Page 191 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

152 The Chariots

ruled over the original farming communities of the Downlands,
and even over the “native” traders of the north and Midlands.
Under the double impact of beaker and battle-ax peoples
even the communities of passage-grave builders along the coasts
of Europe begin to lose their identity. It is over four hundred
years since they were first established as trading posts along the
shipping routes from the Mediterranean, and they are no longer
consciously the foreign agents of a higher civilization. Though
they still retain occasional contact by sea with their sister com­
munities, they are now, in fact, groups of farmers, sailors, and
fishermen assimilated to the peoples among whom they originally
settled. Their religion is still very much alive, and new passage­
graves are still being built. But on the coasts of northern Spain
and northwest France the people buried in these communal
graves are often beaker people, whereas in England, Scotland,
and even occasionally in Ireland, they are of the hybrid beaker
invaders. In Denmark and south Sweden the process of assimila­
tion has gone further. Here the battle-ax people have been in the
country for three centuries, and the two strains are no longer
separate. Passage-graves have given way to stone cists, which in
effect are the single graves of the battle-ax folk translated into the
stone construction of the passage-grave people.
But if the builders of the stone graves have assimilated
beaker and battle-ax customs and material culture, the invaders
have equally assimilated the art of building in stone. It is at about
this date that the beaker people of England take over the sanctu­
ary of Stonehenge and build within the circular rampart and
ditch of the original founders a temple of stone. Some two hun­
dred monoliths, brought by boat from the mountains of south
Wales, are now erected in a double circle in the center of the
rampart. The sun had always played an important part in the
ceremonies that took place in Stonehenge, as the placing of the
Hele stone shows. But whether the sun was actually worshipped
there, or whether it merely acted as clock and calendar for
ceremonies in honor of other gods, we cannot say. The pits dug
within the rampart and the burial in one of them of human
remains would, in fact, suggest that it was rather a cult of the
earth mother or the underworld that celebrated its rites there.