2500–2000 BC

Regular traffic across the English Channel and invasion by New Stone Age long-headed agriculturists, who domesticated animals, practised flint-mining on a large scale and made crude ornamented pottery which has affinities with the ware found in burials in the Baltic islands of Bornholm and Aland. They came from Libya, by way of Spain, Southern and Northern France, or by way of Spain, Portugal and Brittany; some of them went on from France to the Baltic, and then crossed over into Eastern England after trade contact with the Black Sea area. They introduced megalithic burials of the long-barrow style found in the Paris area, with inhumation but with little funeral furniture except the leafshaped arrow-head, the manufacture of which goes back to the Old Stone Age; the leaves copied are apparently the crack-willow, or purple osier, and the elder. Sometimes a leaf-shaped ‘port-hole’ is knocked out between two contiguous slabs of the burial chamber, the leaf copied being apparently the elder.