The Warriors of Britain's Bronze Age Revolution

in 2002 archaeologists discovered the burial of a man who died in about 2 300 BC at Amesbury in Wiltshire England this was about three miles away from the famous ancient site of Stonehenge the grave dates to the early bronze age in Britain a time of great change that brought new people to these islands from northern Europe with them came new technologies like metal working in gold and copper new cultural practices involving the ritual drinking of alcoholic beverages and new burial Traditions involving special individuals placed in Graves with objects Like Flint arrowheads or copper knives and most commonly the special Pottery vessels that archaeologists call Bell beakers most of these billbica era Graves contain few burial Goods but this one is different it contained the richest array of items ever found in a grave from this period in Britain he was buried with five beakers three copper knives and two small gold artifacts the earliest gold objects known from Britain he also had 16 Flint arrowheads and two Stone wrist guards to protect his wrists from the whip of the bowstring the arrowheads were likely attached to shafts that long ago rotted away along with presumably his wooden bow this archery equipment is what led to him being named The Amesbury Archer the astonishing number and richness of the fines also led to the British media calling him the king of Stonehenge this kind of Hyperbole and oversimplification is easily mocked but could it actually be true so who was this man where did he come from and why was he buried here did he really have anything to do with the building of Stonehenge or ruling over the area and what was happening here and in the rest of Britain at this time of immense change this is the story of The Amesbury Archer foreign [Music] 2002 archaeologists working for Wessex archeology were Excavating on the outskirts of Amesbury prior to the construction of a new Housing Development and a new school there was a Roman era Cemetery in that area and that's all they were really expecting to find but in one corner of the site there were two amorphous blobs they could see with the naked eye two patches of Earth that were of a slightly different color and quality to the surrounding ground the geophysical scans of the site hadn't shown anything special about these blobs and they didn't seem to be related to the Roman Cemetery because the size shape and orientation didn't match up it was thought possible they could be ancient tree throws where the root ball of a tree had pulled up a patch of Earth that was later filled in but on the last Friday before the MayDay bank holiday weekend they began Excavating the blobs soon they discovered fragments of belbika pottery vessels giving away that this was in fact a Bronze Age burial and not long after that one of the excavators saw the glint of gold it's special to find gold in a burial from any era but it's extremely rare for the early Bronze Age they were quite rightly thrilled but their audible Joy are perhaps alerted local dog walkers that something special and valuable had been discovered they knew they could not stop and go home for the weekend leaving the find of a lifetime unprotected and so they continued the excavation deep into the night they were not equipped for this and so the headlights of their vehicles were turned towards the burial and from within the pool of yellow light they carefully excavated and recorded to the sound of engines turning over in the darkness Beyond the early Bronze Age Era in Britain has traditionally been known as the bell Beaker or just the beaker era because after about 2500 BC a new kind of burial tradition begins to show up in the landscape quite different to anything from the Neolithic period before it in Britain and Ireland during the Neolithic there were different ways of enduring the dead in different places and times there were various structures we call Long Burrows chambered tombs or dolmens passage Graves and so on usually built with stone usually containing remains from multiple people and generally without much in the way of burial Goods less well-known perhaps are Neolithic Traditions involving wooden burial platforms for exposing the dead as well as cremation whereas a classic billbica era burial involves a single individual most commonly an adult male buried in the ground with a single Bell Baker pot he would be buried on his side with his knees up almost like he was sleeping he might have a flint tanged and Barbed Arrowhead a stone wrist guard or a copper dagger over his grave there was usually raised a circular Mound making the sight of the burial visible in the landscape now that would be the classic Beaker burial but actually there is variation across Britain in this era with women and children also buried burials with more than one person different body positions different grave Goods or none at all and so on The Amesbury Archer was buried laying on his left side with bent legs the rectangular grave cut is thought to have been lined with timber in fact it may have formed a Timber structure that eventually collapsed crushing and scattering some of the burial Goods below there was no surviving burial mound over that grave and if there was one it must have been plowed and eroded flat over the Millennia it does happen so that's fairly standard but this burial is so special because he was buried with an unusual