The Bell Beaker Transition in Europe: Mobility and local evolution during the 3rd millennium BC

By Oxbow Books

Could the circulation of objects or ideas and the mobility of artisans explain the unprecedented uniformity of the material culture observed throughout the whole of Europe? The 17 papers presented here offer a range of new and different perspectives on the Beaker phenomenon across Europe. The focus is not on Bell Beaker pottery but on social groups (craft specialists, warriors, chiefs, extended or nuclear families), using technological studies and physical anthropology to understand mobility patterns during the 3rd millennium BC. Chronological evolution is used to reconstruct the rhythm of Bell Beaker diffusion and the environmental background that could explain this mobility and the socioeconomic changes observed during this period of transition toward Bronze Age societies.

The chapters are mainly organized geographically, covering Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean shores and the Atlantic coast of the Iberian Peninsula, includes some areas that are traditionally studied and well known, such as France, the British Isles or Central Europe, but also others that have so far been considered peripheral, such as Norway, Denmark or Galicia. This journey not only offers a complex and diverse image of Bell Beaker societies but also of a supra-regional structure that articulated a new type of society on an unprecedented scale.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Oct 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781782979289

Book preview

1

INTRODUCTION. A FOLK WHO WILL NEVER SPEAK: BELL BEAKERS AND LINGUISTICS

Alexander Falileyev

This will be a mostly unexpected contribution to this splendid volume. First of all, it is intended to discuss some aspects of the Bell Beaker problem from a completely different angle: from the point of view of comparative and indeed Indo-European linguistics. It is widely known, of course, that some archaeologists do pay attention to the problems of identifications of the Beaker Folk with the speakers of this or that language or proto-language in European prehistory, and various suggestions are available. They are, however, normally criticised, sometimes heavily, by linguists and even by some archaeologists. In this respect my approach to this set of questions seems to be again unexpected, as I am of the opinion that nearly all of these suggestions are allowable, or at least, tolerable. The real problem here lies rather in the field of comparative linguistics, not archaeology. It should be reminded that we, linguists, do not normally do dates, to use the title of the article by A. and R. McMahon which is surely known to prehistorians, as it was published in one of the McDonald Institute monographs (McMahon and McMahon 2006). This makes any chronological association of the speakers of a language with a set of archaeological facts in prehistory effectively impossible. There are some other drawbacks in the study of languages and their relationships in early Europe, which affect these identifications, and I will address some of these issues below. At the moment two linguistic associations of the Beaker Folk are popular at least among some archaeologists and linguists. First I will offer some brief comments on the subject Old Europeans (in terms of the theory of H. Krahe, not of M. Gimbutas) and the Phenomenon, and then I will turn to the notoriously ever-lasting identification of the Bell Beakers and the Celts.

Old European (Alteuropäisch) is the term introduced by Hans Krahe for the language of the oldest reconstructed stratum of European river names in Central and Western Europe. According to Krahe and his follower, these hydronyms show pre-Germanic, pre-Italic, pre-Baltic and pre-Celtic features. The geographical distribution of these names to a great extent coincides with that of Bell Beaker finds, and it is not surprising, therefore, that these two notions have been associated. We find this association in the works of archaeologists and linguists alike. Thus, to quote from G. Clark and S. Piggott (1970, 289):

the distribution of river-names belonging to the non-Celtic but Indo-European substrate language (…), present not only in continental Europe but also in Britain and Ireland, would be best explained by referring them to the folk movements involved in the Bell Beaker reflux.

Similar ideas are expressed by linguists. As P. Kitson (1996, 103–4) maintains,

"Bell-beakers are in fact the only archaeological phenomenon of any period of prehistory with a comparably wide spread to that of river-names in the western half of Europe. The presumption must I think be that Beaker Folk were the vector of alteuropäisch river-names to most of Western Europe"

Taking into account the place this conference was held, it will not be inappropriate to note that Professor Javier De Hoz, in an article considering the processes of Indo-Europeanization of Spain and published by the University of Santiago de Compostela, admits that such an assumption is not impossible (De Hoz 2009, 15).

