The period when bronze first appeared in Britain can only be approximately fixed. It is certain that in the south-eastern districts iron tools began to be used not later than the fourth century before the Christian era.[499] The final period of the British Bronze Age is marked by the discovery of bronze-founders’ hoards, all of which contain tools or fragments of tools which are known as socketed celts, or other socketed instruments which were contemporary with them. These hoards are so numerous and so widely diffused, and the objects of which they are composed are so varied in form, that the time during which they were deposited cannot, in the opinion of experts, have been less than four or five hundred years. But before the first socketed celt was cast the bronze culture passed through earlier stages, during which the flat celts that resembled those of stone were being used, and then gradually giving way to improved forms, which in their turn were succeeded by later developments. The veteran archaeologist who has handled and examined almost every specimen of these numerous varieties has arrived at the conclusion that the British Bronze Age must have begun at the latest between 1400 and 1200 B.C.;[500] and while no one would now contend for a later date, there are some who maintain that bronze was first used in Britain twenty centuries before the Christian era.[501]
[Sidenote: Physical characters of the late neolithic and early bronze-using invaders of Britain.]
After the Bronze Age set in, as before the close of the preceding period, bands of invaders, wholly different in physical type from the neolithic aborigines, landed successively through long ages upon our eastern and southern shores. They came from the Netherlands, from Denmark and its islands, perhaps also from Scandinavia and from Gaul. They must not, however, be identified either with the invaders who introduced the Celtic language into Gaul or with any Celtic-speaking people. There is no evidence, and it is in the last degree improbable, that any Celtic tribe had appeared in Gaul at the time when the alien immigrants began to settle in Britain, or that Celtic had then taken shape as a branch of the Indo-European language. Those immigrants have often been described as a tall, stalwart, round-headed race; but the evidence of sepulchral remains shows that they sprang from various stocks. Those of the type which is commonly regarded as specially characteristic of the Bronze Age were taller and much more powerfully built than the aborigines: their skulls were comparatively short and round; they had massive jaws, strongly marked features, enormously prominent brow ridges and retreating foreheads; and their countenances must have been stern, forbidding, and sometimes almost brutal. Similar skulls, which have much in common with the primitive Neanderthal type,[502] have been exhumed from neolithic tombs in Denmark and the Danish island of Falster. But the skeletons which have been found in some of the oldest Scottish cists belonged to men whose average height, although they were sturdy and thickset, was barely five feet three inches, and whose skulls, shorter and rounder than the others, as well as their milder features, proved that they were an offshoot of the so-called Alpine race of Central Europe, of which there were numerous representatives in Gaul. Again there were tall men with skulls of an intermediate type; while others, who combined harsh features and projecting brows with narrow heads, and whose stature was often great, would seem to have been the offspring of intermarriage between the older and the newer inhabitants. Not a single skeleton of the characteristic British round-barrow type is known to have been discovered on French soil: the round-headed inhabitants of Gaul were as conspicuously short as those of Britain were generally tall; nor, excluding the Britons of the Alpine stock, was there any physical resemblance between the two peoples. The British invaders of the Alpine stock, judging from the pottery which was found with their skeletons, came for the most part, as we shall afterwards see, not from Gaul but from the valley of the Rhine. Moreover, the round-headed people of Gaul settled there first early in the Neolithic Age, before a Celtic word was spoken; and although their descendants formed the substratum of the Gallic population who, in Caesar’s time, called themselves Celts, that name was introduced by conquerors of a wholly different stock. Probably a Celtic invasion of Britain took place before the British Iron Age began: but the remains of such invaders are not recognizable in any British graves.[503]