abundance of objects presumably these were meant to accompany him for use in the afterlife by his forearm there was a stone wrist guard which would have been fastened around his wrist to protect his arm from the whip of the bow chord when shooting an arrow these wrist guards were functional but could also be beautiful and were surely objects associated with the identity of an Archer and that of an adult man and perhaps the identity of a warrior beside that wrist guard was a bone pin that would have been used to fasten a piece of clothing such as a cloak one of the three copper knives was also tucked in close to his chest and so was perhaps worn there in a sheath it's likely these tools or perhaps weapons were not only worn so they could be quickly accessed but so that they were also prominently displayed like the wrist guards as a symbol of the man's status by his face were two of the beaker pots a red deer spatula used for working flints Boar's tusks a cache of flints and another smaller tanged copper knife it's thought that some of these items the Flint and spatula at least would have been kept in a bag long rotted into nothing of course those flints included scrapers arrowheads and blanks for making more arrows and there was a piece of iron pyrite to use for making fire behind his back was another Beaker more Boar's tusks and another cache of Flint tools and flakes next to them was a cushion Stone like a small portable Anvil that would have been set in Timber that he would have used for light metal working the Flint working and metal working tools show that this was truly the long transition period between the ages of stone and metal in fact Flint working was still a widespread skill But Metal Workers would have been far rarer from all over the grave were those 16 Barbed and tanged arrowheads but they were mostly found higher up in the soil above what would have been the floor of the Grave the excavators believed this was because they had originally been attached to Arrow shafts and perhaps propped at Angles against his body they might originally have been clustered together perhaps even in a quiver but were scattered when the timber burial chamber collapsed months or years after the burial it's also possible arrows were scattered over him by mourners after he was laid to rest what purpose the four boars tusks served isn't known two were found by his shoulder near the cushion Stone and it suggested they were used for polishing metal supporting this idea is the fact that they're found in other Beaker burials associated with metal workers or maybe they were decorative or functioned as ritual items as totems or amulets or perhaps as hunting trophies Wars tusks are found with Beaker archers too and I like the idea that actually they formed the rigid top of a leather quiver perhaps the Shale ring was for securing the quiver strap and the bone pin was for fastening a protective flap on the quiver too anyway two more Beaker puts were down by his feet by his knees there was another Stone wrist guard the third copper knife and a Shale belt ring and two very small gold objects the fact that these items were down by his knees suggests perhaps that they weren't worn on his body perhaps he owned them but wasn't wearing them on his burial costume perhaps they were prized possessions or War booty carried in another bag placed with him perhaps they were placed in his grave individually by the mourners as gifts to accompany him in his journey onwards maybe the belt ring was looped into a leather belt now rotted along with the fastenings for the wrist guard the wooden handle and leather Scabbard of the knife and whatever the gold ornaments were wrapped around these are apparently the oldest securely dated gold artifacts found in Britain but what were they well we don't know for sure although there are ones like them from other graves in fact there were some found in the grave right beside this one in a burial dubbed the Archer's companion I'll talk more about him later but he had two of these ornaments inside his mouth they might have been placed there by those who buried him but they could have been on his body and settled down into his mouth as rotted you see these ornaments sometimes described as earrings worn wrapped around the top part of the ear other suggestions are that they were decorative pieces attached to clothing straps wrapped around platted cords perhaps but they're increasingly seen as being hair ornaments wrapped around long braids and that seems most likely to me it may explain why the Archer's companion had two inside the jaw if they were worn on braids hanging down beside his face although it could be they were worn on a cord around his neck perhaps they were worn on a braided beard or mustache but if they were hair ornaments why were those of the Archer himself found down by his knees well he might not have been wearing them they could have been prized possessions carried in a bag of valuables but what if they were on the braids of someone else who cut them off and laid them in the grave as a precious and personal gift to the deceased or maybe along with a knife wrist guard and belt loop they were booty taken in war could they have been attached to the breeds of a worthy enemy the scalp of a powerful Chieftain defeated in battle probably not but who knows the idea that he took part in fighting and that Warrior Hood was part of his social identity might be