Routledge Beaker Burials in Britain and North-West Europe 2600-1800 BC: An Ethnography of Death and Identity

Beaker Burials in Britain and North-West Europe 2600-1800 BC provides a comprehensive account of the current interpretations of Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age Beaker burials, monuments and their social and cultural contexts in Britain, Ireland and the maritime zone of North-West Europe, from Brittany to Jutland. Burials of the Beaker people have long held a special place in the European imagination because of their highly distinctive and exotic material culture associations, their connection with the spread of copper metallurgy, striking modes of funerary display, and apparent rapidity with which these spread across western and central Europe through population movement, exchange and indigenous adoption. The impact of Beaker people’s funerary practices, technologies, social ideals and cosmologies on ‘native’ communities led to diverse and often radical transformations in wider cultural repertoires, political organizations and social and economic life. Beaker Burials in Britain and North-West Europe 2600-1800 BC considers the Beaker people’s funerary record in context of the full range of interpretive frameworks, with comparative reference to wider sources of evidence. There is a particular focus on ethnographic description and interpretation of death ritual, funerary architecture and the social, political, religious and cosmological significance of burials, body treatment and monumentality. A thematic structure allows for the coverage of key topics such as cultural geography and interaction, funerary ritual, monuments and landscape, cultural and social identities, personhood, power and politics, death and living society, and cultural change and history.