ABSTRACT
Their conquest of a land where the spiritual and social tradition of megalithic culture must have had such a firm hold can hardly have been easy of adjustment. To dominate while incorporating so little of that tradition must have involved religious and intermarriage problems and all the stress of a clash of cultures; also the land was small and densely populated, while yet commanding easy access to other lands oversea. It need thus be no surprise to find evidence for a
secession, within a generation or two of the initial conquest, over to South-West Britain, whither the Beaker people had seceded, we believe for some similar reason (p. 266), nearly two centuries before. For the evidence is unmistakable. Spreading out over the Wessex chalk from the entry-port already signalized (p. 266) at the Christchurch river-mouths, a series of richly furnished graves, under round barrows as distinctive in their way as the Breton caims, forms the most brilliant memorial of the Early Bronze Age in all Britain. The barrow-type so introduced is the bell-barrow, surrounded by a berm and embanked ditch, which became varied as the disc-barrow, with a small central burial-tump surrounded by a greatly enlarged berm which the embanked ditch in turn encloses. And the leading bell-barrow burials, as in Brittany sometimes inhumations but more often-and for the first time in the British Bronze Age-cremations, and as in Brittany with the deposit sometimes laid on a plank of wood, are accompanied by triangular bronze daggers initially identical with the earliest Breton type. Furthermore, in two famous cases the hilts of these, at Normanton in Wilts of wood, and at Hammeldon Down in Devon of amber, are studded with exactly the pointille ornament of tiny gold nails just noticed in Brittany. Flanged as well as flat bronze axes appear also: occasionally the barbed-and-tanged flint arrowheads reproduce the Breton type; and while not more than one or two pottery vessels recall the Breton handled forms, two wholly new types of ritual pottery augment the case for the culture’s origin in Brittany with a most significant implication. These are the initial members of the small-sized series known as ‘ incensecups’ or pygmy cups, which runs a long course through the sepulchral practice of the British Bronze Age: one, called from its surface-covering of applied knobs the grape-cup,1 reproduces a type evolved in the later Chassey-Breton ceramic across the Channel and adopted into ritual use there in the megalithic tombs, while the other, known from the Wiltshire finding-place of the finest specimen as the Aldboume cup,2 corresponds in its burnished surface and fine white-inlaid incised and pointille ornament very closely to the later Chassey
and Breton ‘ vase-supports’ of which the same is true (p. 314), and also preserves some memory of their form in its peculiar waisted, splay-rimmed shape, and the perforations which usually pierce its sides. The precise ritual use of these cups is unknown, but their preservation of the ornament of their Breton counterparts at once emphasizes the evidently magical character (p. 18$) which alone can explain its otherwise inexplicable duration from the third so far into the second millennium, and gives a clue to the situation which brought about the Wessex culture’s secession from Brittany. For this megalithic magic was just what the invaders who remained behind there would have nothing to do with, and one can easily see that those of the invading caste who-perhaps in the second generation-stooped to intercourse with the dreaded superstition of their subjects, might be driven out to seek their fortune in a less rigorous land. And a date about 1700 B.C. for this well suits the situation in Britain.
