The Ancients - The Beaker People

Episode Date: April 27, 2024

The Beaker People were a Bronze Age culture that revolutionised prehistoric Britain. They were responsible for introducing Bronze Age technology into the British Isles for the first time, and also completely replaced the island’s earlier inhabitants. Identified by their distinctive style of pottery they quite literally changed the faced of British settlement and genetics forever. But how much do we know about them? And what archeological traces have they left behind?In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes talks to Dr. Alison Sheridan to learn the mysterious story of the 'Beaker People'. Alison explains what recent DNA research has revealed about the nature of their arrival into the British Isles and how significant an impact they had on Britain’s Bronze Age past.This episode was produced by Joseph Knight and edited by Aidan Lonergan.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code ANCIENTS - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. The Beaker People. It's the name of a very mysterious prehistoric people who radically transformed the population of Britain some 4,000 years ago. Arriving from the European continent, they brought their own style of distinctive pottery, hence Beaker people, and introduced Bronze Age technology and ideas to Britain. It was the dawn of the Bronze Age. So who exactly were these people? What was the nature of their

arrival into Britain? Was it peaceful? Was it violent? And how did they transform both the Stone Age landscape and the population? Well, this is a topic that much ink has been spilled on for years. So to explain what we know, I invited onto the show one of the topic's leading experts, Dr Alison Sheridan, who I've worked with in the past for a documentary series on history hit all about prehistoric Scotland. It was great to catch up with Alison again, and I really do hope you enjoy. It was great to catch up with Alison again, and I really do hope you enjoy. Alison, we've met in the past to talk about prehistoric Scotland, and we're going back thousands of years to these people called the Beaker people. I mean, the whole question of

who were the Beaker people, this is a question for the ages. Yeah, it absolutely is. And it's also one that has captured the public imagination. You find that with the results of the DNA analysis, they have solved a problem that archaeologists were discussing for about 100 years about who were the Beaker people and was there such a thing as the Beaker people. But I think we have to kind of disentangle the popular myths, which is of vast numbers of people invading from the continent, no, no, no, from the actual archaeological reality, which is much more interesting.

Much more interesting. We will get to that, the narratives of how they arrive as we go on. What types of material do we have? Do archaeologists like yourself have to learn more about these mysterious people? Well, we have an awful lot of graves to learn more about these mysterious people? Well, we have an awful lot of graves containing people who are buried with Beaker pottery. I mean, the term Beaker, it's simply a term to describe a distinctive style of pottery, which was current over large parts of the continent from about 2700 BC, and which then came to Britain. And then you can see the evolution of pottery there. So you've got the graves with the human beings in them, the pottery. You have metal objects. You have stone objects as well. In parts of Britain, you have houses where they lived. You have

evidence for their agricultural practices. There's a lot that we know, but also the application of scientific methods has just made the information basis explode over the last few years. I was going to say, how recently has that science really developed to that scale? But as you say, is it literally just in the last few years in particular? Yes, it is. There was a major DNA study of human remains associated with beaker pottery across Europe by Inigo Alalde and Professor David Reich of the Harvard Laboratory. They published their results in 2018 because the technique of ancient DNA analysis has developed very, very rapidly so that it used to be

prohibitively expensive and take a long time. But now, it's very quick, it's relatively cheap, and very, very reliable. They've got over initial problems with contamination, which had been a bugbear in the past. I also want to ask a bit more about the whole term beaker people. You mentioned beakers earlier, so I'm guessing that's how we get the name beaker people. Can you describe these types of beakers that we associate with these people? Yeah. I think that we have to separate out the notion of a fixed group of people who were ethnically Beaker people from

a much broader phenomenon, which consisted of people who chose to use this style of pottery and a particular style of other artifacts. For example, on large parts of Europe, you'll get graves where men are buried with one or more Beaker, with a dagger, and with a set of archery equipment. It's almost like a stereotypical high-status male identity in death. You are buried as the great archer, the great warrior, or the great hunter, or both. What the DNA evidence has told us is that in different parts of Europe, you get people with different genetic histories using beaker pottery. It just so happens that when you're looking at Britain and indeed Ireland as well, there you can say, okay, the appearance of beaker pottery and a whole new range of novelties

as well, including the use of copper and gold, is associated with the arrival of people from the continent. When mentioning the words like beaker people, and as you've clearly highlighted there, not just think of one particular group of people, but when we use that term, how far back into prehistory are we going? Well, I mean, the earliest Beakers date to around 2700 BC. As far as the story in Britain is concerned, it's from 2500 BC till around 1800 BC. Okay, so quite actually not a huge amount of time in the large scale of things, but this is almost a millennia we're talking about.

