Housed at the Marischal Museum at Aberdeen University (Scotland) is a collection of some very old "folks" who have a story to tell.
     The Bronze-Age skeletal remains of 23 men and women have been in the care of the University for a century, but now the 4,000 year-old bones will have their chance to reveal the lifestyles they lead in the Northeast of Britian thousands of years ago.
     The skeletons were transferred to Sheffield University in Scotland and will be analysed in a project that is being funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the latest analytical technology will be utilized to answer the questions that have intriqued generations of anthropologists and archeologists.
     Since the 19th century, there has been an arguement over wheather the burial pots, or "Beakers", heralded the arival of continental migrants around 2400 to 2200 BCE.
     These ancient people have been credited with introducing metalworking to Britian, spreading the Indo-European languages and building Stonehenge.
     And there has also been a decades-old arguement between prehistorians that the changes in material culture were due in part to a "Beaker Package", rather than a wave of immigration.
     However, Isotope results from the Amesbury Archer, the so-called "King of Stonehenge", indicate that he grew up in Continental Europe.  (Isotopes are two or more nuclides that share the same atomic number, constituting the same element, but the difference is the mass number. Isotopes of a given element have the same number of [nucular] protons, but a different number of neutrons).
     The project will also analyse stronium (an alkaline earth element, atomic #38/symbol Sr.), oxygen, lead, sulphur, hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen isotopes in the teeth of the skeletons to study the migratory path these people took during their lives.
     The Beaker People have waited 4,000 years to tell their story through the future of technology. It will be worth listening to.  

Source:TheHerald.co.uk(27 July 2005)