The story of Surmir, the archer, Gothic architecture and the Bell Beaker phenomenon

Abstract

The ways in which the “Bell Beaker package” spread across most of Central and Western Europe may have been different from region to region. Prestigious artefacts circulated through exchange, migration by infiltration, interregional marriages and mobility of individuals. This, however, does not explain why people from geographically and culturally distant regions suddenly shared a distinct uniform style and symbolic system. The new symbolic system and the package of significant artefacts helped to reinforce collective identity and maintained a range of spiritual activities. Within these individualised funerary practices people emphasised communication with their ancestors and a display of their social status, as well as confirmation of social hierarchy and reinforcement of a genealogical system of hereditary wealth of individuals and families. I believe that this unification and rapid spread of shared uniformity occurred as a result of a common ideology that used the new assemblage of the Bell Beaker package as a formal expression of symbolical and cosmological unity.