That's right, best part of a millennium. And so several generations of people using beaker pottery. And let's go to the origins question. So endpoints, Britain, Ireland, but where do we think these people originally, well, they originate from? Well, again, luckily, thanks to the DNA results, we're able to say that the continental immigrants who came to Britain and Ireland came from different parts of the continent to different parts of Britain and Ireland. So some of them came from what is now the Netherlands.

Some of them came from further down the Rhine. So central Germany, the very famous one, the poster boy, the so came from further down the Rhine, so central Germany. The very famous one, the poster boy, the so-called Amesbury Archer, probably came from Switzerland or South Bavaria. Other people may well have come from Brittany to southwest England and to Ireland, but the problem there is that in Brittany, because the soils are granitic and acidic, human bones tend not to survive. The same is true for parts of Britain as well. We can say from the style of the beakers and how people were buried that there's every chance that some people did go from Brittany to southwest England and to Ireland.

I'm asking that highlights that strong connection, isn't there, between Brittany and Britain that has endured not just at that time, but also maybe a thousand years beforehand back in theolithic times too. This is a really ancient transport route that has been used and used and used again in prehistory. Absolutely. The Atlantic facade. The great thing about the Beaker phenomenon is that you're getting not just Atlantic facade movement, but also simple cross-channel movement and also up the North Sea. I'm guessing with these early burials, we'll get more into burials in a moment, but to get an idea of where they are settling, are we imagining these different groups of people arriving and settling in different

parts of Britain, not just the mainland, but also the islands too? Yes, absolutely. We think that they probably came for a variety of reasons. Some of them, like the Amesbury Archer, were probably undertaking a sort of heroic journey. You can imagine that he would have been a member of the elite. His grave is actually the richest grave anywhere in Europe. Just as in Homer's Odyssey, you have your young aristocratic man who is going on these long, dangerous journeys. That's what happened to the Amesbury Archer. Mary Helms has come up with a term called cosmological acquisition. The idea being, you go off on these long journeys,

you see these wonderful, weird, exotic things, and then you come home and you tell your pals, and you get one up on your neighbors. As it happened, he never did go home. He probably traveled far and wide, but then he died near Stonehenge. Other people we know came looking for copper and probably gold as well. In southwest Ireland, a place called Ross Island, they opened a copper mine around 2400 BC. Those beaker users probably came from somewhere along the Atlantic, possibly central France or Iberia. Others seem to have come maybe as families. For example, there's a wonderful young lady who was buried at Sorrisdale on the Hebridean Isle of Cole. Isotopically, we know that she wasn't local. Genetically now, we're

able to say she probably came from central Germany as a first-generation migrant. Now, why did she come? She knew nothing about where Cole was, but it might be that some people simply moved because they were curious. Families would move because essentially when you're standing in parts of France, you can see Britain. So, hey, why not? It's not like there was a crisis on the continent that forced people. We're not talking about refugees. We're also not talking about aggressive military expansion. I think it takes a lot to get that through certain journalists' minds because when the DNA evidence came out, they said, hey, look, did hordes of Dutch people come and kill the folks who built Stonehenge? No,

they didn't. No, it's not like that. Before we get more into Stonehenge and the Amesbury Archery, because we mentioned that name a couple of times now, we will absolutely get to that incredible story. But you've highlighted an important point there, first of all, Alison. that time. What has the DNA revealed about the arrival of Beaker people into Britain and how they interact with this, I guess, indigenous population? Yeah, absolutely. Well, genetically, it says that there was a population replacement. But archaeologically, we have to understand that that, in genetic terms, has a very specific meaning. It does not mean that there was a wipeout. The story is complicated because in the centuries immediately before the appearance of the Beaker people, the preferred funerary rite was cremation. We actually have very few human remains dating to

