 10 years, some of these questions have been partially answered by unlocking the archaic DNA from ancient skeletons, but many mysteries remain.
If you get confused about geography, use this Terrain Map of Europe might be helpful.
Questions to Ponder:
What do the funeary practices of the Bell Beakers tell you about what they felt was important?
What do you think the Beakers signified?
What do you think the Mother-Son burials signified?
How do you imagine trade might have flowed between the Wessex culture and Mycenaen Greece? How did shippers keep from getting robbed?
Have you had your DNA sequenced with one of the ancestry sites? Did you find it useful or interesting?
We'll answer your questions about DNA sequencing, so come to class with any questions you might have.
If we believe that there was a massive migration of Yamnaya people into Europe, is that sufficient to prove that the Yamnaya were the source of Indo-European languages?
How could the Bell Beakers completely replace the Neolithic farmers of Britain within a few centuries? Can you point out a flaw in Olalde's logic?
In Iberia, how could 100% of the Y chromosomes come from the steppes but only 40% of the autosomes?
What explanations for population replacement do you find compelling?
How did the Únětice princes get so rich and what were their armies protecting? What else might they have traded?
Come to class with any questions for discussion or clarification on any topic you like, as long is it's more or less relevant to the material below.
If you hate reading on the web, you can CLICK HERE to open a 24 page pdf of this long web page which you can print out; however, you'll have to go back to this web page to click through to some of the attachments.
Half the archaeologists think ancient DNA can solve everything. The other half think ancient DNA is the devil’s work.
Philipp Stockhammer
Introduction
Introduction
In 2002, workers excavating for a housing development in Amesbury, Wessex, England, found a skeleton of a man. The grave was located three miles from Stonehenge and the man is called the Amesbury Archer, or alternatively, the King of Stonehenge. The latter name is an oxymoron; Stonehenge was built by Neolithic farmers who celebrated community and whose society showed few signs of social stratification. The neolithic farmers of Atlantic Europe buried their dead in large communal graves. The Archer on the other hand was buried by himself and surrounded by a rich assemblage of grave goods which included three copper knives, 16 arrowheads, stone wrist guards, gold hair ornaments and earrings, a cushion stone for metalworking, and five clay pots. The pots are called Bell Beakers, because they're shaped like upside down bells.
Analysis of the strontium and oxygen isotope analysis of the Archer's teeth showed that he spent his childhood in the Western Alps. He was between 35 and 45 years of age when he died, around 2300 BCE. The Archer heralded a huge change for the Stonehenge farmers: a population of people from Europe would bring metalworking, social stratification, and the end of communal harmony in Neolithic Britain.
The Bell Beaker Phenomenon
The Bell Beaker Phenomenon
The first evidence of "Beaker Folk" come from the Tagus Estuary in Portugal dated to around 2700 BCE. Distinctive Bell Beaker pottery was found in buildings outside the walls of a fortified site which had Neolithic pottery. This suggests that "Beaker Folk" were living alongside Neolithic residents. There are several sites in Spain and Portugal with Bell Beaker burials, many of which are associated with copper mining.
From the Iberian peninsula, the Bell Beakers spread quickly along major trade routes and rivers, to France, Southern Germany, east to Hungary, and north to the Netherlands, reaching Britain by around 2450 BCE. In some areas of France and Spain along the coast, where collective inhumation was the tradition, Bell Beakers were found inside collective tombs. In inland sites, individual burials predominate, often under kurgans. In one area in France, the percentage of men/women/children were 43%, 31% and 26%, in large contrast to the 80% male burials of the eastern Yamnaya. In all cases, men were laid on their left side while women were on their right side. The richest graves were always male burials. Women were generally buried with beakers and sometimes ornaments, but their graves never contain weapons. Celtic from the West 3: 19 (Celtic Studies Publications) (p. 52). Oxbow Books. Kindle Edition.
The Beaker Folk seemed to be highly mobile. Just as the Amesbury Archer moved from the Alps to Britain, an analysis of 81 Bell Beaker skeletons found that 51 had moved a significant distance during their lifetime.