Indeed, in theory, a correlation between the Bell Beaker phenomenon and the speakers of Old European is not unfeasible. However, the linguistic side of this comparison is really problematic. To start with, the date which has been posited for Old European varies. Thus, according to the classical approach of H. Krahe, it should be dated back to ca. 1500; but if we are to follow W. P. Schmid, Old European river-names belong to a much earlier date, prior to the differentiation of the IE languages; and an even more complicated scheme is offered by Vyach Ivanov and T. Gamkrelidze. On top of that, these scholars (and some others, see for instance Zvelebil 1995, 191–192 for an Old European continuum in the Danube basin in 4500–3500 BC) may have different views on the geographical distribution of the data. These rather contradictive approaches to the problem of Alteuropäisch have usefully been surveyed by N. Sukhachev (2007, 101–117), where further references are provided. Therefore, there is no evident consensus among linguists regarding the time of Old European (cf. also Häusler 1995, 225), which already makes an association of it with the Bell Beaker phenomenon problematic. Yet another problem here is the matter of space: even in the classical presentations of the Old European theory the border of the area seems to be stretching eastwards far beyond that of Bell Beakers. Of course, this archaeological area is constantly being widened, and the papers by T. Demcenco, V. Heyd and C. Prescott presented at the conference are very illustrative in this respect. However, the area where Alteuropäisch hydronymy is found, say, in Eastern Europe, will be hardly associated with the phenomenon even in the distant future. Thus, Old European river-names, according to some scholars, are attested in Finland (see Nuutinen 1992, 135–137 with further references). It is worth noting that these are associated with the Battle-Axe culture (Nuutinen 1992, 135).

Apart from that, the very concept of Alteuropäisch is a problem in its own right: text-books on Indo-European linguistics do not normally consider this postulated stage in the history of the Indo-European languages, and many scholars working with the river-names prefer to analyse them as coined in the locally used language(s) (or extinct idioms) rather than to refer to the putative notion of Old European. See, in this respect, G. R. Isaac’s work on the ancient hydronymy of modern Scotland (Isaac 2005) or, to take another edge of the continent, the research by S. Yanakijeva who argues that there is no need to use the label Alteuropäisch in a discussion of the river-names in ancient Thrace (Yanakijeva 2009, 183). On a methodological level it may be considered that, according to N. Sukhachev (2007, 117):

interpretations, offered for Old European by H. Krahe, W. P. Schmid, T. V. Gamkrelidze and Vyach. Vs. Ivanov are based on different concepts of pre-history and reflect on incompatible cultural and historical reconstructions; the linguistic argument is secondary,

and according to G. R. Isaac (2005, 190):

Old European was invoked as a deus ex machina theory in the past to solve problems which, I believe, have been shown by later research not to be the problems at all.

Needless to say, the concept, notwithstanding the efforts of its critics, still has its adherents. It seems that the problem of Alteuropäisch should be freshly addressed in a systematic and comprehensive manner to revisit the essence of this model and the relevance of its manifestations. Therefore, for the time being, a reference to Old European in a discussion of Bell Beaker linguistic attribution by default raises more questions than it intends to answer.

As known, the very existence of the Celts in prehistory is the focus of a debate lasting for the past two decades. A Celtosceptic approach, also known as New Celtic (e.g. Collis 2010) denies it, while for linguists the reality is that a form of Celtic was spoken in prehistory, whatever the pots these people were using. This range of question has been comprehensively surveyed by S. Rodway (2010) and I will just remark that the word Celt below denotes a speaker of a Celtic language.

