ABSTRACT
The answer is nothing less than the invasion down the Elbe of a new and warlike people. Their seizure of the fat lands of Holstein explains the Huns’-bed folk of the barren Ems-land and Drenthe heaths as largely a refugee population, even more isolated than their Walternienburg cousins inland to the south east from the centres of West Baltic civilization. Pushing on, the invaders established themselves thickly in South Jutland, and spread down the centre of the peninsula, cutting off a remnant of the natives in Vendsyssel at its northern end, and squeezing out the main body from their coastal homes eastward upon the Danish islands. The stages of their advance corre spond exacdy to the curtailment of the native culture just described: for a coastal settlement-trend they substituted an inland one, incorporating perhaps the remnants of the old
Gudenaa hunters (pp. 60-1); and though they might violate native megalithic tombs for the burial of their own dead, their characteristic burial-rite was something quite different, namely, single-interment in a contracted position in an earth-dug grave, often purified by fire, and covered as a rule by a bowl-shaped round barrow. The Single-grave people by their invasion of Schleswig-Holstein and Jutland made a clean break in the continuity of the Northern Neolithic; the history of the ensuing centuries is that of the progressive welding together of invaders and invaded in what became the unitary Bronze Age civilization of the North, but at first the cleavage was absolute, as is well shown by the contrast in archaeological material. The first single-graves contain three typical objects: a big beaker-pot with an ovoid body and a spreading neck decorated with plain horizontal cord-impressions,1 a thickbutted flint axe2 with a slightly lopsided cutting-edge, and a stone shaft-hole battle-axe 3 with a down-curved expansion of the blade and a slightly less drooping lobe-ended butt. A spheroid stone mace-head and an amber ring or button may complete the warrior’s equipment. In succeeding generations, the practice of secondary burial in existing barrows produced a sequence, above the original earth-dug ‘ bottom-graves’, of ‘ ground-graves’ sunk through the barrow into the groundsurface, and ‘ upper-’ and ‘ top-graves’ above again ; and the types in each show progressive development, the beakers to a bent S-profile (sometimes inbent again at the rim), and then by truncation of the body to a mortar or top-hat form,4 and the battle-axes first by reduction to symmetry of the drooping blade and butt, and then, with a buttward shift of the shaft-hole, to simpler and finally much-straightened types of weapon. We shall find this final stage coinciding with the end of the passage-grave period in the adjacent islands about 1750 B .C ., but the early phase of that period which caught the first impact of invasion may be dated roundly at 2000 in Jutland, and rather earlier in Holstein, so that we have to find a source somewhere up the Elbe whence the movement will have started about 2100.
