Iron Age Britain

What if Iron Age Britain was never a land of barbarians at all, but a world of skilled farmers, powerful women, trade, ritual, and spectacle? Tristan Hughes is joined by Professor Tom Moore to reveal a far richer pre-Roman Britain, from roundhouses and hillforts to chariots, feasts, and buried offerings. Archaeology uncovers a society shaped by movement, identity, violence, and belief, where the Iron Age still echoes into Roman Britain and beyond. MORE Druids Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/druids/id1520403988?i=1000679342044 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/5YLYIhWrwzdCG9ZRnTsy60 Before Rome: The Truth About Late Iron Age Britain Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/before-rome-the-truth-about-late-iron-age-britain/id1520403988?i=1000556481304 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/6f0x9nDs4d557gcJI76APQ The Ancients is now on YouTube! Watch here: @TheAncientsPodcast https://www.youtube.com/@TheAncientsPodcast Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Tim Arstall. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

  Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:44Tristan Hughes?

  For a long time, Iron Age Britain has been misunderstood. In the past, this centuries-long period of British prehistory, just before the Roman conquest, has been portrayed as a shadowy world, dominated by warriors in blue paint. A land of so-called barbarians, living rudimentary lives on the edge of the known world. But we now know that that's not quite right. Across Britain, objects have been pulled from rivers and earth that tell a different story. Objects so intricate and so deliberate, crafted by highly sophisticated pre-Roman societies,

• 1:28Tristan Hughes?

  each with their own traditions, their own beliefs.

• 1:34Tristan Hughes?

  It is archaeology that has started to shine an incredible light on who these Iron Age Britons actually were and how they lived. New discoveries are being unearthed and revealed to the world for the first time in more than 2,000 years. We are in a golden age for Iron Age archaeology. It is archaeology that is revealing a world of striking elites, both men and women, of complex settlements, beautiful metalwork, long-distance trade, and of profound beliefs that shaped entire landscapes.

• 2:10Tristan Hughes?

  It's this archaeology that we're going to delve into today.

• 2:15Tristan Hughes?

  Welcome to The Ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is an introduction to the exciting, yet still very mysterious world of Iron Age Britain.

• 2:27Tristan Hughes?

  Our guest is Durham University's Professor Tom Moore, one of the leading experts on Iron Age Britain.

• 2:36Tristan Hughes?

  Tom, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  Lovely to see you again, Tristan.

• 2:40Tristan Hughes?

  It's been too long since we last chatted. We chatted all things that amazing discovery, the Melles and Bee hoard, which I gather is going on display very, very soon.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Yep, there's going to be the first exhibition in Yorkshire Museum on the 15th of May. So excited to kind of see that, the public's reaction to it.

• 2:56Tristan Hughes?

  And so people understand the Melles and Bee hoard, we did a whole film on it with you and other key people involved in the project, but this is one of the largest, the most significant Iron Age discoveries in the north of England in recent years.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, one of the largest discoveries for the Iron Age in the whole of Britain, I would say. Probably the largest hoard of Iron Age metalwork ever encountered, you know, huge number of artefacts, particularly really exciting bits of vehicles, chariots, but also possibly wagons, which we haven't seen before, which sounds a bit nerdy, but is really interesting for Iron Age specialists, because we've never seen four wheel wagons in Britain before, so very exciting.

• 3:29Tristan Hughes?

  Well, nerdy is what we want here on the ancient, so don't worry, we're going to be doing much more of that nitty gritty detail on Iron Age Britain. But of course, Iron Age Britain, it's a large topic, so we're going to hop from topic to topic within Iron Age Britain during our chat and seeing how much we can get through. But first off, with the background, when someone says Iron Age Britain today, how large a period of time are we talking about?

• 3:53Speaker 01

  So the Iron Age starts around about 800 B.C. You know, depends when you define the Iron Age, all the way through to the Roman conquest, really, so AD 43 in the south east of England, obviously slightly later in northern England and then parts of Scotland that are never conquered by Rome. That's a little bit of an artificial cut off for the end of it, because of course, that, you know, that's just the conquest, but actually much of Iron Age life in many parts of Britain carries on for a long period into the Roman period. But that's what we define as the Iron Age.

