or Single-Grave) culture. This culture is attested from the Rhine to the conflu -
ence of the Oka with the Volga, a distance of more than 2500 km. As noted in
Chapter 1, population geneticists have concluded from their DNA studies that
in this vast area people tended to move from the east to the west, and it may well
be that an Indo-European language (Proto-Baltic) was brought not only to what
are now the Baltic states and northern Poland, but also to northeastern Germany
and Denmark. In parts of central and in westernmost Europe, as well as in Britain
and eastern Ireland, the relevant archaeological culture was the Bell Beaker. This
Beaker culture had begun well after 3000 BC, perhaps in Portugal, had spread over
the Iberian peninsula and along the Atlantic coast of France up to Britain and
Ireland, and after ca. 2500 BCfrom the Low Countries into southern Germany
and central Europe. Although people in both the Beaker and the Corded Ware
cultures made some use of copper, their tools and weapons were most often stone,
and the cultures as a whole were Neolithic.
Toward the end of the third millennium BCthe central European region of the
Beaker culture entered the Bronze Age. In central Europe the Early Bronze Age
is usually divided between Bz A1 and Bz A2. Most archaeologists and stu -dents
of European prehistory date the Bz A1 period to ca. 2200–1950 BC, and Bz A2
to ca. 1950–1600 BC. Because I am following the historical chronology rather
than a chronology based on carbon dates, I will date the Bz A2 period to
ca. 1850–1500BC. Information about temperate Europe in its Early Bronze Age
tends to come from graves, but a few settlements have been found.^11 Typic ally
these were villages of 100 or a few hundred people and most of the families in a
village were evidently subsistence farmers, dependent upon the outlying fields and
pastures. In many villages could also be found a potter, a weaver, a carpenter, and
perhaps an itinerant smith and a few other specialists. The settle ment was hardly
fortified, although it might be surrounded by a ditch or a palisade, discouraging
human intruders but perhaps meant especially to keep out preda tory animals. So
far as can be determined from pits and post-holes, houses were small. In some
areas villagers lived in oval or round huts, 4 or 5 m in diameter, and where timber
was plentiful rectangular log houses seem to have been the norm.
The first phase of the Early Bronze Age in central Europe has traditionally
been called the Únĕtice or Aunjetitz archaeological culture, named after a type-
site near Prague. In 1879 Čenĕk Rýzner, a physician and an amateur archaeologist,
excavated a cemetery at Únĕtice and found that the grave goods included many
fine artifacts made from tin bronze. Similar cemeteries were subsequently found
in southeastern Germany, Slovakia and southwestern Poland.^12
The mining of copper and the making of bronze artifacts were fundamental
for the sometimes surprising wealth of the Únĕtice cultural region. Initially the
Únĕtice smelters turned out arsenical bronze. The Erzgebirge (“ore mountains”)
contained significant tin deposits, however, and the smelters soon learned to alloy
copper with tin from cassiterite nuggets panned from streams flowing down the
Erzgebirge. The most spectacular burials—in large underground chambers—of
the Únĕtice culture were found at Leubingen and Helmsdorf, in Thuringia. The
burials date to the early second millennium BC.^13 In 2011 Mario Küssner and his
Militarism in temperate Europe 135