Page 134 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

....luch mciviuuiuiie convoys me south British settle­
ments keep in close touch with events in Europe. While the old

men in the Pennines deplore the recession in the ax trade, the new
generation of their competitors is beyond the Rhine, demonstrat­

ing the superiority in close fighting of the bronze dagger over the
stone battle-ax which is the traditional weapon of the cattle

herders there. On the Rhine and in Holland, as in England, the
beaker trading posts are by now a score of years established,

and there too a new generation is growing up, taking its tradi­
tions, and often its blood, both from the Spanish merchants and

from the horsemen who, generations ago, had wandered out

from the Russian steppes. Many of the young men growing up
here are looking to the untouched markets and reputed mineral

wealth and fertile soil of the north of England and Scotland. And
the younger generation of northern England is prepared to wel­

come them. For they see no future in the manufacture of stone
axes or in subsistence hunting and herding. The future lies

with the metal industry, and this only the beaker people are at

this time able to develop. Unlike their metal-less neighbors in
Scandinavia, who are now abandoning the battle-ax and imi­

tating the new close-fighting weapon, the bronze dagger, in flint,
the men of northern England are already looking forward to the

day when they will be able to produce, and perhaps even ex­

port, genuine bronze daggers of their own.

The ax factory of the Langdale valley, like those of Graig
Lwyd in Wales and Tievebulliagh in northern Ireland, are facts,

and the ways of life of the manufacturers are well attested. The
areas to which the axes from each factory were distributed

have been identified with certainty by microscopic examination
of museum specimens. The earliest form of Stonehenge has been

determined by recent excavation. We know little, on the other
hand, about the ritual associated with its first construction, the

religion it was meant to serve, or indeed the purpose of the
earliest monuments of the henge type. We are in fact on sha y

ground in any discussion of the beliefs of the prehistoric Euro