Migrants who liked a drink

THE ‘Bell Beaker’ people appeared in Europe in the third millennium BC.

They are named for their pottery ‘beakers’, which were bell-shaped and have been found with traces of beer and mead in them. Their pottery skills are thought to have developed so they had containers to drink alcohol.

But the Bell Beaker people – known in Britain simply as the Beaker people – also left behind flint arrowheads, delicate metalwork and ornaments such as gold rings. They may even have invented the wheel, because their pottery is decorated with what appear to be fourwheeled wagons. Beaker pottery is thought to have fallen out of fashion during the Early Bronze Age, which began around 2,000 BC.