A glimpse of the Beaker period

The Bell Beaker Phenomenon is a European tradition with shared traits visible through its material culture and burial traditions. Its name derives from the distinctive shape of the vessels placed in graves, assumed by antiquarians to be drinking vessels. The earliest Beaker graves in Britain date to 2,400 BC, and the tradition persisted for over 500 years.

The evidence provided by ancient DNA analysis reveals the earliest Beaker activity in Britain results from large-scale migration from the continent. Isotopic analysis has also revealed long-distance movement of some individuals, such as the Amesbury Archer, buried near Stonehenge.

The excavations at Sizewell C on the Suffolk coast have started to reveal a whole landscape of Beaker activity. Unlike in other areas of the country, where Beaker remains are mainly known from graves, our excavations are beginning to show evidence of where people lived and worked the land, including revealing pits and possible structures.

The pit clusters often contain dark, organic-rich fills, containing pottery sherds, worked flints, and pieces of charcoal with occasional carbonised hazelnut shells and cereal grains. The acidic nature of the sandy soils means that bone does not survived, otherwise animal bone might have survived in the pits too. The general nature of the pit fills suggests that they contained domestic refuse, maybe taken from midden deposits or rubbish heaps.

Beaker activity has been identified from multiple sites across the whole Sizewell C excavation area, ranging from intense pit clusters at Goose Hill containing hundreds of pottery sherds to horseshoe shaped features and further pit clusters at the Wetland Recreation Area. Further major activity was also discovered Broom Walk where we recovered over a thousand pottery sherds and 3,250 worked flints! These finds were mostly located in shallow circular or irregular depressions (interpreted as either round hut bases or midden spreads).

A different kind of potential building was revealed at the Land East of Eastlands site. Here we found a double line of postholes, roughly rectangular or trapezium-shaped in plan. Beaker structures are rare nationally across England and tend to be round or oval in shape. But this elongated building, orientated north-west to south-east, bears some similarities to the Beaker ‘almond-shaped’ houses of Brittany or the boat-shaped buildings of the Scottish islands.

The material culture of the people living locally duringt this period is represented largely by finds of pottery and flint tools. Flint tools we typically associate with Beaker activity are barbed-and-tanged arrowheads, thumbnail scrapers and plano-convex knives. There would no doubt have been many more objects in use across this landscape, such as basketry, textiles and wood, but these have not survived. However, it is in the malleable clay that was used for the pottery vessels that people have really left their mark.

Pottery finds are helping us to understand the decisions the Sizewell potters made when preparing their clay. They often added crushed up pottery, known as grog, to their clay recipe. This may have been for technical reasons (for example, to help prevent problems during firing), but there may also have been a symbolic association with adding fragments from another vessel to your own. The Sizewell potters sometimes added burnt, crushed flint, and occasionally included cremated bone. We’re currently unable to tell if the bone is human or animal, but either way, it is a very unusual addition.

The Sizewell potters used a range of tools and techniques to decorate their vessels. These include, toothed combs, to create horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines, as well as more complex infilled geometric shapes, finger-tips/nails and small bones, such as bird bones. One little cup found has what is known as ‘barbed-wire’ impressed decoration, probably made by wrapping a cord around a sharp flint and then pressing it into the surface of the clay. This form of decoration was used on Beaker pottery in East Anglia, but it is also seen on Beaker vessels in the Netherlands and Germany.

Image: Beaker vessel decorated with comb impressions

Perhaps the most impressive of all the Beaker sherds found to date came from a small pit that appears to have been dug especially for it. The external surface of this vessel was decorated by rows of closely spaced deep fingertip impressions, between horizontal cordons or ridges. Most unusually, the internal surface is also covered with closely spaced fingertip and fingernail impressions. There would have been over 1000 fingertip impressions made into the surfaces of this vessel! This vessel is particularly large, and again it bears similarities to the ‘potbeakers’ found from sites in the Netherlands and Germany.

The range of vessel sizes and decoration suggests that these vessels were designed for different purposes. The smaller ones were perhaps intended to be individual drinking and serving vessels, whilst some of the larger ones might have been used to prepare and cook food, and as storage vessels.

The decoration on the Sizewell Beakers might help us to understand the social networks that these vessels were used in. The pots would have been immediately recognisable as belonging to the Beaker ceramic tradition, and whether they were used by people originating from north-western Europe, or by those already living in East Anglia, they demonstrate interactions between people on both sides of the North Sea during this period.

The excavations at Sizewell are therefore revealing fascinating insights into the Beaker culture of the East Anglian landscape around 4000 years ago.

Images: Beaker pottery sherds from Sizewell C