The association of the Bell Beaker Folk with the ancient speakers of Celtic is already traditional. We find it in the works of Celtic linguists and historians and Bell Beaker archaeologists. This approach has triggered consequences. Thus, the identification was adopted, although somewhat reluctantly, in very influential The Celtic Realms by Nora Chadwick and Myles Dillon (1967, 18–19), and is still alive and well in a number of recent publications on various Celtic linguistic matters. A more elaborate association of the Folk or, rather, Phenomenon, with the Celts comes from the camp of archaeologists. Thus, at the 1998 Beaker Congress Professor A. Gallay (2001) sought to show that the Pre-Celts and Pre-Italics emerged from the complex of Bell-Beaker setting (Fig. 1.1).

Nearly a decade later Professor Patrice Brun (2006, 30) addressed this subject, but from a different standpoint:

Since there is no evidence that the regions of Western Europe where Celtic languages are still spoken today became Celtic after 1600 BC, they must have become so at an earlier date. Before 1600 BC, the only time when the zones which gave rise to the north-Alpine and Atlantic complexes shared similar material and structural characteristics was the second half of the 3rd millennium BC. This was the well-known Bell Beaker package. Linking all the regions where a Celtic language was later to be spoken, this community represents a unique situation.

Fig. 1.1. Pre-Celts and Pre-Italics in Bell-Beaker setting according to A. Gallay (2001).

Fig. 1.2. Indo-European languages: glottochronological scheme of S. Starostin (Blažek 2007).

Similar views, varying in sometimes valuable detail, have been expressed by archaeologists dealing with the Celtic problem (see for instance Lorrio 2006, 50, with further references). These associations of the Bell Beaker Folk with the speakers of an early form of Celtic (or proto-Celtic) may be of course possible, and again it is comparative linguistics that hinders this equation. There are a lot of problems here, and these could be summarised as follows.

First, there is – once again – the matter of chronology: there is a continuous dispute on the dating of the Common Celtic, ancestor of the modern and ancient Celtic languages, and there is no tool which can provide a universally accepted dating. As linguists know, the only branch of the discipline which operates with absolute chronology is the so-called glottochronology, a part of lexicostatistics which deals with chronological relationship between languages. A look at the results of the most recent research indicates that glottochronology, in its latest model, labelled calibrated (linguists are learning from archaeologists!), dates the split of Common Celtic, that is the time when it started diverging into its branches, to 1100 BC. According to the same methodology, created by M. Swadesh and creatively elaborated by S. Starostin, the emergence of Common Celtic out of the continuity of other IE dialects (after pre-Hittite and pre-Tocharian were materialised) should be dated to the period 3350–3020 BC (Blažek 2007, see Figs 1.2 and 1.3). This gives us a span of at least two millennia, 3350–1100 BC, and chronologically the Beaker Folk fit here perfectly.

The problem is that many historical linguists tend to consider this method with extreme caution. There is an ongoing argument on the validity of glottochronology, an issue I will not discuss here. Instead it will be suffice to mention a following paradox. Some linguists argue that a Celtic language was introduced to Ireland in the Late Bronze Age. An alternative view is that it appeared on the Emerald Island only in the earliest centuries of the new era (see further references in Sims-Williams 2012). There are also other datings in between, of course. These views, based on purely linguistic observations in conjunction with some historical (sometimes archaeological) facts, are accepted by some linguists and rejected by others. However, the very fact of such a chronological divergence seems to speak for itself. It should be stressed that these observations could not, in fact, compromise a possible chronological comparability of the Common Celtic linguistic period and the Bell Beaker age. Yet this possible chronological contemporaneity does not by default equate the speakers of the language with the people or peoples responsible for the Beaker Package.

Fig. 1.3. Celtic languages: glottochronological scheme of S. Starostin (Blažek 2007).

