Ancient Man in Britain

by Donald A. Mackenzie

Beads from Bronze Age Barrows on Salisbury Plain

The large central bead and the small round ones are of amber; the long plain ones are of jet; and the long segmented or notched beads are of an opaque blue substance (faience).

Dr. H. R. Hall, of the British Museum, who discovered, at Deir el-Bahari in Egypt, "thousands of blue glaze beads of the exact particular type of those found in Britain", says that they date back till "about 1500 b.c.". He noted the resemblance before Professor Sayce had written. "It is gratifying", he comments, "that the Professor agrees that the Devizes beads are undoubtedly Egyptian, as an important voice is thereby added to the consensus of opinion on the subject." Similar beads have been found in the "Middle Bronze Age in Crete and in Western Europe". Dr. Hall thinks the Egyptian beads may have reached Britain as early as "about 1400 b.c.".[79] We have thus provided for us an early date in British history, based on the well authenticated chronology of the Empire period of Ancient Egypt. Easterners, or traders in touch with Easterners, reached our shores carrying Egyptian beads shortly before or early in the fourteenth century b.c. At this time amber was being imported into the south of England from the Baltic, while jet was being carried from Whitby in Yorkshire.

After the introduction of bronze working in Western Europe the natives began to work and use metals. These could not have been Celts, for in the fourteenth century b.c. the Celts had not yet reached Western Europe.[80] The earliest searchers for metals who visited Britain must therefore have been the congeners of those who erected the megalithic monuments in the metal-yielding areas of Spain and Portugal and north-western France.

It would appear that the early Easterners exploited the virgin riches of Western Europe for a long period—perhaps for over a thousand years—and that, after their Spanish colonies were broken up by a bronze-using people from Central Europe, the knowledge of how to work metals spread among the natives. Overland trade routes were then opened up. At first these were controlled in Western Europe by the Iberians. In time the Celts swept westward and formed with the natives mixed communities of Celtiberians. The Easterners appear to have inaugurated a new era in Western European commerce after the introduction of iron working. They had colonies in the south and west of Europe and on the North African coast, and obtained supplies of metals, &c., by sea. They kept the sea-routes secret. British ores, &c., were carried to Spain and Carthage. After Pytheas visited Britain (see next [chapter]) the overland trade-route to Marseilles was opened up. Supplies of surface tin having become exhausted, tin-mines were opened in Cornwall. The trade of Britain then came under the control of Celtiberian and Celtic peoples, who had acquired their knowledge of shipbuilding and navigation from the Easterners and the mixed descendants of Eastern and Iberian peoples.

It does not follow that the early and later Easterners were all of one physical type. They, no doubt, brought with them their slaves, including miners and seamen, drawn from various countries where they had been purchased or abducted.

The men who controlled the ancient trade were not necessarily permanent settlers in Western Europe. When the carriers of bronze from Central Europe obtained control of the Iberian colonies, many traders may have fled to other countries, but many colonists, and especially the workers, may have become the slaves of the intruders, as did the Fir-bolgs of Ireland who were subdued by the Celts. The Damnonians of Britain and Ireland who occupied mineral areas may have been a "wave" of early Celtic or Celtiberian people. Ultimately the Celts came, as did the later Normans, and formed military aristocracies over peoples of mixed descent. The idea that each intrusion involved the extermination of earlier peoples is a theory which does not accord with the evidence of the ancient Gaelic manuscripts, of classical writers, of folk tradition, and of existing race types in different areas in Britain and Ireland.

A people who exterminated those they conquered would have robbed themselves of the chief fruits of conquest. In ancient as in later times the aim of conquest was to obtain the services of a subject people and the control of trade.