• 4:19Tristan Hughes?

  It's a huge period, isn't it? It's like from today all the way back to the time of the Crusades. So- When talking about Iron Age Britain, I guess we're going to need to get our head around straight away that there's a lot of development, a lot of evolution that you can see in these societies over that period.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Definitely, and in the past, sometimes we've kind of tended to kind of think of Iron Age life and society and settlement as all being one thing. But like you say, there's a huge change between the end of the Bronze Age, the late Bronze Age, all the way through to the Roman period. And also, it's worth remembering there's huge diversity just in Britain in terms of the way people lived, the societies they lived in, the settlements they lived in. So sometimes it's quite hard to kind of just generalize and say, this is what the Iron Age was like.

• 5:02Tristan Hughes?

  There used to be a tendency to think with the coming of Rome, that was the coming of civilization as it was, and what was in Britain before, it was mysterious, but it was the land of backward barbarians almost.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely, that was the kind of the, the old way of looking at it. I mean, much of what was happening in the late Iron Age was a precursor to what happened in the Roman Empire. I mean, if we think about how farming was in the late Iron Age, most of those developments had already happened under Iron Age societies. It wasn't, Rome brought innovations of urbanism, for instance, but much of the rest of society was already highly developed and complex before Rome ever turned up.

• 5:40Tristan Hughes?

  And this is where archaeology, it really shines a light on Iron Age Britain unlike anything else.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  Yes, because of course you've got to remember that Iron Age societies didn't leave any written records. Interestingly, you know, some of them in the very late Iron Age could probably read and write Latin, but there's very few people. And the only written evidence we have is a few sources from Greek and Roman writers which suffer from their own problems of propaganda and so on. So it's only archaeology that can really tell us about Iron Age societies.

• 6:06Tristan Hughes?

  What I have here, I wanted to bring this because it was discovered deep in an attic quite recently, but it's the history book from, I think it's the 1850s or 1840s. So it's quite an artifact in itself. But it has like the first page, it kind of gives you an insight into how they viewed the Iron Age back then and how different we can, and we can like dissect it all and go into the archaeology today. But it's interesting how it, like this book, you know, for kids more than 150 years ago, it starts basically with the Romans and a quick explanation of what was there before, what they thought. And so it starts, it talks about Caesar's arrival in Britain and talks about the people of Britain. It's inhabitants who were then

• 6:49Tristan Hughes?

  thinly scattered over the island, were not civilized at all, like they resembled barbarians, barbarous tribes. In old tombs or fields of battle, specimens of their arms and tools are still dug up. These consist of spear and arrowheads, hatchets and knives ingeniously made of flint. They were not acquainted with the use of lime in building, but lived mostly in subterranean dwellings covered with large slabs of stone. With the same rude material they erected many remarkable monuments which astonished and confused the modern architects. Such are the dridic circles of Stonehenge and other places consisting of huge upright masses of rock surmounted by transverse blocks of immense size. And it kind of goes on and on. It's like the soil was poorly cultivated and many districts which are now fruitful,

• 7:33Tristan Hughes?

  cornfields, were then barren, wastes or impassable morasses. It would seem at the present day but a poor boast for a powerful and civilized empire like Rome to gain victories over such tribes. Immediate thoughts on that, Tom?

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Yes, well, obviously archaeology has changed. I mean, when you look at something like that, obviously it's written in a time before archaeology was really a full discipline and really understood that. So you could see from that little quote you read there that there's a sort of conflation of flints and Neolithic and with the Iron Age. So they're not really, they haven't got that understanding of deep time that we now understand in the Iron Age. And of course, when we think about the sources they were using, like Julius Caesar's account of the conquest or his invasions of Britain, you know, that's what they're using to understand periods like the Iron Age, archaeology now in the, you know, since throughout the 20th century and now, you know, allows us to have a much better understanding of those societies.