Significance of Grave Goods
Significance of Grave Goods
We haven't found a lot of Beaker settlements, so much of the evidence of the Beaker Phenomenon comes from their graves, most of which were under small kurgans. Beaker Folk burials nearly always contained one or more beakers. Male burials often contained copper knives, flint arrowheads, and stone wrist guards. Some graves had V shaped perforated buttons. A few rich graves contained gold ornaments: disks, necklaces, and pendants.
How are we to interpret these grave goods? Perhaps they were placed with the deceased to help in the afterlife. The Amesbury Archer was buried with metal working tools, flints to light fires, and archery equipment. The archery equipment contrasts with the mace weapons of the steppe peoples; archery requires more skill, and has a longer range than maces.
Beakers have been studied with residue analysis in an attempt to interpret their significance. Many beakers contained the residue of beer (made with barley) or mead (made with honey), which led JP Mallory to speculate that "The proliferation of drinking cups that is seen in central and eastern Europe about 3500 BC has been associated with the spread of alcoholic beverages and, possibly, special drinking cults." Mallory, J. P.,Adams, D. Q.. The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (Oxford Linguistics) (p. 423). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.
The Bell Beakers did not bring beer to Europe; the Neolithic farmers had been brewing beer for at least 1000 years prior to the Bell Beakers' arrival. But it is possible that beer was used as part of a funeary feasting ritual. Cattle remains were not common, but one Beaker burial had the remains of 40 cattle.
Another Bell Beaker had a hallucinogenic alkaloid from the henbane or nightshade plant, together with beer residue.
Some beakers may have stored food as provisions. Other beakers were found with copper slag on their interiors, indicating that they had been used for smelting copper ores. The author of a paper on residue analysis suggests that the beakers may have carried the meaning of transformation: alcoholic beverages may have transformed consciousness of the funeary participants, just as copper ores were transformed into copper. Perhaps by analogy, the departed was transformed or transported to the afterlife.
Mother-Son Burials
Mother-Son Burials
Occasionally, there were dual inhumations in Beaker burials, of a child (not newborn), and an adult, who were interred at the same time. Child graves were unusual during this period and were almost always boys, sometimes buried with status artifacts. The adults were usually female and often were posed in an embrace with the child. This phenomenon was analyzed in a paper, Biological and Substitute Parents in Beaker Period Adult-Child Graves, which examined two "mother-son" graves out of a known 131 instances. In one case, genetic testing revealed the adult was the mother, in another case it was a paternal aunt. In most Beaker burials the bodies were oriented North-South, in a crouched position facing east. Women were placed on their right side with the head towards the south, and men were placed on their left side with their heads towards the north. In mother-son burials, the male child often was in the usual male position with the female out of position.
The authors of the paper gave several suggestions for interpreting the practice, from epidemics, to victims of sacrifice, to victims of raiding parties. They conclude, "The body of a woman, lying as though sleeping, clasping a child in her arms, obviously had a specific meaning to early Bronze Age peoples, a meaning retained across thousands of miles and amongst many diverse and fluid contemporary funerary practices. Whatever it was, it represented something powerful and emotive."
What do you think these burials could mean?
Bell Beakers and Metallurgy
Bell Beakers and Metallurgy
Within 50 years of arriving in Britain, the Beaker Folk had discovered copper ores at Ross Island, in County Kerry, Ireland. Mining and smelting of the ores started by 2400 BCE using low temperature smelting furnaces similar to those used in Spain and Portugal. The copper ores in Ross Island were naturally rich in arsenic, and the resultant bronze metal was much stronger than pure copper, and would have been highly prized. Bronze tools from Ross Island circulated widely within Britain and western France for about five centuries.
Gold was found by the Bell Beakers in the rivers of Cornwall and Devon and an estimated 200 kilograms was traded to Ireland. The Beaker Folk also discovered tin ores in Cornwall and Devon, originally in stream beds and then later in underground seams. When tin is added to copper, in the range of 5-20%, it forms bronze. Tin was extremely highly prized as it was rare in the Bronze age; with the primary sources from Cornwall or Afghanistan. Two millennia later, Heotodus called Britain "the tin islands."
