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The name Battle-axe people (corded ware culture) identifies
widely-scattered Early Bronze Age sites in Europe. Burial sites containing the characteristic corded ware, impressed with cords in the unfired clay, are known
in a wide area in northern, central and westen Europe: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Netherlands, northwest Germany, Denmark and southern parts of Norway and Sweden. Little is known of them. The name comes from the perforated cast copper-alloy battle-axes of a particular
double-bladed form that are found at archeological sites associated with them.
Their predecessors, the Beaker culture— if they were in fact a
separate people— copied the new axehead types in stone, but everywhere the arrival of the 'battle-axe' or 'corded-ware'
cultures mark the phasing out of the Neolithic.
Linguistic controversy surrounds the people whose burial sites have been found, whether they spoke an Indo-European language or not, and even whether a change of pottery type or
burying technique indicate a migration of people or merely the adoption of ideas.
Less controversial innovative features that distinguish the 'Battle-axe culture' from the earlier 'Beaker culture' that it infiltrated or simply superseded are the practice of
burying the dead singly (instead of in megalithic group burials) under round tumuli enclosing a wooden mortuary house (a
widespread practice), with grave goods.
For the first time in Europe, the bones of a domesticated horse are found in connection with the sites: the Tarpan, a forest pony that was native to Europe, but has been extinct since 1876. It is
possible that wheeled carts were used in the corded ware culture.
However, a people must have existed in Jutland and the near areas before
the Indo-Europeans arrived. The Germanic languages have a large number of non-Indo-European roots (especially sea terms; the first
Indo-European speakers lived in an inland area). One way to account for their existence is a language spoken in the area.
Logically, a living language must have speakers.
However this analysis ignores the fact that inland lakes fed by glacial meltwater and comparable in size to the North American
Great Lakes existed across central Asia until shortly before the historical period and thus it is possible that some
Indo-Europeans (the Germanic speakers perhaps) had nautical experience despite their inland origins.
The chief controversy centers on whether the Battle-axe people were the ones who supplied the non-Indo-European root-words in
Germanic languages. These are a group of words that are common to the Germanic tongues, but which are not found in other
Indo-European tongues, or whose root words are unlike the words of other kinds of
Indo-European speech. These words are often found in the fields that have to do with ships, decks,
keels, oars, and masts; another group of these words have to do with war, swords,
helmets, and shields. Other such words are quite homely, like wife, house, bite, and
chew. A few of these words are shared with the Celtic
tongues. Most of these words are shared by all the Germanic tongues; few are found elsewhere, and the ones for which
Indo-European roots have been put forth by the learned are quite unlike their word-kin in shape; there is great wrath among the wise about the beginnings of these words.
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