Dr. A. H. Keane[1990] argues, in opposition to Rolleston’s view, that if any of the Round Barrow invaders had come from Scandinavia, ‘they must have spoken some Low German dialect, of which there are no clear traces in the tribal and place-names of the Bronze Age.’ The answer is, first, that, as Mr. C. H. Read[1991] suggests, they may have spoken not a Low German but a pre-Aryan dialect; and, secondly, that we know absolutely nothing about either the tribal or the place-names of Britain in the Bronze Age. Assuming that Low German tribal or place-names existed in Britain before the Celtic invasion, they would for the most part have been superseded by Celtic names, just as the Celtic invaders of Gaul generally substituted their own tribal and place-names for those of their predecessors, and just as in certain parts of Scotland Celtic names of rivers gave place to Norse names.[1992]
5. Messrs. J. Gray and J. F. Tocher infer from their observations of the physical characteristics of the population of West Aberdeenshire that ‘a tall, broad-headed, dark-haired, light-eyed people’, whom they regard as ‘the descendants of the men of the Bronze Age’, formerly inhabited Aberdeenshire, but were driven inland by later blond immigrants, who were shorter and had narrower heads, and whom they identify with North Germans.[1993] The resemblance of the tall dark people to modern Dalmatians[1994] is, they say, ‘significant when taken in conjunction with the fact that bronze first came into the British Isles from South-East Europe.’
‘The fact!’ But is it the fact? Archaeology has certainly shown that Britain, in the Bronze Age, was commercially connected with Northern France, which, as Mr. C. H. Read[1995] says, was ‘supplied to a certain extent from Italy’. But no archaeologist supposes that bronze was carried all the way from Italy, still less from Dalmatia, into Britain or even into Northern France by Italians or Dalmatians. It came through the methods of primitive commerce. Moreover, as we have already seen,[1996] ‘the men of the Bronze Age,’ by whom Messrs. Gray and Tocher mean the tall brachycephalic people of the round barrows, were still in their Stone Age when they began to invade Britain. A direct immigration from the coasts of the Adriatic into West Aberdeenshire or even Southern Britain is inconceivable; and if it had taken place gradually across the Continent, we should find that the immigrants had left traces of their presence on the way, which is not the case. Notwithstanding the thoroughness with which Messrs. Gray and Tocher conducted their investigation, I fear that it throws no new light upon the ethnology of Ancient Britain. After the successive invasions and immigrations, the internal migrations, and the intermarriages of 3,000 years, it is utterly impossible to establish by dint of even the most elaborate census of a living population the fact that the people of the Bronze Age even in West Aberdeenshire were ‘tall, broad-headed, dark-haired, and light-eyed’; and if they were, why only in West Aberdeenshire?