Control of the metal trade in Britain may have led to enormous wealth. In Wessex alone, more than 4000 kurgans (known as round barrows in Britain) have been identified. The Wessex Culture is described by some fantastic burial finds.
Wikipedia says the Wessex culture "appear to have had wide ranging trade links with continental Europe, importing amber from the Baltic, jewellery from modern day Germany, gold from Brittany as well as daggers and beads from Mycenaean Greece and vice versa."
Interestingly, at the same time rich burials were being made under round barrows, construction at the great Neolithic site of Stonehenge continued. From 2400 to 1600 BCE Stonehenge remained in use with various rearrangements of the bluestones. The construction was more shabbily built compared to previous periods, but even so the question remains: how was there continuity of ceremonial usage with a new intrusive Bell Beaker society? Was the Bell Beaker phenomenon a purely cultural style added on to the former Neolithic life? Or did the Bell Beakers represent intruders from far away moving into Britain? Did they come in as rulers or displace the Neolithic farmers? The age old question of demic diffusion versus cultural diffusion can finally be answered with the recent technology of archaic DNA sequencing.
Bush Barrow lozenge, with angles of 81 degrees, equal to the angle between the summer and winter solstices
The Mold gold cape. Bronze Age, about 1900–1600 BC. From Mold, Flintshire, North Wales
Archaic DNA
Archaic DNA
Let's take a break from archeology for a bit and talk about DNA. In 1990 the National Institute of Health embarked on an ambitious project to sequence the 3 billion nucleotides in one person's human genome. The project cost $3 billion but was completed two years early, in 2003. Over the past twenty years, the technology has made extraordinary advances. Today you can get your own genome sequenced, with access to a library of personalized medical insights for $250.
Sequencing the DNA from a 5000 year old skeleton poses more challenges. DNA degrades easily and the 3 billion nucleotide long strands break up with heat and time, to an average of between 50 base pairs for Neanderthals and 100-500 base pairs for ancient humans. Various techniques had to be invented to multiply these tiny snippets of DNA and stitch them back into a complete genome. David Reich's lab at Harvard has led the way in this researh. By 2014 the DNA from 49 ancient individuals had been sequenced. By 2017 714 individuals, and by 2020, 5550 ancient skeletons had yielded their DNA. Just in the past decade, there has been an explosion of research that has allowed us to understand where ancient skeletons came from and who they were related to. There are three basic ways to compare DNA among individuals:
Y Haplogroups
Y Haplogroups
A person has 23 pairs of chromosomes of which one pair is the sex pair: XY for males, and XX for females. The Y chromosome is passed down nearly unchanged from grandfather to father to son and so on. However, there are mutations, roughly two per generation, so over time changes can add up. By sequencing tens of thousands of people's chromosomes, scientists have created a phylogenetic tree or major groupings of Y chromosomal patterns and labeled them with an arbitrary numbering scheme. Africa is the home to branches A, B and E; East Asia the home to D, and Europe to a variety of Y chromosomes including R1b, R1a, I1, I2, G, J2, N1 and E1b1. We call each grouping a haplogroup, from the Greek haploûs, "onefold, simple" i.e. derived from one parent, and the english group. Below is a picture of the Y haplogroup tree and the geographical distribution of major haplogroups:
mtDNA Haplogroups
mtDNA Haplogroups
You can't use the X chromosome from the mother to track maternal ancestry because every generation it combines portions of the mother's paternal and maternal X chromosomes. But the mitochondria in the egg have DNA of their own, and that gets passed down into the mitochondria of the mother's offspring, almost unchanged except for random mutations. So we can track maternal ancestry using mitochondrial DNA, called mtDNA for short, and you can structure everybody's mtDNA into a tree and assign a human mtDNA haplogroup. Below is a map of mtDNA haplogroups:
Autosomal DNA
Autosomal DNA
The third way to compare people's DNA is by looking at the 22 non-sex chromosomes that a person has. These 22 chromosomes are called the autosome and they contain most of the person's genome. The complicated part is that with each generation, the autosome of the father and mother get shuffled and half of the father+mother's genome is saved and half gets thrown away. However, the boffins at ancestry.com and 23andme.com have figured out a way to analyze the autosome, even with the random shuffling from generation to generation. The way they do it is with SNPs, which stand for Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms. These are single point mutations in particular places in the autosome which vary among people. Most studies compare between 600,000 and 1.2 million SNP locations on your DNA. The way ancestry.com or 23andme.com work is to find a well established family in each country whose 600,000 SNPs seem to represent the "average" for that country or region. They then compare your 600,000 DNA SNPs to the DNA of these representatives families, to determine that for example, 20% of your DNA is similar to Irish DNA and 30% is similar to French DNA and 50% is similar to Ashkenazi Jews.