The second point to be raised here is purely linguistic again, and concerns the relationship of Common Celtic with other early Indo-European dialects. In the scheme of S. Starostin we can see that Celtic was the third branch after Hittite and Tocharian to separate from the Indo-European continuity. In this Starostin agrees with the model presented by D. Ringe et al. (2002), but there are also other schemes available, e.g., by E. Hamp, T. Gamkrelidze and Vjach. Ivanov (see references in Blažek 2007), and these place Celtic in a different position of this hypothetical tree. Needless to note that the validity of the schemes has been questioned for a long time, and other approaches to the formation of the proto-groups of IE languages are available. Moreover, in recent years, and this is not reflected in any of the existing diagrams, a new theory has been offered. Professor K. H. Schmidt (1996) claims that Proto-Celtic, traditionally taken as a Western IE language, has an important set of traditionally Eastern IE linguistic features. Schmidt (1996, 22–26) lists several joint innovations which connect Celtic with the Eastern IE idioms, namely the inflected relative pronoun *ios (Indo-Iranian, Greek, Slavic, Phrygian, and Celtic), desiderative formations with reduplication and a thematically inflected s-stem (Celtic and Indo-Iranian), and future in *-sje-/-sjo- (Celtic, Indo-Iranian, Baltic, Slavic, and possibly Greek). The expansion of productivity of the sigmatic aorist (Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Greek, and Celtic) has also been added to this list (Isaac 2010, references). This theory is of importance as it, in fact, reconsiders the areal configuration of early IE dialects. Following this theory, the Italo-Celtic linguistic, and hence historical unity, advocated by the majority of Indo-European linguists and some scholars of comparative Celtic studies, turns into another myth of the discipline. It does not reject later pre-historic contacts between the speakers of Celtic and Italic, of course, which may allow to elucidate features, shared between the two groups of languages. However, with this model any connection of the speakers of Celtic with the Bell Beakers phenomenon becomes chronologically (and perhaps geographically) irrelevant – thus, according to Isaac (2010, 164), speakers of Pre- or Common Celtic were in the east ca. 2000 BC and therefore could not be involved in the historical processes happening in Western (and Central) Europe. In addition, if this theory is to be accepted, a search for the common ancestral landscape shared by pre-Celts and pre-Italics turns to be inappropriate.

Schmidt’s theory has been accepted and elaborated by some scholars (cf. Isaac 2010 and the bibliography cited there) and openly doubted by others (see references in Sims-Williams 2012). I am not going to discuss it here (some comments are offered in Falileyev and Kocharov 2012), and at this point it will be probably suffice to remark that Indo-European cladistics, not unlike IE chronology, is a subject of lasting discussions, very well summarised by J. P. T. Clackson (2007, 9–15). Moreover, a very pessimistic, although balanced, view on this aspect of Indo-European studies perhaps really betrays the modern state of affairs:

We cannot regard IE sub-groups as sub-groups in a classical sense. Rather, the loss or pruning of intermediate dialects, together with convergence in situ among the dialects that were to become Greek, Italic, Celtic and so on, have in tandem created the appearance of a tree with discrete branches. But the true historical filiation of the IE family is unknown and perhaps unknowable (Garrett 2006, 143).

All these reservations and sceptical comments were known to the authors and propagandists of the so-called Celts from the West theory, which also deserves some comments within this discussion. The earlier suggestion of B. Cunliffe that Celtic goes back to a pidgin spoken in Early Bronze Age Atlantic Europe has been sharply criticised, particularly by Indo-European and Celtic linguists, from the very start (see references in Isaac 2010 and also Meid 2008). However, in their most recent publication B. Cunliffe and J. Koch (2010, 3) try to argue that the Celtic as eastern Indo-European language theory and the western genesis of Celtic are not a priori incompatible. According to Cunliffe and Koch:

there is no dispute here about Indo-Europeans coming originally from the east or that it had already appeared, as Celtic, along the entire Atlantic seaboard from Sagres to Orkney by pre-Roman proto-historical times, the later 1st millennium BC. The question is rather whether Indo-European became Celtic before or after it reached the ocean (Cunliffe and Koch 2010, 2–3).

