There was, however, a second major element in British life at this time. It shows itself in the less well understood traces of a group again called after one of the items in their catalogue, the Food-vessel folk. There are many burials in these “food-vessel” pots in northern England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the pottery itself seems to link back to that of the Peterborough assemblage. Like the earlier Peterborough people in the highland zone before them, the makers of the food-vessels seem to have been heavily involved in trade. It is quite proper to wonder whether the food-vessel pottery itself was made by local women who were married to traders who were middlemen in the transmission of Irish metal objects to north Germany and Scandinavia. The belt of high, relatively woodless country, from southwest to northeast, was already established as a natural route for inland trade. MORE INVASIONS About 1500 B.C., the situation became further complicated by the arrival of new people in the region of southern England anciently called Wessex. The traces suggest the Brittany coast of France as a source, and the people seem at first to have been a small but “heroic” group of aristocrats. Their “heroes” are buried with wealth and ceremony, surrounded by their axes and daggers of bronze, their gold ornaments, and amber and jet beads. These rich finds show that the trade-linkage these warriors patronized spread from the Baltic sources of amber to Mycenean Greece or even Egypt, as evidenced by glazed blue beads. The great visual trace of Wessex achievement is the final form of the spectacular sanctuary at Stonehenge. A wooden henge or circular monument was first made several hundred years earlier, but the site now received its great circles of stone uprights and lintels. The diameter of the surrounding ditch at Stonehenge is about 350 feet, the diameter of the inner circle of large stones is about 100 feet, and the tallest stone of the innermost horseshoe-shaped enclosure is 29 feet 8 inches high. One circle is made of blue stones which must have been transported from Pembrokeshire, 145 miles away as the crow flies. Recently, many carvings representing the profile of a standard type of bronze axe of the time, and several profiles of bronze daggers--one of which has been called Mycenean in type--have been found carved in the stones. We cannot, of course, describe the details of the religious ceremonies which must have been staged in Stonehenge, but we can certainly imagine the well-integrated and smoothly working culture which must have been necessary before such a great monument could have been built. “THIS ENGLAND”