• 8:25Tristan Hughes?

  Better understanding, better dating, more insights into how they lived. Still presumably many mysteries still abound, but we are learning through new discoveries in the north and south of Britain, more about how they lived and yeah, how sophisticated they were, how they communicated, exchanged with each other and so much more.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's a really exciting time for our studies, as you say, I mean, you know, they're exciting discoveries, not least Melsomby, but but also huge advances in scientific analysis. So ancient DNA studies telling us about relationships between people, perhaps where they came from, isotope studies also telling us about diet and also perhaps the origins of individuals. And I have to say, and it's sort of perhaps doesn't grab the headlines so much, but also what we would call developer-led archaeology. So, you know, most people perhaps don't realise that over ninety percent of archaeology in Britain happens before development, before roadskates and building. And that's constantly providing new Iron Age settlements so that we can chart the kind of houses they live in, the settlements they live in, and even perhaps, you know, the the increase in numbers of settlements over time. So it's a really

• 9:24Speaker 01

  exciting time to be able to bring all that together to try and sort of understand Iron Age societies as a whole.

• 9:29Tristan Hughes?

  So we'll get to these settlements very quickly, key words like roundhouses, hillforts and so on. But first of all, the arrival of the Iron Age in Britain, what should we be thinking?

• 9:39Speaker 01

  So in terms of people think of the Iron Age and we think of iron obviously as being defining that. In many ways, iron doesn't necessarily define the Iron Age. The late Bronze Age ends with the kind of, people might know that in the Bronze Age, and particularly the late Bronze Age, there's large hoarding of bronze objects and then depositing them in wet places or in hordes on land. And that ceases around eight hundred, seven hundred B.C., which is kind of the end of the Bronze Age. But iron technology doesn't come in straight away. In fact, iron technology is actually, there's some evidence that it's been around for a few hundred years before the end of the Bronze Age, confusingly.

• 10:16Tristan Hughes?

  So there is iron technology in the Bronze Age, okay.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Yes, oddly, but yes, or at least hints at it. So there's a site in Berkshire which has smithing. So that's when you're you're smithing objects. So you're not actually smelting the ore, that dates from about nine hundred B.C. So very early, when we're firmly in the Bronze Age. Iron technology then smelting, so that's actually taking the ore, doesn't happen until about maybe eight hundred, seven hundred B.C. But actually, the iron technology, when we get it, for example, traded in in Inghotts, for instance, doesn't really happen till about four hundred B.C. So iron technology kind of.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Is there in the background and emerges through the early part of the Iron Age.

• 10:57Tristan Hughes?

  Okay.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  If you see what I mean. So it's a little bit now in the past, people used to think that there was these people were called the Celts who brought iron technology.

• 11:03Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Also perhaps brought Celtic art. We know from particularly things like DNA studies, that's that's certainly not true. The influx of peoples is more perhaps in the Bronze Age than it is in the Iron Age.

• 11:15Tristan Hughes?

  Is that the so-called the Beaker people and?

• 11:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's when we have, we can see more evidence of an influx of people coming from the continent. So in terms of how the Iron Age adopts, it's more of an insular development and perhaps a relationship between changes in the economy, society and ritual in the end of the Bronze Age and new technology coming in. So the idea that there is a new group of people coming in is not, is not the case. It's more in a change in society. To add to the complexity there, it's also worth remembering that there is almost certainly a change in the climate between about eight hundred and four hundred B.C. So it gets a bit colder and wetter. So all of these things are happening concurrent with each other and societies are changing.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  So that's why when you say, when does the Iron Age start? It sounds like a really easy question, but actually it's not quite so easy.

• 12:02Tristan Hughes?

  Well, at a time when Britain gets a bit more miserable, then it sounds like it's the climate as well.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  As an archaeologist, I would never say it gets miserable. It just changes.

• 12:10Tristan Hughes?