The way David Reich's lab uses autosomal DNA is similar. They'll find a reference set of SNPs for Eastern Hunter Gatherer, Caucasus Hunter Gatherer, and Neolithic Farmer, for example. They'll then compare a Yamnaya skeleton and find that it's 50% EHG, 40% CHG and 10% Neolithic Farmer. This suggests to us that the Yamnaya might have come from a mixture of people from the Khvalynsk culture in the Urals, the Maykop culture in the Caucasus and the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture. Simple, right? Let's see what they found about Bell Beakers, and a contemporaneous culture in Northern Germany, Corded Ware.
Massive Migration from the Steppe was a source for Indo-European Languages?
Massive Migration from the Steppe was a source for Indo-European Languages?
In 2015 Wolfgang Haak and a host of people from Reich's lab and around the world published a revolutionary paper. They sequenced the DNA from 69 ancient skeletons across Europe dating from 6,000 to 1,000 BCE. They then modeled each skeleton as an admixture from three references: Western Hunter Gatherer, which should represent mesolithic European hunter gatherers, Early Neolithic Farmers from Anatolia, and Yamnaya pastoralists. They found that the Anatolian Farmers displaced the Mesolithic Hunter Gatherers, with some mixing as time went on. Then, "Western and Eastern Europe came into contact 4,500 years ago, as the Late Neolithic Corded Ware people from Germany traced 75% of their ancestry to the Yamnaya, documenting a massive migration into the heartland of Europe from its eastern periphery. This steppe ancestry persisted in all sampled central Europeans until at least 3,000 years ago, and is ubiquitous in present-day Europeans. These results provide support for a steppe origin9 of at least some of the Indo-European languages of Europe."
Note that the paper has nothing to do with language, only migration. If we believe that there was a massive migration of Yamnaya people into Europe, is that sufficient to prove that the Yamnaya were the source of Indo-European languages?
The Beaker Phenomenon and the Genomic Transformation of Northwest Europe
The Beaker Phenomenon and the Genomic Transformation of Northwest Europe
In 2018 Olalde and a host of people from Reich's lab published the paper to the right. The executive summary says: "Bell Beaker pottery spread across western and central Europe beginning around 2750 BCE before disappearing between 2200–1800 BCE. The forces propelling its expansion are a matter of long-standing debate, with support for both cultural diffusion and migration. We present new genome-wide data from 400 Neolithic, Copper Age and Bronze Age Europeans, including 226 Beaker-associated individuals. We detected limited genetic affinity between Iberian and central European Beaker-associated individuals, and thus exclude migration as a significant mechanism of spread between these two regions. However, migration played a key role in the further dissemination of the Beaker Complex, a phenomenon we document most clearly in Britain, where the spread of the Beaker Complex introduced high levels of Steppe-related ancestry and was associated with a replacement of ~90% of Britain’s gene pool within a few hundred years, continuing the east-to-west expansion that had brought Steppe-related ancestry into central and northern Europe 400 years earlier."
Feel free to click on the article and read or skim the whole thing.
This was an extraordinary claim, that the Beaker Folk had almost completely replaced Britain's Neolithic Farmers within a few centuries. How could this be? Were our happy beer drinking Beaker Folk actually genocidal maniacs, like Marija Gimbutas had proposed that the violent patriarchal Yamnaya had destroyed the peaceful matriarchal Cucuteni-Trypillia of Old Europe? Can you point out a flaw in Olalde's logic?
Perhaps the science was wrong. Let's look at this issue another way.