the period 3000 to 2500 BC, which means that it's difficult then to detect the actual late Neolithic people. However, we're also able to say from the DNA that yes, there certainly was an indigenous genetic signature. So even though the so-called Beaker signature is dominant, nevertheless, the indigenous people certainly didn't die out. And in fact, there was, we can see it archaeologically as well. People would then buy into the Beaker ideal. It's almost as though perhaps these sexy foreigners were so attractive that local women preferred, they kind of dumped their local boyfriends and thought, right, I'm going to go

with this sensuous Dutchman or whatever. There may well have been selective interbreeding, which would again give a genetic advantage to the incoming genetic signature. But also, the DNA tells us that it wasn't just a single large appearance of loads of people, that this was a process that could well have gone on over several generations, and it could have been multiple small-scale movements of people. That actually fits with the archaeological evidence much better than a big bang thing. What is the result of that? If it happens over several generations, do we therefore

see a slow and gradual, if they're dumping their local boyfriends for more exotic people from the continent maybe? I don't know, that's just one theory. What do we see after these several generations? Do we see a gradual reducing of that original Stone Age population? Well, I think we see it as certainly an intermixing. These amazing foreigners must have really impressed people in Britain and Ireland. I mean, really impressed them in so many ways, not least because they were using metal, which is completely alien, copper and gold. Wow, shiny, impressive, rare, prestigious, and all that.

And so, while some people may well have regarded these incomers as a threat to their social system, nevertheless, we know that people still continue to build major monuments like Silbury Hill, this incredible mound in Wiltshire. That was built after beakers started to be used, but was probably built by the indigenous people. Then also, we can see that, yeah, local people certainly bought into the ideal of using metal. They adopted it. They adopted the pottery style and adapted it. Then they would build their own monuments. For example, the Claver Cairns near Inverness, these would be graves for really important people who were,

for all we know, they could be local people, but they were buried with beaker pottery. So, this has a great cachet to it. In fact, if you look at Calanish in the Outer Hebrides, this amazing stone circle site, around 2500 BC, people built a miniature version of a Neolithic chamber tomb, but the pottery associated with it is international beaker. I mean, that is absolutely mind-blowing. So is that a case of local people who, again, were buying into the international pottery style, but were also harking back to a tradition of burial a thousand years old, and they were making a statement, putting themselves in the middle of this ancient monument at Calanish.

These big, amazing Stone Age monuments, Calanish, Temple Woodstone Circles, and of course Stonehenge. How do we see these monuments – let's focus on Stonehenge – how do we see this one transform following the arrival of these people? Well, it's not so much a question of these people transforming Stonehenge. I think it's very much a case of them respecting Stonehenge. The Amesbury Archer is buried in a site that is not far away from Stonehenge and it's overlooking it. You can see the site from there. With the intermixing with the local community, I mean, there will have been people who would have acted as sort of MCs of the

solstitial ceremonies. That's a really good question. I suppose what they brought was an interest in maintaining connections with the continent that hadn't been there before. And through those connections during the early Bronze Age, so from about 2200 onwards, we know that the people who were being buried in the area around Stonehenge, who would have been the descendants of initial beaker users and of people who'd mixed in, they managed the tin trade. Tin was extracted in Cornwall and these were entrepreneurs and they were able to get rich quick by exporting the tin not only to elsewhere in Britain and Ireland where it was used to make bronze because

from 2200, they were mixing copper with tin to make bronze, but also they exported it to the continent. So you're getting continuing appearance of continental-style objects, which is pretty amazing. So it's this, as you say, this kind of respecting of these massive monuments that they would have known were really important to the people that have been living in Britain for hundreds, thousands of years beforehand. As you say, it's not the everyday people, it's the elites who then choose to be buried nearby it. That's the case of Stonehenge and famous figures like you've highlighted earlier, this figure that is the Amesbury Archer. That's right. The interesting thing is obviously people don't bury themselves.