undermined by the fact that he had a long-term physical disability examination of his skeleton showed that he was aged between 35 and 45 in the prime of his life when he died and that he was strongly built however you can see that he had an abscess on his jaw that must have been horrifically uncomfortable but even more serious was that he was missing his left kneecap how long he had been missing it is hard to say but it must have been some years before he died maybe he suffered the injury in battle but there's no evidence to show how it happened he might have been missing his kneecap most of his life the condition of his bones show that he would have had a severe limp needing to swing his left leg out to the side as he walked for years his left leg becoming withered and his right strong he also had an infection in his left knee when he died and yet he had walked and ore was carried by boats cart or horse from the land he grew up in all the way to Southern Britain by testing this specific composition of some of the chemicals in his teeth researchers were able to tell that he spent his childhood somewhere different to where he died when your tooth enamel forms in your childhood it absorbs elements from the Fuji wheat and the water you drink and the water especially carries signatures from the landscape it ran through and analysis on the Amesbury Archer suggests he grew up in either Scandinavia or more likely around the Alps so what on Earth was he doing here and why was he buried so close to Stonehenge the Bronze Age in Britain and Ireland spans about 1700 years from around 2500 BC to around 800 BC the first part of the era between 2500 and 2150 BC is starting to be called the British charcoalithic because that's when copper artifacts like those found with the M3 Archer were in use along with stone tools and after 2150 or so we see the widespread adoption of the copper tin alloy we call bronze metalworking technology was utilized long before 2500 BC across the English Channel in northern and western Europe and the technology was brought to Britain by people of the Bell Beaker culture that's the name archaeologists give to the assemblage of artifacts and burial Customs that spread widely in Europe after about 2800 BC they also call it the Bell Beaker phenomenon or complex because it's not exactly the same everywhere all the time its cultural Origins are debated but its Associated genetically with the largely male Western step-herder ancestry coming from the pontic step after around 3000 BC or so mostly men but women also moved westwards from their step homelands in Eastern Europe into Central Europe giving rise to new societies these are described archaeologically as the corded Ware culture or as part of the corded Ware Horizon genetically they were generally speaking a mixture of those step heard of men with women from central European societies like the globular and foray culture the corded Ware culture is defined mostly by its burial Customs usually individual burials with grave Goods like Stone battle axes and pottery decorated with cord impressions these Graves were covered with burial mounds a few centuries later a descendant group in Western Europe developed a new set of beliefs and cultural practices that we see expressed physically in the burial customs of the belbika culture the pot themselves were clearly an important part of the burial riots and no doubts of the Living World too it's been suggested they were involved in ritual alcohol consumption perhaps in the form of beer or Mead or even milk these new burial Customs soon spread widely even eastwards into what had been the corded Ware culture lands it wasn't just a cultural expansion either the spread of the Bell Beaker complex is also associated with the spread of male lineages of the r1b wire hapler group this is just a genetic marker that is inherited from father to son which makes it useful for archaeogeneticists in tracking migrations and lines of descent the r1b male lineage was incredibly successful and is still the most frequently occurring male lineage in Western Europe archaeologists and geneticists don't really speak in these terms but it looks to me like a specific tribe or Chieftain of related males became very successful at spreading geographically and at fathering more sons who did the same over the generations and that's what happened in Britain and Ireland after about 2500 BC Bill Baker groups of men and women especially from the lower Rhine region moved into these islands of course bringing their ways of life and Technology with them and the old Neolithic ways of life came to an end but how did this happen well it's still not really clear in the early part of the 20th century it was reasoned that this represented the conquest of the Neolithic inhabitants by a race of Bill Beeker folk from the continent with their Superior technology it was widely accepted that the differences in material culture represented distinct ethnicities with distinct Heritage and language this kind of reasoning was supported by contrasting the different skull morphology of the two races found in neolithic tombs versus Bronze Age burial mounds by the end of the 20th century however it became accepted that the Bell Beaker phenomenon had in fact been adopted by the Neolithic inhabitants by a process of cultural diffusion the Neolithic Elites adopting the beaker technology beliefs and burial Customs from across