11 - People

Summary

For all the apparent lack of personal information that is available on the people of the European Bronze Age, much can be said about their appearance and identity as expressed through dress and ornament. One of the most abundant categories of material to survive is human skeletal material; another is the depictions of people and the remains of their clothing and ornaments. This chapter considers some of the types of evidence that provide information on the human beings who lived in the period and whose handwork, homes and graves have been examined in previous chapters.

Appearance

In terms of physical build, skeletal material gives good information on stature and robustness, and some indication of morphological features such as head shape. With the exception of the Ice Man, the reconstruction of facial characteristics has not yet had any impact on the buried people of Copper and Bronze Age Europe other than in Greece, but this line of approach has obvious potential.

Artistic depictions of people are of uncertain value, because naturalistic representation was frequently not the artist's aim. Thus one can no more imagine that all young men were the slender creatures seen in the Grevensv?ge figurines than that people in the Camonica valley were stick figures. Where there is equipment for fastening on or attachment to the body, such as rings, bracelets, corslets or helmets, all the indications are that size and physical type were not greatly different from those of modern populations; certainly the degree of variation is unlikely to have been much different from what can be seen at the present day.