So whoever buried the Amesbury Archer, who was in his 40s or so, he was buried in the continental beaker style. So following their traditions, so it was an individual grave, he was buried as if he was asleep, etc. But he was buried with multiple beakers and multiple sets of archery equipment. He had things like a couple of beautiful copper daggers or knives where the copper itself would have come from Iberia. He had a pair of golden basket-shaped ornaments for his hair. The gold to make that was not from Britain. It was probably from somewhere on the continent. Very interesting. Therefore, they would have almost had a retinue of people who made sure that he was buried with fantastic respect in the traditional Beaker style. The reason I ask all of that is because the S. D. Ainsbury archer is an amazing example. You've highlighted all those grave goods that

they were buried with. When we went to Kilmartin Glen more than a year ago, I remember, and I've said the name a couple of times, there were two stone circles templewood stone circle isn't it there's there's a and there's b but what you see there which i find really interesting is that one of those stone circles is later transformed into a burial into a kissed grave this and in that sense it does kind of feel like the stone circle has been transformed by these new people coming in i mean where does that fit into the whole story of the Beaker people? Because you know it much better than I, and I had to ask. Okay. Well, in terms of Temple Wood, actually what happened is that the people

who use Beaker pottery respected it. So they buried their dead just outside the stone circle, right? And then a few generations later in the Early Bronze Age, that is when the site was converted into a ring cairn and a major kist was placed right in its centre. They were appropriating a by then ancient monument for their own prestige. We refer to it as Early Bronze Age, the period when that actually happened. Talk to me a bit more about these burial practices of the Beaker people, Alison. What were the regular burial practices that we know of that survived for these people? The practice really was to bury people individually, by and large, in most parts of Britain,

either in a simple pit grave or within a sort of wooden chamber, which is the case at Apalagi in Kilmartin Glen, or within a stone box-like chamber that we call a kist. There were rules that were followed fairly strictly so that a man would be buried on his left with his head at the east end of the grave facing south, and a woman would be buried on her right. You can trace those rules, these norms, across to the continent. Then also on the continent, you can see variations. For example, in Brittany, there was a practice of communal burial. That's exactly what we find at Boscombe, not far away from the Ainsbury Archer, where there was this kiss that had the remains of multiple people in it, and they're all sort of mixed together. That indeed is a kind of

Breton-style grave. If you go to Ireland, you see that they were building megalithic monuments called wedge tombs, which hark back to the gallery graves of Brittany, which would have been 500 years old. So the people using beakers, who brought the use of beakers to Ireland, also brought a by then ancient tradition of monument building with them. So essentially, again, like everything to connect with this, it's a complicated but fascinating story. But of course, because we always love to have the idea that this is what they do and they do it everywhere. But as you say, such a large area, we are focusing on Britain and Ireland, but the Bell Beaker culture, how much of Europe does it encompass at its height?

Oh, I mean, vast areas from Iberia, from Portugal and Spain to the west, to certainly, oh crikey, Czech Republic to the east and slightly further east than that. It actually makes its way to Scandinavia very late, but never mind. And it's also there in North Africa as well. So, I mean, incredibly wide. We have all these new scientific developments and the detail that we have surviving about particular graves and figures from this culture. I'd like to quiz your brain in detail about one particular burial that I know you've done a lot of work on in the past. You know what I'm going to say. I'm going to probably butcher the pronunciation of the Scottish name, but the

Achavanich burial, what is this? Spot on, absolutely spot on. Yeah, Achavannach, also fondly known as Ava, was the subject of a research project by a brilliant young early career scholar called Maya Houle. And this skeleton was found in 1987 when they were doing some roadworks in Achavannach, in Caithness, in the far north of Scotland. Then initial post-excavation work was done. Then sadly, the archaeologist who was working on it died. So nothing else happened until really quite recently, about 2017, when Maya was able to apply the full battery of scientific techniques. So she had isotopic study done, she had DNA done, she had a facial reconstruction made, full osteology, palynology, you name it, and was therefore able to tell an

amazing story about this young lady who was only, what, between 18 and 25 years old when she died. And so to cut to the chase, Ava was probably born in the area, but her parents or grandparents on both sides had been immigrants from what we now call the Netherlands. So basically, she's a child of Beaker people or grandchild of Beaker people. She has a particularly wide head. That is the other thing. A lot of the continental people using beakers have heads which were a different shape from the heads of indigenous

Neolithic people. Neolithic people, they have long heads, long and narrow. Let's not talk about weirdly so, but comparatively so, whereas beaker users tend to have rounder. We call them brachycephalic. There's been a lot of debate as to why. Why do you get this cranial difference? I think partly it might be to do with the practices. When you're bringing up a baby and you're carrying them around, if you carry them in a papoose with a very rigid backboard, then a very young baby's skull is going to be pressed so that it's likely that the skull bones, which are still quite flexible when they're newly born and very young, they get forced outwards. I think that's a very attractive suggestion. Anyway, our Ava had a particularly broad head, had some nutritional deficiencies as she grew up. Her diet was very high in protein and fairly low in carbohydrates.

