Instead Britain, together with the rest of Northwest Europe, has been conceived of lying beyond a “Chalcolithic frontier” (Brodie 1997). In Britain, the early identification of copper-using communities did not lead either to the acceptance of a Chalcolithic or to any universal models of the groups involved as occurred throughout much of continental Europe. This technological definition has provided a framework upon which to propose ideas of Chalcolithic societies that are distinctive from their predecessors.
The concept of a Chalcolithic period is fundamentally underpinned by the adoption of copper metallurgy in the apparent absence of tin alloying. Keywords: Niersen, Holwerda, Late Neolithic, burial mound, Bell Beaker, physical anthropology, barrows, burial chamber, animal bones, disarticulated remains, secondary burial. The specific position of some skeletal remains and the description by Holwerda allow us to interpret the grave as a small open burial chamber on top of which a barrow was constructed. Surprisingly not only human remains were uncovered, but also two bones belonging to a large mammal (a cow or a horse). In this article it will be argued that this grave contained not only the remains of a female in crouched position, but also the disarticulated remains of two more individuals placed at the back of the grave. A new physical anthropological analysis, paying particular attention to the taphonomy in the grave, and a critical review of what Holwerda observed in the field has allowed us to re-interpret the grave. The grave presents a rare insight into Beaker graves in the Netherlands, where skeletal remains are rarely preserved. The preservation of the bones, extremely rare on the Dutch sandy upland, motivated Holwerda to lift the grave and transport it to the National Museum of Antiquities (RMO).
The Niersen Beaker burial contained the human skeletal remains of multiple individuals. In 1907, Holwerda uncovered an exceptional primary grave underneath a barrow on the eastern slope of the ice-pushed ridge of the Veluwe.
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