West of the Elbe, on the heaths of the Emsland and Drenthe, the complex of Single-grave and Beaker cultures, formed as above described (p. 259), lasted on into the Middle Bronze Age without assimilation to the Germanic province of culture. Despite its incorporation of the old Huns’-bed megalith folk, its affinities were rather with the Rhineland, and shared rather with the Beaker folk of Britain than with the Germans towards and beyond the Elbe mouth. In fact, Holland and North-West Germany are to be reckoned with the territories of the Tumulus cultures whose rise into the Middle Bronze Age has already been partly described further south. Their history in Bavaria and beyond was repeated on the Swabian uplands of Württemberg, where the Bronze Age barrow folk look back to Corded-ware origin and on to a potent sequel in the Iron Age; it was repeated again in the whole region of Hessen towards the Middle Rhine and the territory of the persisting Adlerberg culture (p. 302) along the Rhine itself; and again further south-west in Alsace, where the great barrow-concentrations of the Forest of Haguenau answer closely to those of Württemberg; and leads us over into France on the one hand by Lorraine, on the other by the Jura and the uplands of Burgundy.
The irruption in these quarters of barrow-building warriors of Corded-ware stock into France has been sketched above (p. 311), and it was in the period round about 1400 B.C. that their emergence to full Bronze Age status—that of the ‘Bronze Age III’ of the French chronology of Joseph Déchelette—begins to be perceptible. Their westward diffusion is indeed obscure, but the group that had created the brilliant Breton culture (p. 312) was now in its heyday, and further south the Middle Bronze Age of the Charente comes to show marked affinities to that of the Rhine. In all South-West and much of Central France, it is true, the old Chalcolithic culture still clung to its caves and degenerate megaliths, while in the south the same conservatism was modified both from North Italy and slightly from Spain, and more strongly by the Rhône culture (p. 310), the maturity of which from far down the Rhône up into Switzerland probably falls within the Middle Bronze Age. The balance between Chalcolithic and true Bronze Age cultures in France was on the whole loosely formed, and much play has been made with the conception of the Chalcolithic peoples as Ligurian on one side, Iberian on the other.
The question remains how far the Celts who from North France and the Lower Rhine came in the Late Bronze and Iron Ages to invade the British Isles may have been treading paths already trodden by their own kin within the centuries covered by this book. It is a difficult question to answer; but the position can at least be clarified by considering the peoples who went to make up the Middle Bronze Age civilization of these islands in due relation to the progenitors of the Celts on the Continent. How, then, in the first place were the Continental Celts engendered?
The centre of gravity of the expanded Celtic world of the Iron Age comprised, broadly speaking, South-West Germany (with the Swiss plateau) and Eastern France, and it is here too that linguistic evidence, headed by that of Celtic river-names, points to the most ancient currency of Celtic speech, with the important modifications that the greater weight lies on the east rather than the west of the Rhine, and that as well as South-West also North-West Germany is to be included. Now, in the earlier prehistory of these lands of the Rhine basin we have above pointed out the importance of the great movement of ‘Westernization’ in later Neolithic times, which replaced their original Danubian culture by the Michelsberg representative of the Western Neolithic (p. 137).
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Thus the substratum for the Bronze Age became predominatingly Western instead of Danubian as it was in the Aunjetitz province further east. At the same time, we must not lose sight of the aboriginal element, descended, no doubt, from Mesolithic times, that seems recognizable in the long-lived tradition of finger-printed coarse pottery. Before the Bronze Age opened, there had been two major additions to these basic constituents: the Bell-beaker folk from the South-West, and the Corded-ware warriors from Central Germany. The former spread all down the Rhine and well away to the east of it, while the latter fused with them in the Rhine valley and as far as Holland and the north-west of Germany, and also spread west and south-west to form the Barrow cultures of the east of France, to enter into the formation of the Rhône culture, and to run out still further west, most notably to create the Early Bronze Age culture of Brittany (pp. 310–14). Till towards the end of the second millennium, no further intrusions into any part of these territories are to be detected.