R1b Haplogroup
R1b Haplogroup
Nearly all Yamnaya male skeletons that have been sequenced to date have a distinctive Y chromosomal haplogroup: R1b. R1b most likely arose in a group of cattle herders in the Fertile Crescent, some of whom later crossed the Caucasus mountains to graze on the Pontic-Caspian steppes. In the fourth millennium, R1b is only found on the steppes and with the Maykop culture. However, Olalde found that 93% of the male Beaker burials outside of Iberia had the distinctive R1b haplogroup. R1b is the most common Y chromosomal haplogroup in Western Europe today, harbored by 80% of males in some areas. If you compare the distribution of Bell Beaker pottery sites from 3000 years ago with the present day distribution of R1b haplogroups, there is a very close match:
European R1b is dominated by a subgroup, R1b-M269. per Wikipedia: "It peaks at the national level in Wales at a rate of 92%, at 82% in Ireland, 70% in Scotland, 68% in Spain, 60% in France (76% in Normandy), about 60% in Portugal,[21] 50% in Germany, 50% in the Netherlands, 47% in Italy,[22] 45% in Eastern England, 43% in Denmark and 42% in Iceland. It is as high as 95% in parts of Ireland." So Olalde was at least directionally right, if not exactly right.
What about Iberia? Recall that Portugal and Spain were the areas with the first Beaker burials found in Europe. In Olalde's 2018 study he found that 60% of male Beaker burials had native haplogroups and only 40% had R1b, indicating that the early Beaker culture mixed with the native groups. However, a followup paper by Olalde in 2019 which focused just on Iberian genetics, found that "by ~2000 BCE the replacement of 40% of Iberia’s ancestry and nearly 100% of its Y-chromosomes by people with Steppe ancestry." How could 100% of the Y chromosomes come from the steppes but only 40% of the autosomes?
Interestingly, a 2014 paper which focused on mitochondrial haplogroups found that two female haplogroups, H1 and H3, which were ancestral to mesolithic Iberia were found in Central European Bell Beaker graves, suggesting that Bell Beakers from Iberia migrated east from Iberia to Central Europe, bringing their wives.
Explanations for Population Replacement
Explanations for Population Replacement
There are a number of hypotheses for how the Bell Beakers could have replaced the Neolithic farmers, but none are very satisfactory. As JP Mallory says, "The archaeological problem before us can briefly be stated as follows: how did Beaker males suppress the native population and exclude the native males from the gene pool? We have already seen the sentiments voiced by R. A. S. Macalister; these have been largely repeated in terms of aDNA in the Eupedia account of Celtic expansions, which informs us that technologically superior Celtic warriors, equipped with Bronze weapons and riding on horses, massacred or enslaved indigenous men while taking their women, or they established a ruling elite that passed on more Y chromosomes through sustained polygamy over many centuries. (Hay 2016: 2.2)". Kristiansen, Kristian; Kroonen, Guus; Willerslev, Eske. The Indo-European Puzzle Revisited: Integrating Archaeology, Genetics, and Linguistics (pp. 453-454). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
Violence
Violence
There is no evidence that the Bell Beakers violently suppressed the indigenous farmers: no evidence of battle sites, mass graves, skeletons with embedded arrowheads or bashed skulls, or newly defensive palisades around Neolithic farming sites. In addition the Bell Beakers don't seem to have had a military advantage over the farmers. Both used bows and arrows. The Bell Beakers do not seem to have brought horses to the British Isles; there is no evidence of horses there prior to 1000 BCE. That is not to say there wasn't some violent coercion, but there's not sufficient evidence for the complete massacre of the previous population.
A Depopulated Europe
A Depopulated Europe
Perhaps the Bell Beakers entered a Europe which had suffered a population crash and was mostly uninhabitable? There's a little evidence along those lines. We saw last week that there was a bitterly cold period at the beginning of the fourth millennium. Those cold snaps continued throughout the fourth and early third millennia and could have wreaked havoc on farming communities:
An article by David Reich and Ian Armit stated, "Analysis of summed radiocarbon probability distributions for burnt cereal grains, for example, appears to show a sharp drop in agricultural activity in mainland Britain at the start of the Middle Neolithic, c. 3350 BC, and a further decline at c. 2850 BC, ushering in a remarkably low level of arable cultivation that persists until c. 2450 BC (Stevens & Fuller 2012, 2015: fig. 1). The subsequent recovery corresponds to the period during which the first indications of the Beaker Complex in Britain occur."
