The bronze age and the Celtic world - Universal History Library

THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE LEAF-SHAPED SWORDS 103
and 379, exhibit the characteristic ornament of this finger-tip ware. If Lord Abercromby's
chronology is even approximately correct, and it is in these cases vouched for by a series
of excellent synchronisms, the pottery characteristic of Central Europe had been intro-
duced into the south of England some centuries before the arrival of the people who
introduced the Type G swords. This leads us to suspect that the Type E swords
were also brought by an invading people, fairly early in the Type E period, as a
certain number of Type D swords have also occurred.
It is unnecessary to pursue this argument through other countries, or to point
out that some of our cinerary urns are in shape exactly like the bronze buckets used
in Central Europe at the dawn of the iron age. We shall have occasion to discuss the
special conditions in other countries in later chapters. Here it wiU be sufficient to
suggest that all the British evidence tends to show that the spread of these swords was
accompanied by a movement of pottery and other elements of cultm-e, that at Brentford
by the existence of skulls and elsewhere by inference we may concludeJhat there was
acoossponding movement of people, and that in the British Isles, at any rate, the
presence of this considerable number of leaf-shaped swords betokens an invasion.
There seems to be no sufficient reason for believing that the circumstances were
materially different in the other regions in which these swords have been found. /