New Perspectives on the Bell-Beaker Culture

Bell-Beaker culture artefacts are not unequivocal expressions of male status, but helped instead to maintain ritual and symbolic demarcations of gender difference. The gendered nature of cultural production explains part of the variability seen in Beaker assemblages. More generally the spread of the Bell-Beaker culture cannot be explained by regional trajectories of social evolution or structuration. It is a spatially extensive phenomenon and interpretations/explanations must recognise this. A scenario is presented which links the eastwards spread of Beaker pottery in central Europe to the importation of copper metallurgy into north-west Europe.