ABSTRACT
The distribution of flat axes in the British Isles is thickest in Ireland, especially North-East Ireland, and spreads over South and East Scotland and North-East England, Wales, and much of the south. The simple primitive type, however early its beginnings (p. 190), occurs occasionally in Early Bronze Age associations,1 but the peculiarly Irish development of well-formed axes with engraved surface-omament is known from a barrow-find at Willerby2 to be as early as a quite early stage of the Beaker culture in Yorkshire, which the trade in them must have reached over the Irish Sea and the Aire gap across the Pennines, while further north a secondary centre for their distribution is attested by the quantity of specimens, and also of stone moulds for their manufacture, on the coasts of North-East Scotland. And directly across the North Sea there is an answering concentration of similar axes in Denmark and South Sweden, where various associated finds show that the amber-traders of the Stone-cist culture acquired them as they also acquired the rather different version of the type current in the Aunjetitz civilization of Central Europe. And not only this: metal-workers in due course actually settled in South Scandinavian territory and produced the derivative type best known from the remarkable hoard found at Pile in South Sweden,3 in which examples are associated with armlet, axe, and dagger types, including a bronze-hilted dagger, imported from the Aunjetitz province. If the first metal-workers came from Ireland or Britain, as the Pile axe-type suggests, Central Europe turned out to be their best source of raw material, and therewith soon the Aunjetitz form of axe with cast flanges (p. 301), which with its North German variant the Falkenwalde type4 was reaching them in the period represented by the Pile hoard, issued in a Scandinavian imitation of its own, named from a noted find in Holstein the Tinsdahl type.5 And the Tinsdahl hoard contained also, with bronze ingot torques and globular-headed pins, a type of weapon new to these
pages, the socketed bronze spearhead, which equates its date with the very end of the Early Bronze Age in Central Europe, towards 1500 B.C. In approximately the century before that date, then, these influences from the metal-using lands to the west and south at last engendered a true Bronze civilization in Northern Europe. Its flowering thus followed to coincide not with the Early, but the Middle Bronze Age of those lands, and before we follow so far, there is more to be said of their Early Bronze Age commerce and its influence upon the North while the age of the stone cist and the flint dagger was there still running its course.