the channel there was no evidence of any widespread violence from this time and no signs of depopulation that would suggest plagues or genocide in fact there was considerable continuity between the two eras special cult sites like The Monuments in Salisbury Plain including Stonehenge often continued to be utilized Neolithic Pottery types continue to be made into the bill Beaker period and it was thought possible that metal working was adopted before the Bell Beaker phenomenon developed there's a huge Neolithic style settlement near Stonehenge known as durrington walls that was built sometime around 2500 BC that would have required a vast amount of Woodworking and yet out of tens of thousands of Flint fragments uncovered by archaeologists there only one was from a stone ax this suggests it was built with copper axes evidence supporting the cultural diffusionist model but 21st century archaeogenetics has shown that actually Not only was there a migration of Bill bigger people from the continent it had a far greater genetic impact than anyone imagined a 2018 study showed that from 2500 BC there was about a 90 replacement of Neolithic farmer genes in Britain on the face of it this looks like it could only have come about due to a sudden and almost complete collapse of the Neolithic population perhaps they were struck by a terrible plague or famine and the bell Beaker people walked in to take over the devastated lands or there must have been a sudden genocide after all but actually the apparent suddenness is somewhat to do with sampling bias the Neolithic human remains tested came from Neolithic burials while the bill Beaker ones came from belbika burials clearly the arrival of the new people disrupted the Neolithic Elites burial Customs but that doesn't mean all the Neolithic people suddenly died in fact the early Bill beakers sometimes show quite a lot of British Neolithic farmer ancestry showing there were recent ancestors over the coming centuries the amount of British Neolithic ancestry in the population homogenizes to around 10 percent of the genes so then some Neolithic people were still around during this transition era were there Neolithic settlements holding out well we know there were actually as we have evidence of this from orkney and were there Neolithic wives taken by Bill Beaker men were Neolithic people taken as slaves perhaps all of these happened so where does the Amesbury Archer fit into all of this well radiocarbon dating shows that he was buried around 2400 to 2200 BC which is the early Beaker period and we know that he spent his childhood on the continent and although the Alpine region is further than other Bill Beaker people came it is within the belbika region and his wirehapa group showing his paternal ancestry was r1b so he may have been one of the first Bell Beaker generations to come to Britain perhaps he was part of a large group who moved here after their relatives had established their home of course it's even possible he was born in Britain and only went to the Alpine region as a boy before returning to the land of his birth at some point before his death perhaps by his lifetime his people didn't even think of Britain and Mainland Europe as meaningfully different if he died about 50 or 100 years or more after the Bell Beaker people established dominance over Southern Britain then all of it might have been his homeland all land belonging to his people his forefathers and the network of tribal relationships that kept Western Europe United by Blood and tradition the men of these societies seem to have been quite mobile during their lives perhaps boys were sent to be fostered for a time with distant cousins perhaps the ancient chorius tradition saw groups of youths ejected from their chiefdoms going to other lands before returning to be welcomed back as men we get an indication of this network of family Connections in examination of the burial that accompanied that of the Archer named the Archer's companion his grave Was Nothing Like Us richly adorned but he did have those two gold hair ornaments he was about 25 to 30 when he died and examination of his curtains showed that he shared a very unusual morphology in the bones of his foot with the Archer himself this was a genetic abnormality so minor that they wouldn't even have been aware of it but as it is something inherited it strongly suggests the Archer and the companion were related genetic tests show that they weren't related to the first or second degree so they weren't father and son or grandfather and Grandson actually there are r1b subclades are different but they could have been cousins to one degree or another whether they died and were buried at the same time or if one was buried first and the other years later we're not sure because although the radiocarbon testing for both shows the same date range it's not precise enough to pin it down any further they could be separated by up to six Generations isotope testing of the companion shows that he grew up in Britain but spent part of his childhood elsewhere suggestions include Wales the Midlands Scotland and even Continental Europe perhaps the Archer's companion was given the great honor of being buried beside his famous great uncle or something like that a year after the discovery of the Archer and the companion another early Beaker gravesite was discovered very close by it was a collective burial of at least nine people all male as