ABSTRACT
Long before the beginning of the Old High German period ancestors of the Germanic tribes inhabited the shores of the Baltic Sea, modern Denmark, southern Sweden, and the areas between the lower Elbe and Ems rivers. Archaeological evidence indicates that people had lived there even before the Northern Bronze Age (ca. 1700-450 B.C.). They buried their dead in communal graves constructed of very large pieces of stone, or megaliths, but later were influenced by people from the south who dug single graves for their dead and introduced, among other things, a particular kind of pottery known as corded ware because of the designs produced by pressing cords into the damp clay. The mingling of these groups may well have produced the early culture of the Germanic tribes. During the Northern Bronze Age there was a flourishing of culture throughout much of what is today western Europe, but the peoples in the north were eventually outstripped, possibly as a result of climatic change, by the developing civilization of the Hallstatt provinces to the south and later by the emergence and expansion of the Celts across central and western Europe during the subsequent Iron Age.
