Tentatively, after about 1400 B.C. and almost completely over the whole island by 1200 B.C., Britain became the scene of cremation burials in urns. We know very little of the people themselves. None of their settlements have been identified, although there is evidence that they grew barley and made enclosures for cattle. The urns used for the burials seem to have antecedents in the pottery of the Food-vessel folk, and there are some other links with earlier British traditions. In Lancashire, a wooden circle seems to have been built about a grave with cremated burials in urns. Even occasional instances of cremation may be noticed earlier in Britain, and it is not clear what, if any, connection the British cremation burials in urns have with the classic _Urnfields_ which were now beginning in the east Mediterranean and which we shall mention below. The British cremation-burial-in-urns folk survived a long time in the highland zone. In the general British scheme, they make up what is called the “Middle Bronze Age,” but in the highland zone they last until after 900 B.C. and are considered to be a specialized highland “Late Bronze Age.” In the highland zone, these later cremation-burial folk seem to have continued the older Food-vessel tradition of being middlemen in the metal market. Granting that our knowledge of this phase of British prehistory is very restricted because the cremations have left so little for the archeologist, it does not appear that the cremation-burial-urn folk can be sharply set off from their immediate predecessors. But change on a grander scale was on the way. REVERBERATIONS FROM CENTRAL EUROPE In the centuries immediately following 1000 B.C., we see with fair clarity two phases of a cultural process which must have been going on for some time. Certainly several of the invasions we have already described in this chapter were due to earlier phases of the same cultural process, but we could not see the details. [Illustration: SLASHING SWORD] Around 1200 B.C. central Europe was upset by the spread of the so-called Urnfield folk, who practiced cremation burial in urns and whom we also know to have been possessors of long, slashing swords and the horse. I told you above that we have no idea that the Urnfield folk proper were in any way connected with the people who made cremation-burial-urn cemeteries a century or so earlier in Britain. It has been supposed that the Urnfield folk themselves may have shared ideas with the people who sacked Troy. We know that the Urnfield pressure from central Europe displaced other people in northern France, and perhaps in northwestern Germany, and that this reverberated into Britain about 1000 B.C. Soon after 750 B.C., the same thing happened again. This time, the pressure from central Europe came from the Hallstatt folk who were iron tool makers: the reverberation brought people from the western Alpine region across the Channel into Britain.