A Bronze Age Brexit: why did these Britons mysteriously cut themselves off from Europe?

Why did they do it? And was it a Bronze Age Brexit?

The end of the Neolithic period

This was the tail end of the Neolithic period, an era characterised by settled farming, communal living, and the construction of some of the world’s most famous – and mysterious – architectural achievements.

On the continent, new ideas and materials were moving quickly through a complex network of trade and migration. The earliest signs of the Bronze Age – defined by the use of metal tools and weapons made by combining copper and tin – were already emerging.

• Read more | 8 little-known prehistoric sites in Britain

But in Britain, the Neolithic peoples – descendants of early farming migrants who had arrived around 4000 BC – stopped engaging with that continental momentum.

“They were not plugged into the exchange networks of the whole of Europe,” Parker Pearson explains. “Given that metallurgy was available, given that knowledge of the wheel was also there on the continent, they were just blocking off all these potential innovations.”

An early split from Europe

The archaeological record bears this out. Pottery styles, burial practices and architectural forms all diverge sharply from those seen across the channel.

“We can also see that there’s absolutely no traded material going either way across the channel,” he adds. “The traditions that developed in Britain were completely different, both in architectural [terms] and [in] small items like pottery.”

However, Parker Pearson doesn’t characterise this divergence as a rejection of progress. It was during this era that these communities produced some of the most iconic monuments in British and Irish history.

“It’s within that period of isolation that they built Stonehenge and other major stone circles,” Parker Pearson says, “as well as the big henge enclosures – circular, ditched and banked structures.” These are styles that are, he says, “entirely restricted to the islands of Britain and Ireland.”

These monuments are a hallmark of what’s known as Late Neolithic Britain and Ireland, a period marked by spiritual and ritual innovation rather than technological progress. Stonehenge and Avebury in Wiltshire, and Newgrange in County Meath, Ireland are key examples, but there are more than 70 other ceremonial centres that became key locations for gatherings, ceremonies, and seasonal feasting.

• Read more | Visiting Avebury and Silbury Hill, the site of Neolithic Britons

But these were not urban or densely populated societies. “It’s a community that is also without villages,” Parker Pearson says. “We have just single farmsteads scattered across southern Britain, and there are key places – centres for ceremonial and monumental activity.”

Rather than staying in one place, these communities could travel. “People were not quite nomadic, but highly mobile,” he adds. “They were living in different places at different times of the year, moving with their animals – their cattle and their pigs – to be at the ceremonial centres for particular times of year, for feasting.”

Then, around 2500 BC, everything changed.

The Beaker takeover

The Beaker people, so named by historians and archaeologists after their distinctive bell-shaped pottery vessels, began to arrive from continental Europe around 2500 BC, bringing this era of isolation to an end.

They brought with them not only new technologies like metalworking and individual burial customs, but also different genetic lineages. Within a few centuries, they had largely replaced the native Neolithic population, in both cultural and biological terms.

“Within some 16 generations of the initial Beaker arrival, we’re seeing the very large replacement of the gene pool. The population – 400 years later, 16 generations later – they've really got only about 10% of that British farmers DNA in their genome.”

So, the Beakers’ arrival set Britain on a new course, bringing technologies that would tie Britain closer to the progress elsewhere in the world. But why had Britain withdrawn in the first place?

“We don’t have any idea,” Parker Pearson concedes. However, recent breakthroughs in ancient DNA analysis point to one potential cause: disease.

• Read more | How was Stonehenge built?

“One of the really interesting results we’re getting from DNA analysis is that we can see episodes of Bubonic Plague,” he says. The bacteria that cause plague, Yersinia pestis, can survive in ancient human remains, and has now been found in the teeth of people buried in Neolithic Britain.

“We know that there were at least two cases of Bubonic Plague in Britain,” he says. “One [occurred] before the Beaker people even arrived – around 2900–2800 BC, so about four centuries earlier. And then we’ve got a second event some 300 years after their initial arrival,” which can be seen in evidence “from burials in different parts of Britain”.

In both cases, the presence of plague raises questions about population movement.

• Read more | Your guide to the Black Death

“It is possible that we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg there,” Parker Pearson explains, “and that the whole point about these large-scale migrations is that they act as a vector for the spreading of diseases across the whole continent.”

It’s possible, then, that Britain’s decision to isolate itself wasn’t purely social or economic. Fear of disease – and attempts to halt its spread – may have played a key role in severing links with the continent, centuries earlier.

This dramatic period of separation ended with the arrival of the Beaker people, who reconnected Britain with Europe and ushered in the Bronze Age proper. But for three centuries before that, Britain stood alone and independent – isolated and insular, but also culturally unique, innovative in other ways that echo to the present day.

Mike Parker Pearson was speaking to Spencer Mizen on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.