  But it's interesting that gradual process, which I'm hearing again and again now with so many ancients episodes in that when new technology comes in, how long it takes people over generations realising or being able to get their hands on, you know, these new tools, this new metal that they now realise in their new settlements is more valuable, is more useful than, let's say, bronze and so on.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Yes. I mean, one of the things you've got to think about with iron technology compared to bronze, it's a very different kind of technology. So with bronze objects, if you're casting them, iron has to be smeltaged and then smithed, you know, there, there's a different process there. They're not the same technological process. Also, it's, it's worth thinking that people don't necessarily see the advantages of iron or perhaps even need the advantages of iron. If you've built an entire economy on bronze working and obtaining bronze or the, the materials like tin and copper to make bronze, and you build your whole society on that, iron technology is not necessarily something you want or need to adopt straight away. So. We can be a little bit kind of assuming that as soon as people find iron technology,

• 13:17Speaker 01

  it's better, that it's actually when you first make iron, it's not necessarily better than bronze for the things you need it to do. So there is a long period where people are playing with that technology, they're imitating it. So there's a wonderful site in Wales where you've got an import of a sword which is made from iron from the continent. And then there are objects made in iron but copying bronze types. So people are clearly kind of playing around with this technology, but perhaps not seeing the advantages of it or needing the advantages straight away.

• 13:45Tristan Hughes?

  Well, let's have a look at the backbone almost of Iron Age society and how these people lived. Is it fair that at this time, agriculture, that's at the forefront. For people living in Iron Age Britain, an everyday figure, they're living in an agricultural type of settlement?

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, throughout the Iron Age, almost everybody is a farmer, even right up into the late Iron Age, you know, that we don't have really specialists perhaps until the very end of the Iron Age. Most people are farming most of the time. And they are mostly subsistence farmers, in other words, you know, growing enough to feed them and their families, you know, perhaps a little bit of surplus, but they're not creating for, you know, a broader economy.

• 14:26Tristan Hughes?

  And what's the everyday settlement of one of these Iron Age farmers? I know it's a huge period, it's several centuries, but there is one type of settlement that you you tend to associate with an Iron Age farmer?

• 14:38Speaker 01

  There are, you know, a lot of people that lived in small farmsteads. I mean, I would hesitate to say, as we say, the Iron Age is a long period and incredibly diverse. I mean, one of the things we are very aware of now is the diversity of the kind of settlements you lived in. I mean, you can contrast it from the the big stone brochs of

• 14:56Tristan Hughes?

  Yes.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  of northern and western Scotland down to the courtyard house settlements of Cornwall, to the unenclosed settlements, to these scattered round houses that you find in in the East Midlands.

• 15:06Tristan Hughes?

  The crannocks, you know, artificial islands.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Yes, occasionally, you know, they're they're less common in in the British Iron Age certainly, but crannocks, yes. So there's a huge diversity. Perhaps most people will think Iron Age hillforts. And we kind of think hillforts are the typical Iron Age settlement. But even then, hillforts are incredibly varied.

• 15:25Tristan Hughes?

  So that's interesting. I would have actually thought straight away, get to the hillforts in a bit, but the roundhouse, like surely the small farming settlement, the roundhouse. I mean, you mentioned brochs and all these things. I mean, they're kidding, they're always round.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Well, the roundhouse is the kind of standard structure that people live in throughout the Iron Age, although they're themselves are also incredibly diverse from, you know, quite monumental structures, I mean, that we see in the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age, really big timber-built roundhouses to smaller structures such as stone-walled roundhouses in Northern England in the later period. So, but yes, the roundhouse is the kind of standard structure. I mean, that is in itself interesting as why there's that kind of tendency to build roundhouses, which tells us something about how those households worked, for instance, perhaps even about the way they understood their space in a kind of more symbolic way.

• 16:18Tristan Hughes?

  So what do we know about the function of roundhouses, almost like the house of an everyday person in the Iron Age?

