[Sidenote: Why was Wiltshire exceptionally rich in ornaments?]
But why was it so abundant in Wiltshire? Why are gold, amber, and ivory rare even in the other southern counties, and wholly absent in Derbyshire, where round barrows are so numerous?[693] Why was the wealth of Wiltshire, so far as it can be estimated from the evidence of the graves, almost entirely concentrated in the south, and especially in the district round Stonehenge?[694] The modern population of South Wiltshire is very scanty: Salisbury Plain is barren; and the only soil at all fertile is in the valleys of the Wiley and the Avon.[695] One would have expected to find that the wealthiest part of Britain was the south-east; and that in the prehistoric period, as in the time of Caesar, the richest of all was Kent. Yet Kent has yielded very few glass beads or gold ornaments of the Bronze Age, and not one of amber or ivory. Doubtless there were once many barrows in the south-eastern counties which have been rifled or ploughed down; but jewellery was not deposited only in barrows; and so many bronze tools and weapons have been found in this region that the scarcity of barrows will not account for the rarity of ornaments. No explanation, so far as I know, has ever been offered; and I offer one with diffidence. First, it is not certain, and indeed improbable, that more than a small proportion of the riches that have been unearthed from the sepulchres of South Wiltshire belonged to families who had lived in the neighbourhood. The prodigious abundance of barrows around Stonehenge can only be explained by supposing that the bodies of chieftains, of their wives and children, were brought from distant parts to be buried there, as to a hallowed spot. Secondly, it is conceivable that the clans which, early in the Bronze Age, settled in South Wiltshire were numerically stronger, better organized, or better armed than their neighbours, and that much of their wealth may have been obtained by plunder.
[Sidenote: British trade and the spiral.]
Another indication of ancient British trade appears in the geographical distribution of the spiral. This form of decoration, which was common in Egyptian and Aegean art, travelled along the route of the amber trade by the Danube valley and Hungary to Scandinavia, and ultimately reached the British Isles, where, however, it occurs only on stone balls,[696] the stones of cists, and megalithic monuments, of which the most conspicuous example is New Grange in the county Meath. The spiral is not found on objects of the Bronze Age in Spain, nor in France except on the dolmen of Gavr’ Inis in Brittany and in a grave in the department of the Aube: in the British Isles it is confined to Scotland, Cumberland, Lancashire, and Northumberland, the north of Ireland,[697] and Merionethshire (which may have owed its solitary specimen to Irish influence); and, moreover, in the British Isles and Scandinavia spirals are connected by the same device.[698] Scandinavia therefore was undoubtedly the source from which the spiral reached Britain.[699]