The dagger, flint arrowheads, wrist guard and ceramic pot are all trappings of burials belonging to a group of people who arrived in the British Isles somewhere around 4500 years ago. The pot – or beaker – led to them being called the ‘Beaker people’ by historians, which seems a little unfair, given there were probably much more intriguing and exciting things about these folk and their lives than the things they placed in the ground with their dead. They chose some fabulous sites for their dead to be interred, often with splendid views over watery places. Why they did this or what we means, we don’t really know, which is one of the most attractive and enigmatic things about prehistory – we end up with more questions than answers. And so the archaeological investigations continue …

The objects here are now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Image: thanks to Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum and Art UK.