Page 188 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

the original forest hunters. They are known by the cumbersome
name of the “globular amphorae culture,” and in the same way
as the descendants of the hunters in England they had adapted

their way of life to trade. From their home in central Germany
they spread out over much of Europe, trading in flint, in amber,
and even occasionally in copper. They were also great pig­
keepers.
It was on the Rhine and the upper Danube that the Indo-
European speakers came into contact with the beaker folk, men

of another language but equal determination. And there, where
their cultures met and clashed, it was the beaker people who
triumphed.

In the last two hundred years the beaker people had spread
out from central Spain, reaching as far as north Italy, Poland,
and Scandinavia. They were small, dark, and roundheaded, and
they traveled apparently in incredibly small groups, of a dozen
or so. The fact that their pottery, including the drinking cups

after which they are called, shows no variation at all throughout
their range suggests that they traveled fast, and that they kept
up communication between the extremes of their outposts.
They were in fact not settlers, interested in finding a home and

staying there. Their way of life involved movement, for it seems
clear that they were essentially traders. They were, undoubtedly
quite consciously and deliberately, introducing the Bronze Age
into central and northern Europe.

Spain had for centuries been in close contact with the
bronze-using civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean. Ships
from Troy and Cyprus, from Crete and probably from Egypt,
traded regularly to the south coast of Spain, as well as to Sicily,

south Italy, and Sardinia; and in all these lands the original
farming communities had adopted a Bronze-Age economy, at
first importing copper and later exploiting their own and neigh­
boring countries’ ores. They had also adopted the religion of the

east, with its communal stone-built grave chambers. Spain, with
its rich lodes of copper, lead, and silver, had been particularly
well equipped to achieve self-sufficiency in metal production, and
now this production demanded markets in its turn, and a second­

ary expansion from this center into the northern lands resulted.