8 Facts About Bronze Age Britain

While the Bronze Age was buzzing in the Mediterranean and Middle East, it’s easy to forget Bronze Age Britain. Ancient history’s middle child is too often ignored in favour of its better known siblings, the Stone and Iron ages.

But so much of what we think of as British today comes directly from the Bronze Age! So buckle up, because it’s time to show Bronze Age Britain some love.

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When bronze finally came to Britain, it arrived with a culture historians have dubbed the Beaker People. Identified by their distinctive bell-shaped pottery beakers, they spread from central Europe and the Eurasian steppe, arriving in Britain from around 2100BC. They almost completely replaced the previous population of Neolithic farmers, however they didn’t completely erase them from history.

For example, while Neolithic farmers built Stonehenge, the Beaker People continued to use it, rebuilding and expanding it right up to around 1500BC.

teaching idea

Using air drying clay, plasticine or play dough, children can make and decorate their own beaker. Start with a thumb pot and then work out the clay into the correct shape. Decorate with clay tools or toothpicks.

A recent DNA study has shown that the Bronze Age might just be responsible for the skin, hair and eye colour traditionally associated with the British. The pre-Beaker Neolithic populations had skin, hair and eyes that were likely to be olive to brown, whereas the Beaker People were likely to have much lighter versions.

This seems to be from the mixing of three distinct groups of people, each contributing something to the now-common Northern European colouration; Western/European hunter-gatherers (blue eyes), Anatolian/Middle Eastern farmers (light skin), and Eastern hunter-gatherers, (blonde hair).

teaching idea

Look at skin colours from around the world. Why do native populations from different places have different skin colour? What would be the benefit of having darker or lighter skin depending on where you lived? For older children, introduce the idea of dominant and recessive genes and how genetic traits are passed between parents and children.

Almost every European Language, including those native to Britain, (English, Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, Cornish and Manx) comes from a single Bronze Age language.

Called Proto-Indo-European by language historians, it was originally spoken by the people living on the Eurasian Steppe, just north of the Caspian Sea, around 5000 years ago. Their language spread over thousands of years to eventually encompass an area from India to Ireland.

This is why, today, similar words can be found across languages as far removed as Icelandic and Iranian. These languages split and developed extensively over time and distance, so they are no longer mutually intelligible, but it’s incredible to think that they all came from one small Bronze Age tribe.

While English wouldn’t develop until the Anglo Saxon invasion, Britain was still speaking an Indo-European language in the Bronze Age, that linguists today call Proto Celtic. It would eventually give rise to the Irish, Scottish, and Welsh languages still spoken today.

teaching idea

Look at a language map of Europe. What family of languages does English belong to? How far back do you have to go to find the common ancestor of both the English and Celtic languages?

Do any children or teachers in your class/school speak more than one language? Or perhaps their parents do? Are they Indo-European languages? Where do they fit in on the tree? Make a language map for your class.

You can buy a copy of Minna Sundberg’s amazing image above, here.

While humans have drunk animal milk since at least the stone age, it wasn’t until the Bronze Age that the majority of people in Britain had the ability to digest lactose!

Lactose intolerance is unpleasant but not usually fatal, so not being able to digest it wouldn’t have a major effect on survival. However, Britain must have been a much more pleasant place to live once people stopped suffering the effects!

It’s thought that the Beaker People introduced the genes necessary for digesting milk, as they were descended from the herding cultures of the Eurasian Steppe, for whom milk was an important food source.

teaching idea

Investigate the Bronze Age diet. What kinds of foods would they have had access to? What would they not? How would diets differ depending on where you lived, and how you got food? What would a hunter-gatherer diet look like compared to a herder or a farmer? Who would be the healthiest?

Bronze is an alloy of copper and either tin or arsenic. While arsenic was used by some ancient cultures it’s a bad idea for obvious reasons! Tin became the go-to metal for alloying with copper, and Britain held some of the richest tin deposits in Europe.

Scientists have analysed tin ingots from the Bronze Age, that show Cornish tin was being traded as far as Israel. The small, cold, damp islands on the edge of the known world were central to the supply of the European and Middle Eastern bronze industry.

teaching idea

Look at metals and alloys. Investigate how mixing things together changes their properties. Try this easy experiment from the Royal Society of Chemistry, which shows children the effects of alloying through the use of plasticine and sand.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Bronze was the first metal, considering that the preceding age is called the Stone Age. As bronze is an alloy, it makes sense that copper and tin were both being used separately before people discovered that mixing them gave a stronger, more durable result.

However, the earliest metal to be worked was likely gold. Gold forms nice natural nuggets that are easy to find, smelt and work, and of course gives a shiny, long-lasting, and corrosion-free result. Gold is a very soft metal and therefore is no good for weapons or tools, but was used extensively for jewellery and high-status decorative items like the Mold Cape.

This incredible ceremonial cape was beaten from a single ingot of pure gold. It was found in a Bronze Age burial site in Mold, Wales, and now resides in the British Museum.

teaching idea

Make a Mold Cape of your own with card or sugar paper. Have children measure each other around the shoulders and then cut out each half of the cape, allowing 2cm all around for the seam. Stick the two halves together with tape, glue or staples, (leaving a hole for the head) and then paint with yellow or gold paint. Once dried, decorate with markers.

The Bronze Age also brought the wheel to Britain. As far as we know, the wheel was first used in the early Bronze Age in Eurasia and the Middle East. The earliest wheel discovered in Britain dates to around 1300BC and was found at Flag Fen near Peterborough.

It’s crazy to think that something we take for granted as being essential to our way of life, didn’t even exist for the majority of human history. The Stone Age lasted 3 million years and yet the wheel wasn’t invented until just 4000 years ago!

Teaching idea

Reinvent the wheel! Give children a selection of thick and thin cardboard, string, pencils, rulers, scissors, lolly sticks, small wooden dowels (or pencils) for axels, wooden stirrers, tape, glue and rubber bands. In small groups, children should try to build a model cart. This is not as easy as it might seem! Children will have to think about how to attach the wheel to the axel, how to keep it stable, and how strong it will need to be to carry the weight of the cart. Once children have built their carts, they can test them by pushing or pulling them along with string, and experimenting with how much load they can bear.

For most of human history, horses were just another wild prey animal to be hunted for meat and skins. But in the early Bronze Age, the Indo-European tribes of Eurasia went from hunting to herding, and eventually to domesticating horses for riding and pulling carts.

The technological revolution of wheeled vehicles, and horses to pull them, allowed the Indo-European tribes to cross the vast grasslands of the steppe and spread across Europe and Asia, bringing with them their languages, culture and genetic code. Not only that, but horses were much faster and more agile than oxen or donkeys, so they could be used in battle to pull chariots. This gave a huge advantage in war and the conquest of these new lands.

Horses were valuable creatures. This can be seen in the Bronze Age practice of including horses in high-status burials, which continued right up to the Viking age. Horses were so important that cults grew up around them, and they can be found in Bronze Age art from statues to hillsides.

Teaching Idea

Create your own hill figure using foam sheet printing. Have children design and print their own version of the Uffington horse. See here for a simple tutorial on foam sheet printing.