• 16:23Speaker 01

  So, I mean, it was the main habitation for probably households, it was communal living. There's very little evidence that they were divided into sort of different rooms or spaces like that. So, and it's where most of the activities would have taken place within perhaps the doorways, through the lights, you know. So that's where everything is going on. One of the interesting things that's always been fascinating, if somewhat controversial, is this sort of orientation of the doors of houses because they faced east or southeast a lot of the times. There's big discussion about whether that's to avoid wind direction coming from the southwest, so it keeps you, your house less windy and cold, but also the light is coming from the east. But also there's a kind of that tendency towards the southeast might be having something to do with symbolic orientation between, towards the sunrise, for instance.

• 17:07Tristan Hughes?

  And can we imagine these smaller settlements, I've been to Buttsor Ancient Farm before, I always think of that, but we'll get to the hillforts and the larger settlements in a bit, but with these kind of farmsteads, these roundhouses, generally speaking, do we think from archaeology that you would probably see maybe like three, four or five roundhouses in one of these settlements in like a very small, tight-knit community?

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Yes, again, you know, it's a little bit difficult to generalize, but certainly for, I mean, there is actually quite a change over much of, particularly southern Britain, from the early Iron Age, that's a period from about 800 B.C. through to about 400 B.C., where we have more unenclosed Settlements, just a scatter of round houses, so perhaps just a few households. So you're talking very small populations. And then as we move into the period after about four hundred B C, people live in what we would call small enclosed farmsteads. So they're digging ditches round their settlements. And again, those are perhaps just one or two round houses, so small households. So most of those communities are pretty small. They're the extended households rather than, there are very few sort of villages, if you like, large numbers of households together.

• 18:15Tristan Hughes?

  And livestock, crops, and the building of the round house itself, is this where we get the word Wattle and Dorb quite a lot?

• 18:23Speaker 01

  Certainly, most of those would have been Wattle and Dorb constructed. Yes, there are a few where we have stone footings for round houses, particularly in sort of northern England, for instance, in Northumberland. But yes, most of them are kind of timber built structures. It's worth remembering, I mean, particularly if you, I mean, if you've been to Butts, you can think of some, particularly actually the late Bronze Age or early Iron Age round houses. These are pretty impressive structures, you know, big use of timber. They're not, you know, the idea that these are kind of mud huts is, as you're kind of earlier, you know, reference was talking about.

• 18:54Tristan Hughes?

  Well, exactly. We're kind of already displacing that straight away.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  These are, these are, these are complex structures, big structures. And of course, when we're talking about brochs and big monumental structures in Scotland, these are incredibly highly architectural buildings.

• 19:07Tristan Hughes?

  Don't get me started on the brochs. That's another episode in itself. But hopefully we'll have some pictures, some shots of Butts Ranch and Farm. We filmed there in the past. And you, and with Wattle and Dorb, it's kind of the, the binding together of lots of, lots of sticks and then the painting over with the kind of.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you're weaving.

• 19:23Tristan Hughes?

  You're weaving, yeah.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, together and then covering it in clay.

• 19:27Tristan Hughes?

  It's clay, yeah. And then you can paint here.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Animal dung and stuff. Yes, I mean, we have.

• 19:30Tristan Hughes?

  Good insulation.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 19:32Tristan Hughes?

  Okay. So that's kind of the everyday farming settlement of the Iron Age that we think of. You mentioned the word hillforts. So Tom, when we're talking about the British Iron Age, when should we be thinking with hillforts and what should we be thinking?

• 19:47Speaker 01

  So again, hillforts is a. With one of those terms we use all the time, but actually hillforts are very varied. You know, we can think of really large hillforts, you know, people perhaps be aware of Maiden Castle

• 19:57Tristan Hughes?

