Bronze Age beaker, East Yorkshire, c.2000BC
Some of the decoration on this pot was made with fingernail marks. If you look carefully you can see the marks someone made over 4000 years ago. It shows us that people have always liked to decorate special objects.
This pottery beaker would have been filled with a drink called mead. It was buried with an important personâs body. The drink was to help them in the after-life, the place they went to when they died.
This beaker is from an excavation by J.R.Mortimer at Garton Slack, in East Yorkshire.
In North West Europe the custom of placing pots in graves became popular in the Neolithic period. 4500 years ago you might have been buried with a beaker of mead like this. These beakers are from a period between the stone age and the bronze age. The people of this period are sometimes nicknamed the âbeaker peopleâ as we know little else about them.
However, 4000 years ago you might have been buried with a food vessel with porridge or ale. Around 3500 years ago you would have been cremated and put in the pot yourself.
Some graves were deliberately dug in older barrows, linking them to their past and ancestors. The process was to say âfarewellâ and to prepare the body for the afterlife. Death was seen as a stage in a journey, not the end.
John Robert Mortimer (1825-1911) was a East Yorkshire corn merchant. He became one of the most highly-regarded archaeologists in England. Following his death, the collection was purchased by Hull Corporation. Many of its treasures can today be seen in the galleries of the Hull & East Riding Museum.