We don't know what she died of, but she's got Schmoll's nodes, which are things that form on the vertebrae, which meant that she actually had a very hard life. So it's a sign of physical hard work, so hard labor for her. In her grave, there was Marsh St. John's wort pollen and also sphagnum moss. Interestingly, both of these have had medical uses in the past. So sphagnum moss is what soldiers were using in World War I to stench the bleeding of their wounds because it does the trick. And then marsh St. John's wort is good for certain ailments. So, amazing stuff. And also, we know that they probably put plant material to line her little stone kist. So, they cared for her. They buried her with a beaker and also with a couple of little

stone tools. So clearly they believed that after you die, you have another existence. You go to the afterworld. And the idea of the beaker is that it contains food or drink for the afterlife. And also there was pollen inside the beaker and inside the kist that was able to show that the environment around was sort of heathland with sort of scrubby woodland as well. So it's incredible how much you can tell from a single grave. For some reason, I find really interesting the fact that it's within one generation, as you say, that they've gone from the Netherlands to not southern England, nowhere near the Amesbury Archer, right in the northeast of Scotland, the mainland in Caithness. Does

that also kind of give an insight into how much these people did travel if they needed to? Are there, as you hinted earlier, maybe a quest for copper or for some other reason? Absolutely. It also tells us that they must have been incredibly good sailors, really good navigators. Even though they wouldn't have known precisely where it was that they were going, clearly they got there and they flourished. So, for example, in the inner, the Outer Hebrides, not only have we got Sorrisdale, the young woman who came from Germany, but then her descendants,

there are the highest density of Beaker-associated settlement sites, houses that are in the Outer Hebrides than in the whole of the rest of Britain, which is incredible. What do we know about their houses? Certainly the ones in the Outer Hebrides are very well built. They're stone built. They're sort of slightly oval. They would have been big enough to take an extended family.

And these people would have been farmers. So there's no evidence that they consumed fish, but certainly they would be rearing cattle and sheep and growing barley and possibly wheat as well and pigs as well. I mean, they would have had a very good farming lifestyle and be quite prosperous people. But also, this metal connection is so important and so interesting because having established a copper mine in southwest Ireland, somehow they were able then to create a network of contacts that got this copper all the way from there to northeast

Scotland and to northern England and elsewhere as well. I mean, it's absolutely mind-blowing what they were able to achieve. So what do we know about these metal trade routes? Because I feel that this is going to come back to that place we mentioned earlier that we know in western Scotland, Kilmartin Glen. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, certainly the copper from the southwest of Ireland, that is the main source used for both copper objects and then later the bronze objects. And so there were networks that took it from southwest Ireland to northeast Ireland and then up the Atlantic facade of Scotland. And Kilmartin Glen is situated a little bit to the south of the Great Glen, that is Loch Ness, which was a major sort of

Loch Highway. They told the Loch Ness ones to get out of the way, but they went up to what is now Inverness. There was a bronze industry that started around 2200 BC around Inverness and to the north of that using copper from Ross Island. We know that they had already been importing Ross Island copper before that that they had already been importing Ross Island copper before that during the time when beakers were used. Do we think there's a similar story in England and Wales? Are there bronze working, are there copper working factories there as well, which are also getting copper and beaker people overseeing manufacture there too? Well, there's a sort of intriguing

hint at Comystwyth in Wales. There was a probable beaker grave, or at least somebody found a gold sun disk, a beautiful thin sheet gold thing, which is a classic continental beaker artifact. It was suspiciously close to where there is a copper mine. We certainly know that quite a few copper mines were opened up in Wales and England around 2000 BC. We know that tin had been discovered in Cornwall from about 2200 BC, again with continental prospectors coming and finding the tin. Cornish copper was probably also used. Well, you gave a hint to it there. I want to talk about the different products that they were creating from these various ores. What are some of the iconic metal technologies, products that the Beaker people create? Well, if we start with gold, it was really

ornaments. Because the initial use of gold, they probably used continental gold. But we know, thanks to amazing work by Chris Standish of Southampton University, that from around 2200 BC, they were using Cornish gold, which is absolutely phenomenal. They exported Cornish gold to Ireland. The very earliest gold objects associated with beakers are these basket-shaped ornaments, which would be used almost like golden scrunchies for your hair. If you imagine you've got a plait or a bang of hair. These would just shout out prestige, status. I am so important. It's the bling of the day. They also had these so-called sun discs, which may well have been representations of the sun. We know that, obviously, if you hold this in the sunshine, it's going to reflect the sun's light.