On their Alpine side, they marched with North Italy and the recruitment-areas of the immigrants responsible for the Indo-European essentials of Italic language: philological connexions between Italic and Celtic tongues are close, and as well as their Indo-European essentials, substratum contributions may also need allowing for from Western Neolithic and aboriginal sources common to both sides of the Alps. On the east, their frontier is clearly that dividing the Aunjetitz area from the Tumulus cultures that from Bavaria and Thuringia westwards grew up outside its immediate orbit. And it is, in fact, in those Tumulus cultures, formed on a Western and aboriginal Neolithic substratum by the mixed Corded-ware and Beaker peoples, that the prime element in the Celts is to be sought, running southwest to include the people of the Rhône culture, west to the outlying group in Brittany, and north to include the mixed Beaker and Barrow peoples of the Lower Rhine, Holland, and North-West Germany, where between the Weser and the Elbe ran their frontier with, the Germanic population of the Northern lands.
Both these two wings, the Breton and the Northern, are of especial importance for Britain. When intrusion did come to disturb the West European Tumulus-culture area towards the end of the second millennium, it was that of the Urnfield peoples of the Late Bronze Age, with their main impulse in the forceful expansion of the Lausitz folk (p. 362). Indeed, it is often held that until this Urnfield contribution to the West had been made, it is improper to consider the Celts as a fully formed entity: the Tumulus peoples of earlier Bronze Age times can be called no more than proto-Celts. But, to take first the Northern or Lower Rhenish wing of their distribution, this was reached by the Urnfield movement late and in considerably modified form; and since it was from here that, in the Late Bronze Age and later, Britain received some of her most important drafts of Celtic immigrants, it is needful to realize that those immigrants seem to be drawn—to start with at any rate—rather from a Lower Rhenish population set in motion by the Urnfielders’ approach, than from one already altered by their admixture.
Further, the contemporary advance of the Germans from the Elbe towards the Weser and the Rhine should also have set the Tumulus population here in motion; and in the Late Bronze Age immigrations of Celts into North Britain, and above all Ireland, there is a good deal to suggest an origin in this quarter rather than anywhere further south or west, without anything specifically referable to a contribution from the Urnfielders. So it becomes highly relevant to recall that the composition of these Lower Rhenish and North-West German Tumulus folk, blended, as we have seen, of Beaker, Corded-ware, and Single-grave people on a substratum closely akin to the Bell-urn and Neolithic B elements in Britain (pp. 271–2), can hardly be taken as anything but virtually identical with that of the Beaker immigrants who passed over to Britain in the early second millennium from this very quarter. In other words, if the Rhenish Tumulus people were Celtic or proto-Celtic, the same should be said of the Rhenish Beaker immigrants into Britain—that is, in any case, the B2 and A Beaker peoples of our sixth chapter (pp. 268, 273). Similarly, if the Rhône culture and their neighbours are Celtic or proto-Celtic, the same should hold good for the Early Bronze Age invaders of Brittany, and if for them, then also for the dissident group of them who crossed over to make the Early Bronze Age culture of Wessex (p. 316).
Bronze Age Britain, then, should be admitted Celtic to a like if not the same extent as the Continental West of the Tumulus cultures. For, as well as the Beaker immigrants, we have considerable affinities with the Continent in Neolithic substrata: on the one hand, in the Western people of our Neolithic A; on the other, in those of Neolithic B and their counterparts on the other side of the Narrow Seas, whose kinship may be supposed to go back to Mesolithic times. And if abroad the history of the spread of Celtic civilization westward is mainly that of the ‘Celticization’ of the Western and aboriginal peoples who had clung so long to Chalcolithic culture and the megalithic religion, the analogous process in the British Isles did not wait for the Celtic immigrations of the Late Bronze and Iron Ages: it was an affair in the first instance of the Bronze Age—begun by the northward and westward roving of groups of the Beaker folk, and maintained by the people we know from the food-vessel and its derivative classes of pottery, into and through the Middle Bronze Age. This will become clearer if we consider briefly the formation of the Middle Bronze Age in the British Isles and the cultural balance which it so distinctively represents.
The Age has long been regarded as one of fusion between the descendants of Beaker immigrants and Neolithic natives, and though both have turned out to consist of more complex population-groups than was formerly suspected, the period was certainly one in which these groups settled down in unity together. The commonly accepted symbol of this is the cinerary urn wherein the cremated remains of the dead came to be deposited, for the most part under barrows in the Early Bronze Age tradition introduced by the immigrants. But whereas the rite of cremation in the south of Britain is apparently the contribution of the Breton invaders of Wessex, responsible also for the practice of placing a pygmy offering-cup in the grave, yet the urn itself is to the outlying group in Brittany, and north to include the mixed Beaker and Barrow peoples of the Lower Rhine, Holland, and North-West Germany, where between the Weser and the Elbe ran their frontier with, the Germanic population of the Northern lands.