The theory which places the speakers of a variety of Celtic (or proto-Celtic) in the Atlantic Europe of this time cannot by default avoid a reference to the Bell Beaker phenomenon. And it is of course easily found:

If a distinct Celtic language had emerged by the 3rd millennium then could the period of rapid mobility, reflected in the Beaker phenomenon, have provided the context for the language to spread across much of western Europe? (Cunliffe 2010, 34).

At face value, this statement could indeed be correct, and I am inclined to think that this possibility mentioned by Cunliffe should be listed among potential solutions of Bell Beaker users’ linguistic identity, but with considerable modifications, for which see below. The problem of this particular hypothesis is its setting. According to the tentative scenario suggested by Cunliffe and supplied with myriads of question marks, the Indo-European language reached the Atlantic zone c. 5000 BC as the result of enclave colonisation bringing the Neolithic lifestyle from the Mediterranean, and "Celtic began to develop in the Atlantic Zone between 5000–3000 BC during the period when extensive connectivity was established along the Atlantic façade. It should be noted in this respect that the emergence of Celtic is placed by Cunliffe in a framework of Indo-European archaeology which is not accepted by the majority of linguists, and this setting has been already criticised by archaeologists as well. In the same volume R. Karl (2010, 41) asks many questions which were not considered by the author of this theory: is the area of the ‘origin’ of ‘the Celtic’ as large as the ‘Atlantic fringe’? If less, how does it spread within the ‘Atlantic fringe’ zone? And how does it spread beyond the ‘Atlantic fringe’"?Probably these questions will be answered in further publications.¹ However, the vision of the Indo-European problem within Atlantic Celtic hypothesis contradicts what is nowadays acceptable to Indo-European linguists, and this theory does not seem to consider modern insights on the possible mechanisms of Bell Beaker networks. Therefore the Bell Beaker contribution to the spread of Celtic languages in Europe in this particular scenario is totally unlikely.

In this respect the approach of C. Gibson and D. S. Wodtko (forthcoming) to the same problem seems to be more promising. These scholars presume that there must be an important degree of bilingualism/multilingualism in the Bell Beaker age, which is of course very possible provided that, nowadays, archaeologists do not speak in terms of the Bell Beaker Folk, but rather a network phenomenon. One of the Indo-European languages used in this inter-community communication, as Gibson and Wodtko admit, may have been the ancestor of Celtic. This is a quite sober hypothesis, although the nature of the communications between and within various Bell Beakers communities will never be established with any degree of precision. It should be positively considered that this approach, appropriately, does not reflect on the putative notion of Celtic homeland, be it the West or the East. Moreover, the Bell Beaker phenomenon presupposes movements not only from the Atlantic fringe to the rest of the Continent, but from other places and in various directions, and also from the Carpathian basin and the Middle Danube westwards (cf. for instance Harrison and Heyd 2007, 170–172). Therefore, Celtic, not unlike some other Indo-European languages and possibly some non-Indo-European languages as well, could be in theory well involved in the phenomenon. A prospect that people who utilised the same pots, adhered to the same ideology and made use of the same mortuary practices spoke different languages does not upset scholars nowadays.

This leads us to the following conclusion: indeed, there is a possibility that some human beings associated with the Bell Beaker phenomenon at some place in Europe which is not (or cannot be) clarified and at some time which is not (or cannot be) identified did speak a form of Celtic which cannot be recognised. This gives us a positive flavour for the discussion of the problem. However, such a conclusion by default presupposes no further debate, neither linguistic nor archaeological. Celtic and Bell Beakers ends here.

