About
2000 BC another great stride was taken as man learned how to smelt
and mix metals - copper, tin, gold and silver were being worked. By
1600 BC tools, weapons, utensils and ornaments were being produced in
an alloy of copper and tin known as bronze, this almost replaced
copper, giving the name Bronze Age to this period of technology.
Many
of these metal items have been found in Suffolk, - found in hoards
where they were buried for safety, or was the waste residue metal of
tinkers or metalsmiths. Swords, spearheads and axes were made, with a
good example of a bronze socketed axe found at Chediston. There is
also a copper ring and a twisted copper wire bracelet in the
Halesworth Museum which were found locally.
Flint
tools and implements were still being used, together with needles,
fishing hooks and harpoons which were made of bone or deer antler.
Pottery was often of a better quality than earlier examples, with
bowls more elaborately ornamented, using finger-tip impressions and
diamond and diagonal hatching in the decoration. About 1600 BC,
before the Bronze Age was under way, a group of settlers known as the
Beaker People came into Suffolk, so named from the shape of their
pottery. Some fragments of this have been found in the Halesworth
area, and a reconstruction of a beaker with its characteristic
geometric decoration has been made by Ron Manning using the coil
method. This method was in use before the potter's wheel was
introduced.
Bronze
Age settlements have been identified in Suffolk, and a Bronze Age
house at Mildenhall has been found which was 5.1m in circumference
with a porch which faced south-east. These settlers used large
amounts of pottery, they still worked flint, they grew cereals and
flax, making the latter into a coarse linen. The average man grew to
a height of 1.72m, and lived to an age of about 37 years; the women's
average height was 1 .6m and she died when about 34 years old.
Aerial
photographs of the Wenhaston Parish show a Bronze Age ring at the top
of Star Hill, on the left of the road going down between the Village
School and the Star Public House. There are also Bronze Age sites on
the edge of Wenhaston just within the Thorington Parish boundary.
The
dead were buried in round or long barrows, which were large mounds of
earth raised above the ground. Something like 110 barrows have
survived in Suffolk, with more than another 500 which have been
ploughed into the land over the years, but have been identified from
crop marks or aerial photographs.
In
Norfolk, over a thousand such burial barrows have been located, and
these, as with those in Suffolk, give us a good idea of the centres
of population at that time. In Suffolk large groups are concentrated
east of Ipswich, with very few in the Halesworth vicinity. Although
many of the dead are buried, others were cremated, and their ashes
buried in pottery urns. Some of the burials in the Ipswich to
Colchester area were laid in flat cemeteries instead of barrows.