In Ireland, daggers and other copper artefacts occur together with Bell Beaker pottery. There is little proof these people engaged in conquest so it is probable that a small band of immigrants introduced new ideas that were subsequently adopted by the native Irish. The evidence suggests that copper metallurgy came to Ireland as an established technology.
Ireland’s supplies of copper soon brought it into the trade routes between Britain and mainland Europe. Copper mining from the site at Ross Island (2400-1900 BC), a peninsula jutting out from the eastern edge of Lough Leane in Co. Kerry, Munster, coincided with a prolific output of axe heads, daggers, and halberds over the following four hundred years.
The newcomers preferred method of burial seems to have been singular (as opposed to communal) either in cist (stone-built boxes) or pit graves in the east, sometimes in cemeteries or under mounds, and in wedge tombs in the west. Cremation was also common. A settlement at Newgrange is associated with the earliest horse remains in Ireland.
Construction of wedge tombs tailed off from about 2200 BC, and while the tradition of large scale monument building was much reduced, the existing megalithic monuments continued to receive funerary and ritual artefacts.
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