Archaeoastronomy in the British Isles - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 97

At a stroke the discovery removed, or should have removed,
many of the objections to the Thoms' and MacKie's concepts.
Clearly the Archer was highly placed in an organized society,
where he was cared for despite his disability, and he had achieved
that status despite - or even because of - having come to the area
from a great distance. He was buried with no fewer than five exam-
ples of a new ceramic ware, fine clay 'Bell Beakers'. After decades
of argument about whether the 'Beaker People' were invaders or
just the masters of a new technology, we know now that some
of them were incomers and were welcomed. It clearly was not
a society that consisted of small tribes and family groups, who
might come together for festivals or religious construction proj-
ects, but otherwise killed strangers and had no spare resources
to support a priesthood, far less to heap honors on an archer who
could hardly walk.
Nevertheless that image persisted, or took a long time to die.
At a temple site on the Dorset Cursus, part of another series of
unexplained ancient earthworks, a thousand years earlier between
3400 and 3200 b.c., a 30-year-old woman was buried with three
children: a girl aged 10, a boy aged 9, another girl aged 5. The two
girls may have been hers, but the boy definitely was not. From the
lead isotopes in all of their teeth, it seems that she came from the
Mendip Hills, 80 km to the north; she had moved south to Cam-
borne, adopted two of the children, come back to the Mendips
to have her own daughter, then come back to Camborne, where
she met her end. But was this evidence for a more compassionate,
more mobile society? Since the children were buried with her, per-
haps they'd all been killed as a punishment for her leaving [ 18 ].
However, still more evidence was accumulating for mobility
and trade. Great halls, partly used for storage, were found at Balbri-
die and at Warren Field, in Aberdeenshire, showing the existence
of large, stable communities [ 8 ]. Part of MacKie's thesis was that
flat-bottomed Grooved Ware, decorated by winding a cord around
the wet clay pot, was for the use of the priesthood who lived in
wooden henges and had furniture (Chap. 1 ). Now, more than a
thousand wattle-and-daub houses have been found with furni-
ture, cupboards, beds and hearths at Durrington Walls (Chap. 5 ),
although the wooden structure near Stonehenge was occupied for
less than 50 years [ 19 ] .