far as we can tell and they're known as the Boston Bowman like The Amesbury Archer they were buried in a Timber tomb and the radiocarbon dates spanned 2500 to 2200 BC broadly contemporary and perhaps even earlier than the Archer the tomb was likely opened repeatedly over a period of a few decades at most for the additional burials to be made grave Goods included a Boar's tusks eight beakers and arrowheads which led to the name the Boston Bowman this looks like a family or Clan tomb from some of the earliest Beaker people to establish themselves here so the Archer the companion and the Boston bowmen were buried a few miles from Stonehenge but what is the significance of that isn't Stonehenge part of the megalithic tradition of Atlantic Europe and built by the Neolithic Farmers that the Archer and his people replaced well it's not that simple the monument wasn't created in one go instead it was developed in stages over centuries the initial creation of a circular ditch and Bank although there was activity around here earlier dates to around 3000 BC and so it was done by the Neolithic people and there were earlier Neolithic long Burrows and curses monuments around here it was already a special landscape there were natural landscape features at the Stonehenge site that linked the heavens and the Earth giving it special importance that was enhanced by the ritual enclosure of the space it was also used for Mortuary rituals with excarnation Platforms in the center and it was used as a cemetery presumably the power of the site linking Heaven and Earth helped facilitate the transition of The Souls of the dead into the Afterlife but it wasn't until about 2500 BC the Stonehenge was built into something more like the famous form it has today when the huge sarson Stones were erected with those iconic lintels joining them presumably this was one of the last great building projects by the Neolithic people perhaps it was even stimulated by the arrival and conflict of the new people [Music] it's possible of course it was the new people themselves he built this stage they certainly continued to develop Stonehenge after this date in various fits and starts over the next few centuries because the Amesbury Archer was buried around this time you'll see it suggested that he was linked in some way to the Planning and Building of the monument radiocarbon dates often can't be precise enough to say for sure especially when there's only a couple samples taken but it seems likely he lived a bit later on however the extraordinary richness of his burial suggests he was an important man in life and his relative proximity to the place does imply a special relationship to it intriguingly isotope testing of the Boston Bowman suggests they could have spent some of their youth in Wales which is of course where many of the stones for building Stonehenge came from could this be evident that the beaker people were somehow involved in transporting the stones or at least had some links with the two areas well for one thing these burials are probably slightly later than that building phase and actually the isotope results could be interpreted differently the geology also matches places in France for example and considering there's not much evidence for Beaker culture presence in Wales at that early date childhood Journeys to the continent seem more likely the Archer the companion and The Bowman aren't the only Bronze Age burials near Stonehenge far from it the landscape is covered with burial mounds many of which can be seen from the monument most of them are from centuries later when the burial Customs had developed after about 2000 BC the local Chiefs around here were often buried with magnificent grave Goods like those of the bushboro chieftain you might see southern Britain in this era referred to as the Wessex culture but there are no other Graves as spectacular as that of the Amesbury Archer from that early period so could he have been the chief who ruled over this area well surely someone was in charge of the land here perhaps achieved powerful enough to claim it for himself and his clan they probably didn't have Kings exactly at this early date but I think it's certainly possible that the Amesbury Archer was the chief of Stonehenge thank you to my patrons for making this video possible I'd like to travel to more sites for making videos in future but I can only afford to do that with your help if you can support the channel then please join us on patreon there's a link in the description if you enjoyed this video please hit like and do subscribe if you haven't already now to find out all about the most astonishingly productive wealth generating copper mine in British prehistory and how it transformed Bronze Age Britain please check out this video now thank you for watching foreign [Music]

Channel: Dan Davis History

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Keywords: bronze age history, history of europe, history documentaries, ancient history documentary, ancient civilizations, bronze age, bronze age britain, bronze age europe, stonehenge, the amesbury archer, the boscombe bowmen, amesbury archer, prehistoric britain, prehistoric archaeology, amesbury archer dna, amesbury archer stonehenge, amesbury archer gold, amesbury archer video, amesbury archer discovery, stonehenge documentary, bronze age documentary

Id: osckQYlf8_w

Length: 27min 56sec (1676 seconds)

Published: Wed May 31 2023