In his valuable contribution to the conference Professor Christian Strahm has put the history and the present state of Bell Beaker phenomenon studies in the context of Recycled Ideas. Recycled ideas may be used as a sub-title of the present article as well. One might be reminded, for example, that a century ago J. Abercromby (1912, 100) was of opinion that the IE (proto-)language (in contemporary terms Aryan) was brought by Bell Beaker using tribes to the British Isles where it was adopted by the local Neolithic inhabitants and successfully gave birth to Celtic idioms. Some ten years later another renowned prehistorian offered a more sceptical verdict: we are forced to admit that we are in total ignorance of the language spoken by the Beaker-Folk (Peake 1922, 80). The progress of Indo-European and Celtic linguistic studies during the century on the one hand, and a sufficient development in archaeological/prehistorical research for the last hundred years on the other, brings us all back to the same set of opinions, although upgraded to the current state of the scholarship. Recycling ideas constitutes a loop, and in case of a linguistic attribution of the Bell Beaker phenomenon, particularly its association with the speakers of Early Celtic, this loop looks like a vicious circle. As have been shown above, this association in theory may be appropriate. However, neither linguists nor archaeologists are able to prove it unambiguously, and an argument in favour encounters nearly an immediate counterargument. Generally, it may be reminded that this problem goes beyond the interests of a comparative linguist – as S. Zimmer (1990, 313) summarises:

the first aim of Indo-European linguistics is […] not the reconstruction of the Indo-European Ursprache as one of the languages spoken in an unknown antiquity by unidentified people but a reference tool in discussing the history and development of the different Indo-European languages

and if there is no defined Ursprache, there is no people speaking it. This statement is applicable also for the discussion of the later stages in the history of Indo-European languages and language groups, and another quotation–this time from P. Sims-Williams (2012, 442) – is revealing:

I believe that if we want to make progress with ancient linguistic geography we have to do two things. The first is to work backwards in time from the known to the unknown, not trying to go too far too fast. The second is to use ancient linguistic data, and not use modern languages or genetics or archaeological cultures as surrogates for it.

He continues:

in fact, there is no a priori reason why Celtic speech should coincide with any one archaeological ‘culture’; hence the search for some alternative to Hallstatt and La Tène – Bell Beakers have been suggested (Brun 2006; Lorrio 2006: 50) – should surely be called off.

Thus, strictly speaking, the famous question (although slightly paraphrased here), Pre-historical Archaeologists and Linguists – Can They Mate? should be answered in the negative,² also in view of the considerable differences in the vision of the past in these two different academic disciplines (on which see e.g., Sukhachev 2007) and the list of further interdisciplinary miscommunications with references would be lengthy. It is still to be hoped that archaeologists may find new paradigms for their portrayal of prehistoric European past, and that the linguistic community will produce a generally accepted model of the development from Common Indo-European, otherwise recycling will become clinical. For European prehistory this set of questions, no doubt, will always be relevant.

Notes

1.    cf. J. Collis’s lecture at the14th International Congress of Celtic Studies (Maynooth, August 2011) Celtic from the West? A critique. The abstracts of the paper say: I wish to briefly critique the recent suggestion made in the volume edited by Barry Cunliffe and John Koch that the origin of the Celts and the Celtic languages may have been in Iberia. I will do this on grounds of logic, methodology and misuse of the classical and archaeological sources, http://www.celticstudiescongress.org/images/stories/congress/synopses.pdf.

2.    The situation is different for a later period, when other type of sources could be involved in discussion (see e.g., Falileyev 2008; 2009).

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2

BELL BEAKERS AND CORDED WARE PEOPLE IN THE LITTLE POLAND UPLAND – AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW

Elżbieta Haduch

The Bell Beaker Culture population was biologically separate from the other inhabitants of the Małopolska region in the Neolithic period. The metrical and morphological traits of the skull such as: breadth, length and height of the neurocranium, its proportions: brachycrania and orthocrania as well as the special shape of the flat occiput distinguished them from the local population of the Corded Ware Culture and Early Bronze Age group of the Mierzanowice Culture. Anthropological analysis of the Corded Ware Culture (Cracow-Sandomierz subgroup) skeletons characterised them as dolicho- or mesocranic ones. It is very important to notice that the short skulls (brachycephalic) are also present among them – for example 2-A male specimen from Koniusza mound. On the other side, among Bell Beaker graves from Małopolska Upland there were found female mesocephalic skeletons (Samborzec IX, Sandomierz 31 and Złota 374). These cases confirm interaction between Corded Ware Culture people and Bell Beaker Culture groups not only in the sphere offuneral rituals (burial from Koniusza) but point with the high probability of the incorporation of local inhabitants – females – into the newcomers’ groups. This observation does not exclude the hypothesis of the allochthonous origin of the Bell Beaker Culture groups in Małopolska Upland.