On the continent, in the Czech Republic, you see people buried with spondylus shell discs of the same design. We know that the Sun was very important to the beliefs of the Beaker users, as it was to the people who built Stonehenge, of course. The Lunars are absolutely incredible, aren't they? Those massive sheets of gold, and these, I say, elite, prestigious items. Before we go on to copper and bronze, am I right in thinking then actually one of the first metals that these people have really become efficient, become experts at smithing and creating these artifacts, it's not bronze, it is gold? Oh, absolutely. Yes, it's gold and copper. And so the gold lunalee that you mentioned, These are wonderful sheet gold neck collars. We think

that they probably started around 2200 BC. Most of them have been found in Ireland, so they're very much an Irish phenomenon. You get a handful of them in Britain and a handful on the near continent as well. The inspiration could have come from Iberia, but certainly as soon as they got hold of the idea, they used imported gold from Cornwall. So they developed goldsmithing expertise in southwest Ireland. There are different kinds of lunalee. There are ones which are made by the tip-top, most skilled gold workers. And then the ones that tend to be found outside of Ireland, they're called provincial lunalee. that tend to be found outside of Ireland, they're called provincial lunarly. They tend to be thicker. They're not quite so well made.

The decoration isn't quite so well done, but it's as though people elsewhere got hold of the idea and they thought, right, I'm going to make these too. What do we know about copper and materials that they crafted from copper in these early stages? Were these items that were more available to everyday people? No. The very earliest copper objects, again, would be just for the elite. And so what they were making would be knives and daggers, which are very, very useful if you're hunting or if you're in combat with people. Also flat axe heads. Now these could easily have been used to chop down trees, but they could also have been used as weapons.

They were certainly prestigious. We know this because in Kilmartin Glen, there was a kind of golden age from around 2200 BC based on the fact that they could control the flow of Irish metal to elsewhere. There was one guy who was buried in a big kist under a big cairn. They actually took a piece of rock that had Neolithic cut marks on it. They cut it out of the living rock and they then added, they carved in images of flat axe heads. Isn't it amazing? That was then the underside of the capstone of this guy's kist. It's just absolutely phenomenal. It's like he was buried with the symbols of his power, with what had made him rich. You also get these things called halberds, which are like daggers on a stick.

You get a lot of them in Ireland and in Western Britain. Those would have been designed as execution weapons. They have a thickened midrib. and experimental work using poor sheep's heads, sheep were already dead, has shown that if you sort of strike it down on a head, it is a skull splitter. Extraordinaire. So again, super, super elite weaponry here. Sometimes today, because of course we live in an age where we've got steel, we've got iron, we've got bronze. When someone talks about copper, it's just like, ha, that's pretty rubbish metal compared for cutting and all that. But we need to remember at this time, this is revolutionary. This is new. This is after stone and blunt stone and stuff like this. So at the time, to have something as effective and as brutal as that, as something like an execution weapon, this is game changing. Oh, it is. Absolutely. Yes. Yeah. And it's easy to see how people could be wowed by these

and could want to have them. And then of course, when you alloy copper with tin, you're making a, again, a harder metal and that absolutely took off. And as soon as you do that, you're also creating a new demand system and you need a new supply system because the tin was coming from Southwest England, from Cornwall, possibly also Devon, and your copper is coming from southwest Ireland. So you need some way to get the two of those together. We know that the tin was being exported to southwest Ireland. So you're getting these incredibly complicated supply networks, and anybody who can control the flow of that metal got rich quick. They were the tycoons of the day, weren't they? They're absolutely extraordinary, got very rich. I never really like askingons of the day, weren't they? They're absolutely extraordinary. Got very rich.

