in Brittany the tin deposits made possible the dimmer splendor of the Armorican
Bronze Age. Enthusiasm about metallurgy also brought the Bronze Age to Ireland,
where the mining of copper in southwestern Ireland (counties Kerry and Cork)
began ca. 2000 BC.
In both the Únĕtice zone of central Europe and in Wessex and Brittany
“princely” or “chiefly” burials suggest the formation of chiefdoms early in the
second millennium BC.^23 A few tumuli or kurgans, as at Melrand in Brittany or
at Leubingen in central Europe, exceeded 2000 cubic meters in volume, and the
rich burial chambers contained silver and gold objects along with several bronze
daggers and axe-heads. Graves of high-ranking women included amber beads and
jewelry of precious metal. When a chief was buried animals were sacrificed at
the grave and their meat provided a feast for the mourners. Other animals were
ritually slain and were placed in the burial chamber, so that they might accompany
the chief to the Underworld. Humans might also be selected for this horrendous
honor. At Leubingen a few bones indicated that a young girl had been ritually
slain and her body placed across that of the chief.
While some regions of temperate Europe were prospering early in the second
millennium BC, in other regions Europeans were just emerging from their Neo -
lithic past or still in it. Vaguely in the Corded Ware zone of Europe, and not
yet in the Bronze Age, were the coastal areas around the Baltic and the North
Sea. In what is now southern Scandinavia the only natural resource that was valued
in the early second millennium BCwas amber. Washed ashore from the ocean,
amber was collected on the beaches of southwestern Sweden and Jutland, as well
as on the Baltic coast from Poland to Estonia. Amber, however, was not a novelty:
it had been prized for its beauty ever since the Paleolithic period, and since at
least 2500BChad been a commodity for exchange.^24 Although the lands along
the Baltic and North Sea had apparently attracted a steady flow of immigrants
from the east, probably speaking a Proto-Baltic language, the lands were laggard
in experiencing the changes that occurred earlier in the stanniferous regions of
Europe or in the Po valley. In the Nordic countries the Bronze Age did not begin
until ca. 1500BC(Montelius I).^25 As summarized by Andrew Sherratt,
Scandinavia—and especially Denmark, with its relatively large and dense
population—lived in a retarded Stone Age, exporting amber and importing
both Irish axes and Únĕtice daggers, but without metal sources in its own
sphere and without an indigenous industry for reprocessing imported metal
on any scale.^26Another laggard part of temperate Europe was the Hungarian plain, Tran sylvania
and the land on both banks of the lower Danube. In the fifth millennium BCthe
fertile lands along the middle and lower Danube and its tributaries had been thickly
settled, and some of the richest Neolithic burials ever found were excavated at
Varna on the Bulgarian coast. The gold in these “princely” graves points to a ranked
society. The Neolithic and Chalcolithic type-sites of Gumelniţa on the Romanian
bank of the lower Danube and Karanovo (VI) in central Bulgaria were at the heart
Militarism in temperate Europe 137