Note 6 — End of PREHISTORY

The British authors use the term “Beaker folk” to mean both archeological assemblage and human physical type. They speak of a “... tall, heavy-boned, rugged, and round-headed” strain which they take to have developed, apparently in the Rhineland, by a mixture of the original (Spanish?) beaker-makers and the northeast European battle-axe makers. However, since the science of physical anthropology is very much in flux at the moment, and since I am not able to assess the evidence for these physical types, I do not use the term “folk” in this book with its usual meaning of standardized physical type. When I use “folk” here, I mean simply the makers of a given archeological assemblage. The difficulty only comes when assemblages are named for some item in them; it is too clumsy to make an adjective of the item and refer to a “beakerian” assemblage.