I mean, I never really like asking this question because I know it's such a difficult term, but we've mentioned of all these weapons and so on and so forth. Well, there's an execution weapon like the halberd. Do we have any idea as to whether the Beaker people, this Beaker culture, whether there was a warrior culture within at least the elite? There was a warrior ideology for sure, but there's been an awful lot of osteological analysis done on human remains and amazingly few show any evidence of sharp force trauma or blunt force trauma. There are a few, but I think it was very much for show. It was a macho thing. So if you were a member of the elite, if you're a man, then you're going to be portrayed

as a warrior. Don't mess with me because I've got the weaponry and I can dispatch you easily. It's that kind of thing. I'd like to ask one more question about the burials, something that you hinted at earlier about rock art. Of course, rock art, that tradition in Britain, it's there long before the arrival of the Beaker people. But as you highlighted, it seems that in this one burial in Kilmartin Glen, they prize up this rock art outcrop and they put it in their burial. I mean, what do the Beaker people do with rock art? What's their attitude towards it? I mean, in Kilmartin, it was a reverence because they could have got rock from elsewhere, but they selected out. This is an early

Bronze Age, so this would be descendants of Beaker. I think maybe they thought that it was to do with the ancestors and the gods. It's sacred rock, which has a particular kind of significance in terms of ideology and belief systems. Perhaps they were harnessing the power of the gods and the ancestors by bringing in this ancient, sacred art into their graves. But they were also literally stamping, pecking their own identity into it by putting these axe heads there. It's amazing. The other thing I want to add about the early Bronze Age from 2200, that's when you get your first high-status female graves occurring in any numbers. There are maybe one or two before that associated with beakers.

But now, this is when you're getting beautiful jet spacer plate necklaces, which are skeuomorphs of these gold lunarly happening. And also, in Kilmartin Glen, they decided, okay, beakers, they're nice. Okay, but what's really the most fashionable thing is food vessels from Ireland. So this is just simply a different style of pottery called a food vessel. And so instead of burying their dead with beakers, they said, right, no, we're going to have the best of Irish craftspersonship and we'll have Irish style food vessels here. And there is one amazing grave at Apalagi in Kilmartin Glen, which was put right next to a classic early beaker grave. And there is one amazing grave at Upper Largy in Kilmartin Glen, which was put right

next to a classic early beaker grave. And in this grave, the early Bronze Age grave, they buried a pot, which in its top upper half or upper part, you could lose it in Ireland, but the bottom bit has got four little stumpy legs on it. And that's very typical of food vessels that you get in Yorkshire. And so in a single pot, you get a kind of microcosm of the external connections of the people at the time. Links across to Ireland, but also connections with Yorkshire, which is where they would have got the Whitby jet necklaces from. Phenomenal stuff. You harnessed there must have been very good sailors earlier, so we can imagine they got some sort of maritime transport. They got

these early Bronze Age boats. Do we know much about overland transport? Do we know of wagons or anything like that? No. The earliest evidence that we have for any wheeled transport in Scotland and possibly in Britain overall, it dates to around 1100 BC. So it's much, much, much, much later. Likewise, no horses. The earliest domestic horse is Bronze Age, again, about 1100 or 1000 BC. Even though they had got horses on the continent, they didn't bring their horses over with them, which is intriguing. One other thing I'd like to ask about that is in regards to the Outer Hebrides. I remember going to Orkney, actually when we last met in person, going

to the Nessar-Rodger excavation and learning about how that site transforms at the end of the Stone Age. Talking to one of their experts on site, Roy, about the pottery and analysing the residue within the pottery that they discovered there and figuring out that they had some sort of yoghurt kind of thing which they meshed from it. Roy then highlighted that back in the Stone Age, these people were lactose intolerant. They couldn't drink milk. Do we know anything about that with the beaker people and their diet? Were they able now to drink milk? I mean, what's the whole situation there? Okay. No, they too were lactose intolerant.

But when people have done lipid analysis of beaker pottery, they have found dairy milk fat very, very consistently. And the thing is that you can actually process it. I'm glad you mentioned yogurt because you can process milk in various ways to make it more digestible. But also, there's been a major project looking at this whole thing about when people became tolerant to lactose and what happened before that. There is a certain amount. If you're lactose intolerant, you can still drink

unprocessed milk, a certain amount of it. You wouldn't want to do it to a vast degree. But also, I would like to think that it was fermented milk that went into the grave. You're sending somebody off into the afterlife with a wholesome liter of milk. Lovely. We know that elsewhere around the world, people have fermented milk to make an alcoholic beverage. We also know from other beakers where they have found, for example, evidence for lima pollen, which came from honey. They might have been making mead, and they might have been brewing ale as well. They were familiar with alcoholic beverages, which they would then give to the dead person on his or her dangerous journey into the afterlife.