Settlements in the Małopolska Upland can be traced back to the Early Neolithic period. Natural conditions, landform features, access to watercourses and the loess soils of the region were conducive to various types of development.

Characterised by unique cord ornamentation on clay vessels, the Corded Ware Culture (CWC) is a phenomenon of the 3rd millennium BC, encompassing vast areas of continental Europe. The Corded Ware people are commonly believed to have been a pastoral society with nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyle. In Małopolska, the CWC developed from 2800/2700 to 2300/2200 cal. BC (Włodarczak 2006). Extensive sources and radiocarbon dating techniques allowed researchers to distinguish two synchronous CWC subgroups: the Cracow-Sandomierz subgroup in the area previously inhabited by the agricultural communities of the Funnel Beaker Culture (FBC) and a subgroup which preserved its Central European character without local characteristics. Their mutual impact is testified by the presence of items typical of both subgroups in grave inventories (Machnik 1994, 10).

The latest CWC phases coincide with the proto-Mierzanowice phase, during which the settlement network of the Mierzanowice (MC) culture started forming (Włodarczak 2006, 137).

Studies of the CWC are based on material obtained by grave exploration, since the culture’s settlements are absent from the Małopolska region.

The Bell Beaker Culture (BBC) communities appeared in the Małopolska Upland in the early second half of the 3rd millennium BC, in the period approaching the decline of the CWC and the advent of the MC. Bell-Beaker centres in the Małopolska Upland form the eastern province of the culture. Similarly to the CWC, BBC materials originate from burial grounds.

Graves characteristics

For the CWC culture, the dead were laid to rest in graves under mounds, dug into burial mound embankments or in flat burial grounds. A certain regularity in grave orientation was observed: females were laid on the left side, males on the right, with a significant majority of male burials, particularly in higher age categories.

In the BBC communities, many characteristics of funeral rites make references to the CWC model, directly pre-dating the appearance of the BBC, as well as the early phases of the Mierzanowice Culture. The cultural interaction between the CWC and the BBC is visible not only in Małopolska, but also in Moravia and Slovakia (Budziszewski and Włodarczak 2010, 110). This interpenetration of cultures calls for an in-depth comparative analysis of their representative populations.

BBC materials are slightly younger than the Cracow-Sandomierz CWC subgroup, apparently representing a phase directly following the CWC’s development period in the Małopolska Upland. In the later phase of the latter, we may notice elements typical of the BBC. There are, however, no premises indicating that the two groupings were isochronous.

BBC burial grounds in the Małopolska Upland were springing up from 2400 to 2250 cal. BC (absolute chronology of the BBC burial ground in Samborzec 2400–2200 cal. BC, in Sandomierz 2290–2190 cal. BC) (Budziszewski and Włodarczak 2010, 118).

Materials and method

The analysis of the structure of the CWC people was based on the author’s own anatomical and anthropological observations of skeletons originating from CWC graves in Małopolska and data published by other authors. The detailed analysis covered only those skeletons which were in a condition that would enable skull measurements to be taken (Gleń 1979; Gleń and Kaczanowski 1980; Haduch 1999; 2003; 2008; Milisauskas and Kruk 1984 and unpublished data). The skeletons from Zielona (Haduch 2004) and from Zagaje Stradowskie (unpublished data) were not included in the comparative analysis due to their condition.

A relatively small number of BBC culture skeletons originate from Poland.