I’m a lifelong learner, and I’m always interested in gaining knowledge about various topics. Whether it’s cosmology, history, or crochet, I’ve always got something new to obsess about. This post is a departure from my regular themes of travel and life abroad. It focuses on a recent topic of interest: pre-history.
I’ve been listening to a lot of the Tides of History Podcast recently. When I was at the National German Museum the other day, I spent some time in the pre-history section where they had items from the very distant past.
In the podcast, the host talks extensively about the intersection of the fields of archeology, (historical) linguistics, and now ancient DNA. For a long time, people only had archeology and linguistics, of course, so cultures were sometimes defined by the artifacts they left behind in settlements or graves.
This is a picture I took at the museum of some vessels from what is Germany today. They date somewhere between 2800 and 2300 BC to what has been called the Bell Beaker Culture. This period falls within what is often called The Bronze Age.
The Bell Beaker Culture name comes from the shape of the vessels found in archeological sites. And over the years, people looking into all of this history have expanded the definition of the people living in this part of the world at this time. The Bell Beaker package includes these types of vessels as well as other aspects of culture and living (types of graves used, metal work, language, etc).
With all of this, questions about how, when, and why ancient people migrated and intermingled have been asked. One theme that really gets highlighted in the Tides of History Podcast is that people have always been moving around and interacting with each other for various reasons.
Anyway, it’s all really fascinating to consider, and it was cool to see some of the Bell Beaker vessels at the museum.
Here’s an episode of The Tides of History about Bronze Age Europe.
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