February ii, 1915J 



NATURE 



Ht 



by hcT daughter, Henrietta Litchfield, two vols., illus- 

 trated ; The Place-\ames of England and \\ales. Rev. 

 J. B. Johnston; A Historj' of the Gold Coast and 

 Ashanti, from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of 

 the Twentieth Centur}-, W. W. Claridge, two vols., 

 with map. George Routledge and Sons, Ltd.. and 

 Kegan Paul and Co.. Ltd. — A DictionarA- of Occult- 

 ism. L. Spence ; Giordano Bruno : his Life, Thought, 

 and Martyrdom, W. Boulting; Best Books, part iii. 

 (Classes F-K), W. Swan Sonnenschein. Williams and 

 Xorgate. — On the Cosmic Relations : Being an Out- 

 line of the Evolution of the Relations between the 

 Soul and the External Universe, and a Summarv- of 

 the Recognised Relations that are still so immaturelv 

 evolved as to be little understood, H. Holt, two vols.' 



THE BRONZE- A GE IN VA DERS 

 BRITAIN.^ 



OF 



COMEWHERE about the year 2000 B.C., when the 

 *~-^ peoples of Western Europe were beginning to 

 learn the uses of bronze and to alter the style of their 

 pottery, a race of invaders began to reach our shores 

 who were totally different from any race which had 

 lived in Britain before that time. The ancient British, 

 although of various strains, were all of them of the 

 long-headed type ; they had projecting occiputs ; their 

 heads appeared as if compressed from side to side. 

 But those Bronze age invaders had rounded heads, 

 with flat occiputs ; their heads had the appearance of 

 having been compressed from back to front. 

 European anthropologists name this round-head type 

 of man "Celtic"; they regard him as an offshoot 

 from the racial type which now attains its greatest 

 purity , in the mountainous countries of Central 

 Europe — the "'Alpine" type of race. We may take 

 the Bavarian or Savoyard as good modern representa- 

 tives of the ancient Celtic or Alpine type. They are 

 usually men of short stature, with dark hair and 

 skins, with short and wide faces, regularly modelled 

 features, and rounded heads. The men who invaded 

 England early in the Bronze age and buried their 

 dead in round barrows, were of a different build of 

 body; they were strong, tall, and muscular; they had 

 long faces, rugged features, prominent noses, over- 

 hanging e\'ebrow ridges; we have reason to believe 

 they were fair in hair and complexion. Although 

 these early invaders of Britain had the "".Xlpine" 

 form of head, it is not among the modern inhabitants 

 of Savoy or of Bavaria that we can hope to find 

 their ancestral stock. We are all agreed that they 

 were continental in origin. Those who have studied 

 our Bronze-age invaders — who have investigated their 

 physical characters, their methods of burial, their 

 domestic animals, their pottery, their weapons and 

 ornaments, are almost unanimously of opinion that 

 we must seek their ancestral home somewhere in that 

 part of Europe which now lies within the bounds of 

 the German Empire. Every year our knowledge of 

 Europe during pre-Roman times becomes more exact, 

 and I propose, once again, in the light of more recent 

 discoveries, and particularly from the point of view 

 of one who is a student of the human body, to seek 

 for the origin of our round-headed ancestr\-. We 

 shall find that this early invasion of England was but 

 a side eddy of a racial movement which affected 

 almost the whole population of Europe. 



How far the British people were exterminated and 

 replaced during the invasions which took place after 

 Roman domination had come to an end is not easily 

 decided. If the Anglo-Saxons brought a new tongue to 



1 Presidential Ad-'ress delivered to the Royal Antbropoit^cial Institute 

 of Great Britain and Ireland, on January 26, by Prof. Arthur Keith, F.R.S. 



England they brought no new phyisical type ; in stature 

 and in head form we cannot distinguish them with 

 certainty from the Britons of the period of Roman 

 occupation, nor from the older pre-Roman population. 

 But in this earlier invasion, which began 2000 years 

 before the Roman legions crossed the Straits of 

 Dover, we have not the same difficulty; so distinctive 

 is the head-form of the Bronze-age or '* round- 

 barrow " men that we recognise the type at a glance ; 

 the type was then new to England. Along all thf 

 counties on our eastern seaboard, from Caithness in 

 the north to Dorset in the south, we have found the 

 graves of this distinctive round-headed race. The 

 Hon. John .Abercromby, who is our leading authority 

 on British potten.-, weapons, and ornaments of the 

 Bronze age, is of opinion that the round-hen<i.-.i 

 invaders were few in number, and that, after ga" 

 a foothold in Kent, they gradually ^read northw : 

 and westwards throughout our country. With that 

 conception I cannot agree. The south-eastern part 

 of England was apparently only one of the landing 

 places; the researches which were carried out bv 

 Canon Greenwell and Mr. Mortimer leave us in Jio 

 doubt as to their arrival in eastern Yorkshire; the 

 round-heads became masters of it. The counties 

 which bound the Firth of Forth formed another centre 

 of the invasion ; the round-heads conquered that part 

 of Scotland. For our present purpose their exten- 

 sive settlement in the lowlands of .\berdeenshire and 

 along the southern shores of the Moray Firth are the 

 most important. In recent years Prof. Reid and Dr. 

 Alex. Low, of the University of Aberdeen, have made 

 us familiar with the Bronze-age men of the north- 

 east of Scotland. These more northern invaders had 

 their own peculiar kind of round-headedness, a kind 

 remarkably fiat on the crown — just as they had their 

 own kind of graves, their own kind of potten>- and 

 ornaments. Sixty years ago that pioneer of anthro- 

 f)ology— Prof. .Anders Retzius, of Stockholm — identi- 

 fied a certain physical t^-pe in Aberdeenshire as similar 

 to that which he had seen amongst the peoples in 

 some of the Baltic provinces of Russia. The invaders 

 who settled on the shores of the Firth of Forth, in 

 Yorkshire, and in the south-eastern part of England 

 have, like their more northern allies, their own dis- 

 tinctive traits in form of head, and in fashions of 

 weapons and pottery. We find a difficulty in explain- 

 ing the distribution and characters of the " round- 

 head" invasion, if we suppose, as Mr. Abercromby 

 does, that there was only one point of landing, but 

 all our facts find an easy solution if we suppose that 

 the' invasion which occurred in the Bronze age, was 

 similar in character and in extent to that which took 

 place in .\nglo-Sa.xon times. 



We must presume, then, that those round-headed 

 people, like the Anglo-Saxons, crossed the North Sea ; 

 we must presume further that the "round-heads'" 

 were then the dominant power in the North Sea. 

 There are certain considerations which make such 

 a presumption difficult to accept. Then, as now, the 

 Continental shores of the North Sea were inhabited 

 chieflv by long-headed peoples. We do know, however, 

 that before the beginning of the Bronze age tht "" round- 

 heads " had broken through from the hinterlands 

 of Germany and had reached the coast at various 

 points between Scandinavia in the north and Brittany 

 in the south. It is somewhat difficult to believe that 

 a round-headed people were piaster mariners; sea- 

 |X)wer has usually been the appanage of long-headed 

 ijationalities ; the Spaniards, the Portuguese, the 

 Dutch. Norwegians, and British were, and are. pre- 

 dominantly long-headed. However that may be, we 

 know the round-heads reached the Orkneys, the 

 Hebrides, and the western shores. They spread 

 across the lowlands of Scotland and crossed over to 



NO. 2363, VOL. 94] 



