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Stonehenge covers British archaeology in the same way as the Giza Plateau covers Egyptian and World Archaeology. It would be good to see the context how much of England was involved in the great project in Wiltshire.

Stonehenge

REUTERS at Yahoo published news about the Archer's grave near Stonehenge and the journalists made the header. Naturally rich graves and gold fires the imagination. They have dated the grave to 2300 BC and the golden items to 2470 BC. I suppose that we cannot expect a long living Archer. Anyway dating techniques are moving forward. They found also three copper knifes and they think they originate from France or Spain.

The elder date of the gold is interesting. Julian Richards expert on Stonehenge shows that there are two styles of beakers and the first style is calculated to 2400 to 1700 BC and the later from 2100 to 1500 BC. The finds sow a great variety of shapes in fact and the so-called bell-beaker is only one of the shapes they find as grave gift from this period. This tells us also that the later style did not take over completely.

Most interesting and amazing is that they have found that Archer came from the Alps. They have looked at his teeth that can tell such things. The younger man in the grave, probably his son was born in England.

We can compare these facts with what we know from Scandinavia. They have shown that they did not import copper to north for thousands years before the Bronze Age. Seemingly it begins with the slab cist/ wedge-tombs that we imported from Seine-Oise-Marne SOM districts in France they say. However they are very frequent at Ireland and they connect them with the copper-people since they have found copper in them.

Here on Dal we can maybe see copper prospecting and we get also their ritual and knowledge about their society
http://freepages.history.rootsweb.com/~catshaman/02slabc.htm
They were also missionizing for agriculture as we see from the pollen curves 2300 - 2100 BC. In Egypt there was no difference in the ritual when "going beneath" as dead, when sowing or when searching for metal. That was usually done in winter or the season of Hathor. But they were going into the fork of the Lady Isis.

They have earlier found "The Architect's" grave at Bush Barrow. Most interesting is the golden plate with the square that could be used for calculating the astronomy of the year. Practical astronomy is not as complicated as the Stonehenge. They only need sight stones and heel stones in the important directions. The expensive character of Stonehenge tells us that they put the focus on ritual. The golden plate must have been a good help of
learning more and keep the starry sky in memory. This together with the rock-carvings at Evenstorp is enough to prove that ritual astronomy gave the "leading stars" of the people.

To the context we can add that for making bronze they needed tin. Tin occurs only in some belts on earth. One is in Spain an another is in Cornwall. TIME TEAM shoved that they can still wash out raw tin from the rivers. In Scandinavia they imported much of the early bronzes from England and later from middle Europe…. Maybe I should mention that the earliest gold find in Sweden is from a wedge tomb in Gautland.

In most places they needed to import knowledge for the metal making. So no wonder if we find an imported metallurgist at Stonehenge. Bronze was not as pure as in our days and they tell about arsenic bronze when they used arsenic instead of tin. They think that the archetype smith Hephaistos got his bad legs because of working with arsenic bronze in the early days.

We can see that the metal use made people move a lot more than in the peaceful Stone Age when they raw material mostly was present in their neighbourhood.