The Irish Beaker People

Newgrange Passage Tomb

In previous blog posts I discussed the Beaker culture, characterised by its bell-shaped pottery, including DNA evidence for the movement of these early people. When the Beaker culture arrived in Britain and Ireland 4,500 years ago, it was brought by migrants who almost completely replaced the existing inhabitants within a few hundred years. Beaker burials are distinctive and include Beaker ware or pottery.

In his paper Into the west: placing Beakers within their Irish contexts, the author Neil Carlin, points out that the Beaker culture in Ireland is viewed as being rich in settlement evidence. Funerary evidence, on the other hand, is more scarce consisting primarily of collective burials in original megalithic tombs or as secondary burials in earlier sacred sites. Evidence of the Beaker people has also been found in cists and pits.

Example of Beaker Pottery

Beaker Artefacts

Ireland is known for its Beaker-associated copper industry. For example, Beaker pottery was found during the excavation of an ore-processing camp connected with the Early Bronze Age mine at Ross Island, Co. Kerry. Neil Carlin’s paper lists the following items as examples of Beaker origin: polypod bowls, wrist-bracers, V-perforated buttons, basket-shaped earrings, early gold discs, lunulae, copper daggers, small disc beads, small convex scrapers, barbed and tanged arrowheads as well as hollow-based arrowheads.

In Ireland, different types of Beaker objects are rarely found together but in Britain several different Beaker associated objects tend to occur together in the same context. The dating of the Beaker evidence in Ireland remains poorly understood although one archaeologist has argued that the use of Beaker ceramics continued from 2500/2400 to 1900 BC. Finds of beaker pottery in Ireland are mainly found in pits along with artefacts such as lithic, burnt and unburnt animal bone and the charred remains of cereals and fruit.

Stone-lined Pit

At Monadreela, Co. Tipperary, a stone-lined oval pit produced evidence for in situ burning and contained 110 sherds from at least 10 Beakers, fragments of cremated human bone, a large quantity of hazelnuts and acorns together with a small polished stone axe.

Burnt mounds are the most common prehistoric monument in Ireland with over 7,000 examples identified. At Cherrywood, Co. Dublin, a spread of burnt stone and charcoal consisted of two layers that produced ten sherds of Beaker pottery from one pot, 33 lithics including a convex scraper and two hammer stones, and an animal tooth. The tooth was radiocarbon dated to 2400 -2100 BC. Under the mound were eight troughs one of which contained sherds of Grooved Ware.

Early Bronze Age Burial
(c) asi-louth.ie

Wedge Tombs and Cists

Beaker pottery has been recovered from at least 13 of the 25 wedge tomb sites excavated and has been associated with human bones often from collective burials including inhumations and cremations. The construction of wedge tombs has been dated to the period 2400-2050 BC.  

Beaker pottery has been found in eight cists together with burials. At Gortcobies, Co. Derry, fragments of cremated human bone accompanied by convex scrapers, sherds of Late Beakers and a pygmy bowl were recovered from a rectangular stone chamber at the centre of an oval cairn. Neil Carlin points out that, overall, there are very few Beaker grave goods from cists.

Gold lunula, Monaghan
(c)National Museum of Ireland

Portal Tombs and Passage Tombs

Beaker finds from portal tombs are much less common and are usually associated with disturbed deposits. Beaker pottery has only been found in one portal tomb at Poulnabrone, Co. Clare, where two Beaker sherds and a hollow-based arrowhead were found. However, these could not be positively associated with human remains from this tomb.

V-perforated buttons have been found in four passage tombs, including the Mound of the Hostages at Tara, Co. Meath, where three were found in the passage. One button was associated with a bronze awl and a crouched inhumation with a bowl beside its head. A disk bead necklace was also found in the passage with another crouched inhumation and two bowls.

Many Beaker objects have been found in natural locations such as bogs, mountains and rivers. Neil Carlin points out that copper metalwork is mainly retrieved from bogs which have produced 46% of all axes (n= 400) and 40% of all daggers (n= 15). Sixteen of the 44 lunulae and two possible gold discs have all been found in bogs. Battle-axes were mainly deposited in rivers. Only two out of 15 copper daggers and a single lunulae have come from rivers and lakes.

Conclusion

In Ireland, only a relatively small number of burials with Beaker artefacts have been identified which contrasts with the situation in Britain. Most of the pottery is been found in pits while many of the non-ceramic artefacts come from natural places such as bogs.

Bowl-inhumations, which consist of a crouched inhumation within a cist accompanied by a pot beside the head, appear to represent the Irish version of Beaker burials after 2200 BC. These burials tend to be accompanied by grave goods including boars’ tusks, flint scrapers, arrowheads, knives, awls and bangles, bone toggles, belt rings, beads and buttons of jet-like materials.

Neil Carlin notes:

Currently, there is no evidence to suggest a direct association between the construction of any large-scale earthen monuments and the use of Beakers in Ireland. In fact, no monuments apart from one possible pit circle, a few ring ditches and many wedge tombs and cists were created by Beaker users. This differs strongly from the association of Beakers with the erection of monuments like Silbury Hill and possibly also the Stonehenge blue stones in the south of Britain.

Reconstruction of a Beaker burial
(c) National Archaeological Museum of Spain, Madrid.

Beaker objects in Ireland do not seem to have shared the same associations with the dead that these objects did in Britain. It has been suggested that deposits in graves related to the individual and those if natural places with the wider community. Neil Carlin suggests that this may indicate that there was not the same preoccupation with individuality that has been proposed for Britain. In Ireland, communal identities were expressed through the construction and use of wedge tombs and the re-use of Neolithic megalithic tombs.

For further information see:

Into the West: placing Beakers within their Irish contexts.