  Maiden Castle, yes.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Down in Dorset, to quite small hillforts, like those in Northumberland, the Cheliet Hills is covered in hillforts, but those are probably only, you know, including a couple of households. They're incredibly well constructed monuments with, with, with quite substantial ramparts, but they're not big. And again, another thing with hillforts is we think of it as the Iron Age, but we now know that hillforts start in the late Bronze Age. So they're one of these things that, that continues and develops and changes. And they change over time in terms of their roles as well. So some of the early Iron Age hillforts, so again, thinking about sort of eight hundred to six hundred B.C., someone like Uffington in Berkshire, it's probably, most people are not living in that hillfort. It's probably a central focus for a wider community.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  It's probably a storage place for food resources, perhaps for some surplus, but they're probably not actually living there. But then we think of Danbury in the Middle Iron Age. So when I mean that, I mean about sort of four hundred to two hundred and fifty B.C. There's got a lot of people living in there.

• 20:56Tristan Hughes?

  And Maiden Castle as well.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  Maiden Castle, yeah, there's, you know, there's a few hundred people living in, in those, in those hillforts. So hillforts are very varied.

• 21:05Tristan Hughes?

  And I guess also, you also think about the big ramparts. If you visit one of these places today, one of the stunning things is getting through those ramparts and then being in that, that open plain in the middle. For instance, if you're in Maiden Castle and seeing the sheep and all of that. But, but it is the ramparts and how deep they are even today that like you can't help but think about when you visit one of those sites.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Yes, and I mean, if you think of the, the size and the entrances as well, the complex entrances, if anybody's been to Maiden Castle or Danbury of kind of getting into these things, there's a huge amount of labour expended on those sites. I mean, one of the big questions for archaeologists is who's constructing them? You know, so is it that there is sort of Vassal people who are constructing them? Or is it the inhabitants? I think we're, most archaeologists now for the Iron Age would assume that there is kind of, it's, it's largely done by the inhabitants or as part of the community. This is not sort of, hillforts are not necessarily. At the top of a settlement hierarchy where there are lots of other people who are kind of dependent on these these sites.

• 22:04Tristan Hughes?

  Because when these hillforts are being built in like the mid-line age, this is still centuries before the Romans arrive. Is there very much a feeling there's not written literature down about these people that we we can't label them with the the tribal names that we have later from the Romans, it's just too far back.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  No, very much so. I mean, I think trying to kind of identify them to the to the tribal names, we can talk more about those in the late Iron Age i- i- is quite problematic. These are much smaller uh size communities than than those larger entities. So so no, I think that's, you know, these are not, they don't work in the same way. I mean, if you look at Dan- at Danbury, for instance, in Hampshire, the hillfort there is not the sort of residence of an elite. It's more like a large village, if you like, a large group of brown houses and community together, but it doesn't seem to be of any higher status really than many of the other settlements around.

• 22:55Tristan Hughes?

  And we and you said elites there because we, I guess we can't know whether it was a king or a or a warlord, or as you mentioned, if there even was one for those.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's been a big discussion in Iron Age studies for, well, for forty, fifty years, really. The idea of whether there is elite, we always assume, and this comes back to sort of things like classical sources, you know, Roman writers, because Caesar describes Iron Age society in Gaul as being elite and having kings and and Druids. We kind of think that that must be how the Iron Age in Britain was for all of the Iron Age. But actually, archaeologically, there's very little evidence for an elite, you know, the things that you might think of as an elite. Burial practices and grave goods, that there would be a larger house or more rich material goods at somewhere like Danbury, that doesn't exist in the archaeological record. If you look at Danbury, for instance,

• 23:43Speaker 01

  the kind of things that happened at Danbury, the kind of goods they were using, these kinds of objects they were using are very similar to the smaller farmsteads we were talking about earlier. So it's very hard to distinguish any obvious elite. That doesn't mean it wasn't doesn't mean there wasn't difference in status between people, and status can be measured in things like number of cattle you have, the number of sheep you have. But I think to think of it as sort of a hierarchy with a king or a chief. I think most Iron Age specialists would suggest that's probably a little bit simplistic.

• 24:12Tristan Hughes?

  Is it fair to say they probably had a defensive function, or at least some of them would have had a defensive function?

