Bronze Age Britain period can be sub-divided into an earlier phase (2300 to 1200 BCE) and a later one (1200 – 700 BCE).

Beaker pottery appears in England around 2475–2315 cal BCE along with flat axes and burial practices of inhumation.

With the revised Stonehenge chronology, this is after the Sarsen Circle and trilithons were erected at Stonehenge.

Believed to be of Iberian origin, (modern day Spain and Portugal), Beaker techniques bring to Britain the skill of refining metal.

At first the users make items from copper, but from around 2150 BCE smiths discover how to make bronze (which is much harder than copper) by mixing copper with a small amount of tin.

With this discovery, the Bronze Age arrives in Britain.

Over the next thousand years, bronze gradually replaces stone as the main material for tool and weapon making.Britain has large, easily accessible reserves of tin in the modern areas of Cornwall and Devon in what is now Southwest England, and thus tin mining begins.

By around 1600 BCE, the southwest of Britain is experiencing a trade boom as British tin is exported across Europe, evidence of ports being found in Southern Devon at Bantham and Mount Batten.

Copper is mined at the Great Orme in North Wales.The Beaker people are also skilled at making ornaments from gold, silver and copper, and examples of these have been found in graves of the wealthy Wessex culture of Central Southern Britain.Early Bronze Age Britons bury their dead beneath earth mounds known as barrows, often with a beaker alongside the body.

Later in the period, cremation is adopted as a burial practice with cemeteries of urns containing cremated individuals appearing in the archaeological record, with deposition of metal objects such as daggers.

People of this period are also largely responsible for building many famous prehistoric sites such as the later phases of Stonehenge along with Seahenge.

The Bronze Age people live in round houses and divide up the landscape.

Stone rows are to be seen on, for example, Dartmoor.

They eat cattle, sheep, pigs and deer as well as shellfish and birds.

They carry out salt manufacture.

The wetlands are a source of wildfowl and reeds.

There is ritual deposition of offerings in the wetlands and in holes in the ground.

There is some debate among archaeologists as to whether the 'Beaker people' are a race of people who migrated to Britain en masse from the continent, or whether a prestigious Beaker cultural "package" of goods and behavior (which eventually spread across most of Western Europe) diffused to Britain's existing inhabitants through trade across tribal boundaries.

Modern thinking tends towards the latter view.

Alternatively, a ruling class of Beaker individuals may have made the migration and come to control the native population at some level.

Genetics suggests that there was only a small influx of people to Britain at this time, around a few percent.There is evidence of a relatively large scale disruption of cultural patterns which some scholars think may indicate an invasion (or at least a migration) into Southern Great Britain c. the 12th century BCE.

This disruption is felt far beyond Britain, even beyond Europe, as most of the great Near Eastern empires collapse (or experienced severe difficulties) and the Sea Peoples harried the entire Mediterranean basin around this time.

Some scholars consider that the Celtic languages arrived in Britain at this time, but the more generally accepted view is that Celtic origins lie with the Hallstatt culture.