There was a significant cooling event (not shown above) around 2200 BCE, known as the 4.2 kiloyear event. Thought to have been caused by a weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, it would have brought cold and arid weather to much of Eurasia. The cold weather, in addition to causing crop failures, may have brought on epidemics. DNA from the plague has been found in the teeth of three skeletons in England dating to around 2000 BCE. We'll look more at the plague hypothesis next week.
While the Neolithic population may have fallen somewhat, cold weather and plague did not eliminate the farmers; rituals at Stonehenge continued throughout the third millennium.
New Religion
New Religion
Certainly the Bell Beakers brought some new ways of thinking, religious and ritual. But they also seemed to have preserved the previous beliefs and rituals, and it's not clear how new beliefs could eliminate a population.
JP Mallory, in trying to explain population replacement in Ireland, summed it up nicely: "The result of this excursus into how well the archaeological evidence provides an explanation for the rapid genomic shift in Ireland has not been very promising. The categories reviewed – military superiority, social organization, religious institutions, and the evidence of palaeo-demography – have not displayed the type of evidence that an archaeologist, totally ignorant of the genetic evidence, would interpret as indicative of a catastrophic (at least for Late Neolithic males) change in population." Kristiansen, Kristian; Kroonen, Guus; Willerslev, Eske. The Indo-European Puzzle Revisited: Integrating Archaeology, Genetics, and Linguistics (p. 459). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
What Else do Genetics Tell Us About Bell Beakers?
What Else do Genetics Tell Us About Bell Beakers?
The 2018 Olalde study found "that the Bell Beaker arrivals in Neolithic Britain had significantly higher genetic variants associated with light skin and eye pigmentation than the local population, but low frequencies of the SNP associated with lactase persistence in modern Europeans." Selection for lighter skin may be related to Vitamin D. In cold northern climes, Vitamin D deficiency is a chronic condition which can impair health and lead to increased mortality. Increased susceptibility to infection, increased autoimmune diseases, and cancers all seem to be related to the disruption of the immune system with low levels of Vitamin D. Dark skin is selected for around the Mediterranean due to the risk of melanoma. Prior to the Bell Beakers, the Neolithic farmers had olive skin and blue eyes; Beaker Folk had 75% brown eyes, and 25% blue eyes, and mostly black or brown hair, but occassionally blond. Red hair is found mostly in Northern European Celtic or Germanic people; it is most frequent in areas where R1b is frequent.
Last week we saw that Yamnaya were on average three inches taller than the Neolithic farmers. That appears to be due to genetics, not just diet. The difference in height today between Northern Europeans and Southern Europeans seems to be due to differing amounts of inherited steppe ancestry.
While most Bell Beaker graves are single inhumations under kurgans, analysis of two Bell Beaker cemeteries in Southern Germany, with a total of 34 graves, supports the theory that Bell Beakers were patrilocal with males staying with their family group, and practicing exogamy, where female mates were selected from afar to prevent inbreeding. Male children were buried in the cemetery, but not female children, emphasizing the importance of male heirs. One male child showed signs of being raised elsewhere, which supports the idea that Bell Beakers practiced fosterage: sending some male children to live with extended maternal families: "Families/households formed alliances through kinship and the observed exogamic practices and foster children further forged such alliances, likely linking families into clans. Alliances were thus regional rather than closely local, and they could have formed larger political and ethnic entities to be mobilized in periods of unrest, or during periods of expansion. This pattern is not confined to South Germany as demonstrated by another, roughly contemporary kinship group, from the Salisbury Plain near Stonehenge in England."
