There was, however, the Channel between England and Europe, and this relative isolation gave some peace and also gave time for a leveling and further fusion of culture. The separate cultural traditions began to have more in common. The growing of barley, the herding of sheep and cattle, and the production of woolen garments were already features common to all Britain’s inhabitants save a few in the remote highlands, the far north, and the distant islands not yet fully touched by food-production. The “personality of Britain” was being formed.
CREMATION BURIALS BEGIN
Along with people of certain religious faiths, archeologists are against cremation (for other people!). Individuals to be cremated seem in past times to have been dressed in their trappings and put upon a large pyre: it takes a lot of wood and a very hot fire for a thorough cremation. When the burning had been completed, the few fragile scraps of bone and such odd beads of stone or other rare items as had resisted the great heat seem to have been whisked into a pot and the pot buried. The archeologist is left with the pot and the unsatisfactory scraps in it.
Tentatively, after about 1400 B.C. and almost completely over the whole island by 1200 B.C., Britain became the scene of cremation burials in urns. We know very little of the people themselves. None of their settlements have been identified, although there is evidence that they grew barley and made enclosures for cattle. The urns used for the burials seem to have antecedents in the pottery of the Food-vessel folk, and there are some other links with earlier British traditions. In Lancashire, a wooden circle seems to have been built about a grave with cremated burials in urns. Even occasional instances of cremation may be noticed earlier in Britain, and it is not clear what, if any, connection the British cremation burials in urns have with the classic Urnfields which were now beginning in the east Mediterranean and which we shall mention below.
The British cremation-burial-in-urns folk survived a long time in the highland zone. In the general British scheme, they make up what is called the “Middle Bronze Age,” but in the highland zone they last until after 900 B.C. and are considered to be a specialized highland “Late Bronze Age.” In the highland zone, these later cremation-burial folk seem to have continued the older Food-vessel tradition of being middlemen in the metal market.
Granting that our knowledge of this phase of British prehistory is very restricted because the cremations have left so little for the archeologist, it does not appear that the cremation-burial-urn folk can be sharply set off from their immediate predecessors. But change on a grander scale was on the way.
REVERBERATIONS FROM CENTRAL EUROPE
In the centuries immediately following 1000 B.C., we see with fair clarity two phases of a cultural process which must have been going on for some time. Certainly several of the invasions we have already described in this chapter were due to earlier phases of the same cultural process, but we could not see the details.
