Page 133 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

nredict gloomily that it will not be long before bronze is there to
Lv Indeed when they return—in reduced numbers—to France

for the market the following year, they discover that the beaker
folk have replaced their tents by a permanent timber trading

post. The Spaniards’ wives and families have come up to join

them, and the post has a disquieting air of permanence. There­
after tlie ax traders stop visiting France altogether.

But next year a party of beaker people arrives in a chartered
boat on the south coast of England. And within a very few years

a network of permanent trading posts covers the whole of south­
ern England. There can be little doubt that the expansion is part

of an organized trading campaign, with regular caravans running

by stages all the way from central Spain, bringing the bronze and
other wares to the outposts, and returning with the goods from

the north. Indeed, the beaker people make no secret of their wide­
spread organization. They boast of their connection with north

Africa, from which many of them come, and of the trade routes
all along the African coast from Egypt. And they tell how

their people have spread their network far to the east, into Italy

and the basin of the Danube and the Rhine valley.
But for all their wealth and organization they are not a

standoffish people. They have clearly come to stay, and around
their trading stations small farmsteads and neat fields begin to

spread. They have many skills, and in particular the bronze­
smiths among them can do more than cast the new metal. It is

they who first recognize the presence of copper ores in England
and identify, with great excitement, outcroppings of tin in

Cornwall. And they encourage the local chieftains to mine these
new riches. Clearly they are bringing wealth to the country, and

their popularity increases accordingly. It is cemented by an in­

creasing number of marriages between the dark handsome
southerners and the tall Downland farmer families. And as the

years pass and the men who had seen the Stonehenge embank­
ment raised grow old, a new generation begins to grow up around

uLo±r settlements- over the Dows small round

egm to appear, piled above the graves of men who had