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Chapter Five
The Earlier Bronze Age
Mike Parker Pearson
INTRODUCTION
The Earlier Bronze Age is, by and large, a handy shorthand for a specific chronological range
(2600–1400 BC) and for a group of associated artefacts—certain styles of pots, houses, lithic
assemblages, burials, stone monuments and metalwork. Whilst the British Bronze Age can be
divided into a tripartite scheme—Early (2600–1600 BC), Middle (1600–1200 BC) and Late (1200–
700 BC) —it is divided in the present work (see also Chapter 6) into two: the Earlier (2600–1400
BC) and Later Bronze Age (1400–700 BC). Few archaeologists would still accept the technological
determinism that led Vere Gordon Childe in his 1930 study, The Bronze Age, and others to see
technical innovation (in this case the use of bronze) as driving social change, and thus providing
the chronological framework for prehistory. Instead, we recognize that many aspects of that
vanished society, such as monument building and subsistence practices, were similar before and
after the adoption of bronze metallurgy. The British Isles were considerably behind other parts
of Europe in using metals. The smelting of copper had been going on in south-east Europe for
2,000 years prior to our earliest evidence in Britain. There is no clear indication of a British
Chalcolithic (Copper Age), since both the earliest copper and bronze tools here are dated to the
same broad period of c.2700–2000 BC.
The Earlier Bronze Age has been a crucial period for many of the most important questions
and debates in British and European prehistory. Was the arrival of Beaker pottery due to the
immigration of ‘Beaker folk’, or was it more the diffusion of an ‘ideological package’, a group of
new traits associated with new beliefs and practices? Was the great stone monument of Stonehenge
built by Mycenaean architects from the eastern Mediterranean or by indigenous groups unaware
of architectural innovations elsewhere? Was the change from communal to individual burial
indicative of changing notions of individuality? Do the monuments and rich graves of Wessex
indicate the emergence of elites who controlled chiefdoms? Did Bronze Age metallurgy initiate
the freeing of production from political constraint, and thereby instil core values of freedom and
innovation in Western society? In addition, this period has gripped the imagination of fringe
interests in prehistory, such as the ‘Earth Mystery’ researchers, who consider that the standing
stones and stone circles tap long-forgotten lines of energy unknown to modern science.
There are many recent books about the British Earlier Bronze Age and its surrounding centuries
(Barrett 1994; Burgess 1980; Burl 1987; Clarke et al. 1985; Parker Pearson 1994), written from