Alison, this has been great. Lastly, before we completely wrap up, we talk about the end of the Belpica culture, I'd like to talk a bit more about origins because we get thrown again, time and again, these words, step ancestry. Now, what do we mean by that with the Beaker people? Okay. Well, in Central and Eastern Europe, about 400 years before Beakers started to be used, it seems that there was a movement of people, the so-called Yamnaya culture or Yamnaya people from the Eurasian steppes. They came across Europe into Central and Eastern Europe. They seem to have had quite a major impact on the indigenous populations there. The genetic makeup became mixed between the indigenous Chalcolithic people and Yamnaya steppe people. That is how you

get steppe ancestry. Then that is something which has carried down the generations. The so-called Beaker people who came to Britain also have steppe ancestry, but we are talking about many, many generations back. I've heard some people have said, oh, look, people came from the Ukraine to Britain. No, they didn't. No, they didn't. No. from the Ukraine to Britain. No, they didn't. No, they didn't. No. So, let's dissociate the spread of the Yamnaya people and their gene set from the subsequent expansion of Beaker users into Britain and Ireland. You already mentioned earlier in our chat about the descendants of the Beaker people and how they further influence older, ancient in their eyes, like Stone Age sites and so on, which begs the question, I mean, what can we say is the end of

the Beaker people? It was very fuzzy indeed. And there wasn't an end point. What you're seeing is over the generations, people bought into the idea of using metal and making Beaker pots. And then you get what I call style drift. You're getting different styles of beaker, regional styles. Then you're getting food vessels, which is similar but different. People love their fashions. As soon as Irish food vessels started, they thought, oh, wow, this is fantastic. You'll see people would choose to use food vessels rather than beakers, but they were probably used in exactly the same way. Likewise, with funerary practices, what you're finding is that there was a diversification. From the beaker norms, the continental norms of you will be buried this way,

you're getting a loosening up. It's not as though every man was buried on his left and every woman was buried on her right. No, no, no. You're getting kind of mixings up and different orientations. You're getting people cremating people. You're getting folks going into tombs and taking bones out. You've got collective burial. So there is this great diversification. And also, when you're getting the bronze starting to be used at 2200 BC, with all of the opportunities that that affords for people to show off their status, you find there's another whole range of prestigious objects, some of which are like the ones on the continent, like the V-perforated buttons. Others are indigenous. So it's a wonderful mixta-maxta of people and traditions. We're all still Beaker people, by the way.

Well, that's a lovely way to finish it. I mean, it also seems really exciting for the future as we go full circle. He highlighted at the start new scientific developments, DNA, learning more about these burials that have been preserved, about the artefacts that they're buried with. Is the future going to be really exciting for archaeologists and people looking at the Beaker people? And not just elite burials of these figures right at the top, these tycoons, but also perhaps we'll start learning a bit more about everyday beaker people too. Absolutely. Something which came out of the amazing Beaker People project by Professor Mike Parker Pearson was that it's very important to study graves where you've only got skeletons, where you don't have any beakers or any other grave goods, because you need to find out who,

during that particular time period, who was being buried, how and why. Also, there are gaps in the distribution of beakers. So what kind of pottery were people using in those areas too? There's an awful lot that we don't know about them and a lot more that we need to find out about their settlement patterns and their agricultural practices. So archaeologists will still be very, very busy in time to come. Well, keep in touch. I'm sure there'll be several more excavations on the Beaker people coming very soon in Britain and Ireland. Alison, this has been great fun. And it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. It was completely my pleasure. Thank you so much, Tristan.

Well, there you go. There was Dr. Alison Sheridan talking all things the mysterious Beaker people and how they transformed Britain some 4,000 years ago. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Now, last thing for me, wherever you listen to The Ancients, make sure that you are subscribed, that you are following the podcast so that you don't miss out when we release new episodes twice every week. But that's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.