down         ANCIENT SHIPPING by land and sea Bronze Age map from The Times Atlas of Past Worlds, 1989 The red lines show the overland trade routes, now known as amber routes A direct passage across the North Sea may also be suspected "Inhumation in (tree-trunk) coffins was already starting to be practised in Schleswig-Holstein in the beginnings of its Bronze Age ... especially in Jutland. ... The same rite of boat- or coffin-burial appears simultaneously in Britain in the middle centuries of the second millenium, when the North Sea trade route was flourishing ... penetrating the Wessex culture ... but more prominent on the east coast, especially in Yorkshire, where the Irish route over the Pennines reached the sea. The ... Gristhorpe coffin-burial near Scarborough ... the great barrow of Loose Howe on the Cleveland Moors ... serve to show how the same rite took hold among the seafarers of both sides of the North Sea between about 1600 and 1400 B.C." From The Prehistoric Foundations of Europe; C.F.C.Hawkes, Methuen 1940; pp 365-66. "The Wessex people were rich in Baltic amber no less than in Irish gold ... it becomes clear that they made a strong magnet on one flank of an Irish-Baltic trade whose richest exchange was in gold and amber. ... But the more direct routes between Ireland and the Baltic lay across North England and Scotland ..." Ibid, pp 324-25.        main index         click here for Hyperborean amber route click on map below for history of early Friesland the circle outlines the cradle of the modern occident bird   divide   god   man   other   sea   sun next ship index of picture collages main index

North Sea Bronze Age traffic flourished for 2,000 years
before the Angles came to Anglia

amber was petrified sunlight

© Charles Harrison Wallace 2000
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