After the Bell Beakers: The Únětice Culture, 2300 to 1600 BCE
After the Bell Beakers: The Únětice Culture, 2300 to 1600 BCE
All good things must come to an end and the Bell Beaker culture faded away by 2300 BCE in Europe and 1800 BCE in Britain. In Europe it was replaced by the Únětice culture, named after the Czech village of Únětice, located northwest of Prague. This is an interesting area; if you were a Yamnaya and wanted to get to Europe you could follow the path of the LBK farmers and travel up the Danube River, or go north around the Carpathian mountains. Both groups could meet up in central Czech Republic, and it appears that's what happened: the steppe people who became the Bell Beakers seem to have followed the Danube group, and the other group who we call the Corded Ware culture, which we'll study next week, went north around the Carpathians.
This section is generously pilfered from an excellent paper by Harald Meller titled Princes, Armies, Sanctuaries: The Emergence of Complex Authority in the Central German Únětice Culture. Miller describes how this area on the eastern flank of the Harz mountains to the Elbe River had extraordinarily fertile farmland. By 2400 BCE, the area was fully covered in a mixture of Corded Ware and Bell Beaker settlements. Over the next three hundred years, the Corded Ware and then the Bell Beaker settlements gave way to a new culture which seemed to be an amalgam of Bell Beaker and Corded Ware. In the Únětice culture both men and women were buried in single graves with the body in a north-south position and head pointing east, in contrast to the bipolar and gender differentiated burials of Bell Beaker and Corded Ware. No weapons are found in any Únětice common graves. Únětice pottery was a new undecorated tradition and looked like neither Bell Beakers or Corded Ware.
The Nebra Sky Disk was found at a Únětice site in Germany. It is about 12 inches in diameter, made of bronze with gold decorations which represent the sun, the moon, the Pleides stars, the angle between the solstices and perhaps a boat. The tin in the bronze came from Cornwall.
Many Unetice sites were near Stonehenge style ceremonial centers where astronomical observations were made.
Princely Graves
Princely Graves
Over fifty large kurgan/barrows have been found, and while many were looted, several yielded fantastic treasures. The princely burial of Leubingen was under a barrow 29 feet high and 150 feet in diameter. Inside, the skeleton lay flat on his back, unlike in poses for Corded Ware or Bell Beakers. Grave goods included traditional Corded Ware weapons: axes and a halberd, as well as Bell Beaker weapons: daggers but no arrowheads, and Bell Beaker style gold neck rings, hair pins, and bracelets.
Another mound near Dieskau was looted but four gold neck rings and a golden axe were recovered (see below)
Weapons and Barracks
Weapons and Barracks
Two large very large houses were found at Dermsdorf and Zwenkau. These were isolated, not part of a larger settlement, and could have housed 100-130 men each, and are speculated to have been an army barracks. Buried at Dermsdorf was a bronze hoard of 98 axes and two halberds. Numerous other weapons caches have been found, all of which contain mostly axes with a much fewer number of halberds, daggers and ribbed double axes. Miller speculates that the halberds, daggers and double axes were reserved for the leaders of infantry armed with axes, all in a standardized military organization. If he's right, the existence of standing armies would be a new form of stratified social organization.
Baltic Amber Trade
Baltic Amber Trade
How did the Únětice princes get so rich and what were their armies protecting? The Amber Road was a trade route in which amber from the Baltic and Scandinavian coast was traded, through Únětice territory to the Mediterranean. The breast ornament of the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamen had Baltic amber beads, and Baltic amber has been found in the shaft graves at Mycenae, the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, and at a royal tomb in Syria. Amber has no value to someone who is starving; its value as exotic jewelry reflects the richness of the highly wealthy and stratified cultures it was traded into. The neighbors to the north of the Únětice culture had rich hoards of Únětice bronzes, although these weren't shared with the people of the Baltic. Could the Únětice princes have gotten so rich solely on the amber trade? What else do you think they might have been trading?
Corded Ware
Corded Ware
This week we've mentioned the Corded Ware culture several times. The Corded Ware culture emerged alongside Bell Beakers, but occupied northern Europe: Poland, Germany, the Baltics and Scandinavia. Next week we'll do them justice and uncover their past and explore some of their mysteries.
Here's an optional Dan Davis video on the Únětice Culture:
Here are the slides from class:
IE Class 4.pdfGoogle Sites
Report abuse