The Typology & Origins of Beakers in Wales

The recent publication by Dr H. N. Savory of a corpus of beakers found in Wales enables us, for the first time as far as that part of Britain is concerned, to draw conclusions about the beaker cultures based on a considerable body of evidence from an area forming a geographical unit within the Highland Zone. In his discussion of this, Savory has raised general questions of considerable interest with regard to the origins and development of the British beaker cultures, and in particular to the derivation and spread of the A-beaker culture. The purpose of the present paper is to re-examine this evidence and to supplement it with the evidence from beaker graves in Wales (tabulated in Appendix I), including burials of beaker type not actually accompanied by pottery (Appendix II). The conclusions reached differ in some respects from those of Savory. The belief formerly held that Wales is poor in beakers is no longer tenable. The precise number is of course uncertain since the sherds from sandhill sites cannot be allocated to an exact number of vessels, but it seems clear that at least 64 separate beakers must be represented, and perhaps fragments of an additional number whose total is unknown. Not all of these survive in their entirety: only about half have been preserved either intact or sufficiently complete for their shapes and the main outlines of their decoration to be ascertained and all these are illustrated in figs. 1–7; but even the unrestorable fragments preserve elements of decoration and can tell us much about the vessels to which they originally belonged.