Bronze Age Britain

Page 3 of 3

• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Beaker people
• 3. Later Bronze Age
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Later Bronze Age

Textile production had also got under way by this time. Women would wear long woollen skirts and short tunics. The men wore knee-length wrap-around skirts, or kilt-like woollens, as well as tunics, cloaks and even one-piece garments. They were also clean-shaven, long-haired and wore round woollen hats.

The standard farming household consisted of two houses, a main living house and an out-house for cooking and textile production. The dead were cremated, and buried in small cemeteries behind each settlement. The large burial sites of the early Bronze Age were a thing of the past, as the land was now needed for agriculture.

The late Bronze Age was also signatured by advanced pottery-making techniques, and more sophisticated weapon-making. The Iron Age that followed it did not happen suddenly, but is thought to have started in Britain around 650 BC and finished around AD 43. Again, the knowledge of iron-making was brought to Britain by Europeans, who had already started to build the first blast furnaces.

To sum up, the period of Bronze Age man lasted for almost 1,500 years, a time that took the giant step from the Stone Age to the Iron Age.

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Published: 1998-06-01