Book

Background to Beakers

Newly published: ‘Background to Beakers’; inquiries into regional cultural backgrounds of the Bell Beaker Complex. Harry Fokkens / Franco Nicolis (eds.).

Author

Harry Fokkens / Franco Nicolis

Date

01 January 2012

The book is a collection of articles by authors that gave a presentation in the Background to Beakers on the 2010 EAA conference in The Hague. The aim of the session was not to search for the origins of Bell Beakers, or for typological similarities, but in stead to discuss the many different ways in which Bell Beakers were incorporated in regional sequences. Our expectation was that these different cultural backgrounds, especially in settlement contexts, and the different ways in which the Bell Beaker ‘idea’ was regionally interpreted or translated, could tell us more about its character than we know from looking at  grave goods alone.

The result is presented in the present book: eight chapters about different backgrounds to Beakers. All contributors in one way or another described the process of the introduction of Beakers in different cultural environments. What is interesting, is that though the description of the process is similar in most regions, the interpretation of the process is very much different everywhere.

The book has been published by  Sidestone Press and is available also in Open Access.