In A. M. Jones & G. Kirkham (eds.) Beyond the Core: Reflections on Regionality in Prehistory, 2011

OXBOW Books 2011

Raising a glass to the Beaker People

Beaker Culture Diffusion
from Wikipedia

Introduction

A recent paper entitled The phylogenealogy of R-L21: four and a half millennia of expansion and redistribution by Dr Flood, a former Principal Research Scientist at The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, provides some interesting insights into population changes in Britain and Ireland over a period of 4,500 years. Dr Flood argues that it is likely that the L21 genetic mutation originated in the large Beaker colony in south-west Britain around 2,500 BC. From there, it was carried by sea into north-west France, Ireland, north-west Spain and the Middle Rhine, which today have a high incidence of L21, and into Northern England and Scotland.

Around 100 BC, a second major R-L21 expansion was initiated in Ireland and Scotland. Dr Flood suggests that this is consistent with a collapse in the population of Ireland, followed by a rapid expansion. It is thought that a severe weather event, famine and/or epidemic occurred around this time. Famine, plague and war tend to be closely associated. Ireland has suffered regular severe famines, as has Northern Europe more generally.

Ireland’s isolation meant that there were many diseases to which the Irish would not have acquired immunity. Examples of diseases that later devastated the New World include smallpox, influenza, typhoid, yellow fever and pertussis. Typically, these diseases wiped out 95% of newly exposed populations.

Genetic Change

Every movement of people throughout history has produced different challenges. The environment and the way that humans lived meant that the genetic code of different branches of human beings mutated. Within a population group those individuals with a certain mutation may have greater survival rates than those without. Those without the mutation would die at a faster rate and therefore the mutated gene spreads.

One reason many Africans are naturally resistant to malaria is because 33,000 years ago the genetic structure of the African population group changed (mutated). Because Europeans had already migrated out of Africa, they did not carry this mutation and therefore many are not resistant to malaria.

Reconstruction of Beaker Burial

Beaker People

When the Beaker culture extended to Britain and Ireland 4,500 years ago, it was brought by migrants who almost completely replaced the existing inhabitants within a few hundred years. The assumption that people today are directly descended from the people who always lived in that same area no longer stands. Human populations have been moving and mixing throughout history. These people have been credited with introducing metalworking to Britain and spreading the Indo-European language group.

In genetic terms, L21 is a major branch of the general Y-haplogroup R1b that has dominated Western Europe since the early Bronze Age. About 37 per cent of men in the British Isles are R-L21, and two-thirds of the Irish.

The Vikings

From about 793 AD Viking raiders from Scandinavia began to assault the coastline of the British Isles. The Vikings occupied most of the Scottish Isles and the Isle of Man initially and established large port settlements at York, Dublin and along the south and east coast of Ireland. These invaders took huge numbers of slaves to run their agricultural holdings, mostly from now overpopulated Ireland and Scotland. It is reported that in a single day, they took 1000 slaves from Dublin and their genetic inheritance is visible today. It is thought that about 90 per cent of Nordic L21 men may be descended from slaves taken in raids.

The Diaspora

From the 1840s, much of the population of Ireland, Scotland and Cornwall went abroad as economic refugees. About 10 million Irish have emigrated and today over 40 million North Americans claim Irish heritage. Following the Highland Clearances and the dissolution of the Clans around 1750, the Scots began to emigrate, and today around 50-million people identify as being of Scots or Scots-Irish heritage, even though the population of Scotland is only 5.3 million.

The dating of the L21 mutation to around 2,500 has been supported by the presence of Bell Beaker sites all over Britain and Ireland dating from before 2400 BC. For example, Cornwall has an abundance of Beaker sites including round barrows and cairns, henges, stone circles and stone cist graves. The Cornwall/Devon area was a major dissemination point for R-L21 and is likely to have had the first large settlements in Britain.

Dalriada Overkingdom

The situation in Scotland is complicated by an invasion of the west coast of Scotland by Irish Gaelic speakers who eventually seized power from the Picts and gave Scotland its rulers, its Gaelic language and its name. Dr Flood argues that the expansion of the mutation M222 in Scotland is the only clear example of a concerted move by the Ui Neill group into Scotland, establishing the Dalriada overkingdom of Argyll and Antrim.

Bottlenecks in our genetic history

A population ‘bottleneck’ occurred around 74,000 years ago when the volcano that produced Lake Toba in Indonesia erupted and ejected 2,800 cubic kilometres of volcanic ash. Sunlight was blocked out through the entire Southeast Asia, South Asian and Arabian Peninsula and ash formed a thick layer on the floor. Only 10,000 people are thought to have survived this cataclysmic event, and these are now known as our distant ancestors.

Example of Beaker Pottery

Conclusion

The genetic mutation known as L21 originated in the large Beaker colony in south-west Britain around 2,500 BC. The Beaker people expanded over a period of a few hundred years, creating widely separated colonies in north-west France, Ireland, north-west Spain, the Middle Rhine and into Northern England and Scotland. These people have been credited with introducing metalworking to Britain and spreading the Indo-European language group. The so-called Bell Beaker, which gave the culture its name, may even have been used to drink alcohol!

Around 100 BC, a second major R-L21 expansion was initiated in Ireland and Scotland. Later invaders of Britain such as the Belgae, Saxons and Normans had a British genetic mixture from the early Bronze Age. Researchers believe that the human genome has been subject to irregular pruning including considerable decreases in genetic diversity probably resulting from natural disasters, epidemics or warfare. Perhaps we should raise a glass to these early people – slainte!

For further information see:

https://www.academia.edu/24686284/The_phylogenealogy_of_R-L21_four_and_a_half_millennia_of_expansion_and_redistribution

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWz7OJj5RP0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bk7eKGhs_P0&t=53s