Ex-Christian

[The Grand Nudger]

We don't know much about them at all. The demographic replacement at the start of the bronze age was comprehensive. We're not sure, for example, that the solar cults were original to the sites even if they became instrumental to their use and later (re)construction. Both in the bronze age and in contemporary times. We know that bell beaker had a strong solar cult so it'd have been mighty convenient if the megalithic structures that the replaced inhabitants built coincidentally fit with the religion of the invading demographics. There are a few interesting things we've learned from genetics aside from their replacement. We didn't know for sure until recently that the three sites I mentioned were related. Not until we figured out that the remains interred were related, and at newgrange, the product of first order incest. This heavily implies some sort of ruling family and beyond that there's no evidence of that sort of organization in their society or, more broadly, in neolithic societies in general. It paints the picture of a people who might have -just- started to get their shit together when their whole world came down. The bell beaker culture would, itself, be replaced by proto-celtic...though the process was more cultural than demographic. Proto-celtic is likely a descendant/offshoot of bell beaker.

The people playing dressup now are reconstructionists and neopagans. I suppose one fun thing to note is that for many of them, there's this idea that they're honoring ancestral ritual or beliefs and sites, but we know that's not the case and literally can't be the case. In this, they're probably in the same situation as many of the bell beaker people were. Equal amounts unclear on the origin of the sites and their cultural possession of the same. It's a strained comparison, but imagine foreign people thousands of years in the future rediscovering the ruins of north america and building a religion based off of it that places them in the center. Imagine those people being replaced by another culture that does the same thing, and imagine them being wiped out by yet another group who then writes the very first history of the whole debacle from their own pov...the whole time making use of and alterations to the artifacts and sites...and that's where we are with what happened in britain from the late neolithic to the iron age.

My own personal interest comes in from the suspicion that proto-celtic "histories" from mythical or legendary accounts are actually some garbled version of this story.