• 24:17Speaker 01

  Again, you know, we should sort of say, you know, you're getting into controversial topics here. I think.

• 24:21Tristan Hughes?

  That's what I do. I'm sorry, Tom.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  No, that's right, too. In terms of those ramparts, yes. The key distinction there is thinking, were hillforts attacked all the time? Were they meant to be defended from?

• 24:35Tristan Hughes?

  Or to deter or to impress people, I guess.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think both those things. I mean, we know that some hillforts had violence take place at them. Uh, Wulbury, for instance, and Somerset, Breeden Hill in South Worcestershire. You know, there's evidence of what we might call massacres, you know, people were killed at hillforts and they probably were attacked from time to time. I think, you know, we can't get away from that. But those ramparts also, as you just intimated, have a function just showing the amount of labour that you can consume. It is a demonstration of your power, but it's also a demonstration of how important your community is perhaps. So I think, you know, the idea that they're always fighting from hillforts is perhaps not quite right.

• 25:19Tristan Hughes?

  Fair enough. I always think back to Maiden Castle and hearing from Dr. Miles Russell, how back then, actually, with the chalk beneath the grass, you don't realise it, but back then gleaming white would have been visible for miles around. And, you know, that is a statement in itself.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:36Tristan Hughes?

  So just remembering that and also what we mentioned earlier with the roundhouses and the colour that would have been visible, you know. Yes, okay, chalk is white, but it is not just black and white, almost in the Iron Age back then, you know, full of technicolor, full of wanting to impress and stand out, whether it's with the monumental hillforts or with probably an everyday roundhouse.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  Yes, definitely. I mean, I think, you know, I mean, if you want to talk about colour in the Iron Age, you perhaps want to talk about some of the objects.

• 26:02Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  That you're using in the, in the middle and late Iron Age, which are of course, you know, some of them bronze, shining bronze, and then adorned with, with glass and coral and so on, you know, as we were. Mentioning with Melsonby and so on. So I mean, colour is definitely used to intimate various different identities and attitudes. So yeah, I think it's good to kind of remind people that the Iron Age is not not a black and world or a green and brown world completely.

• 26:26Tristan Hughes?

  That's good. Well, let's move on then to this other key type of assessment and one that I know you've done a lot of work around. That seems so tied to the the later story of Britain's Iron Age. So what are these things called opida?

• 26:39Speaker 01

  Right. So opida are these ranges monuments that emerge at the very end of the Iron Age, really. So about the end, towards the end of the first century B.C. We call them opida because that's a term that was used on the continent, particularly by Julius Caesar, to refer to sites he encountered in Gaul. And the things that we see in Britain emerge around the same tides of these sites in Gaul. So we've kind of transferred the term. And it means, from Latin, you can translate it as enclosed settlement or town. The confusing thing for the British sites is they are not towns, not towns as we would understand it. So the classic opida in Britain, places like Camulodun and modern Colchester.

• 27:18Tristan Hughes?

  Colchester. So Colchester.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:20Tristan Hughes?

  Was originally an Iron Age centre.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Underneath Colchester, underneath the medieval and Roman town, is an Iron Age centre. Also underneath modern St Albans, a site named Melsonby, Stanic. These are the sort of classic opida. They're characterised by these huge enormous ramparts. I mean, one of the things, you know, we talked about hillforts, but these things have huge earthworks. For many of them, like Colchester, confusingly, these earthworks don't define a nice enclosed area like our hillforts like Danbury. They often define huge areas of landscape. So I worked at Badgingham, for instance, encompasses about 200 hectares.

• 27:54Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  You can quite, yeah. To get people's heads around that, you can quite easily plonk a Roman town within that quite happily and still have space. But they don't define a nice sort of enclosed area. So one of the things that we've been working on, I've been interested in is how do they, what are they doing? How do they use that space? So it's more about defining landscapes for activities. And that's probably telling us about the change in society. So. By this time, hill forts in many parts of Britain had fallen out of use, probably some time before opus really emerged, actually. So, society is changing in the late first century B.C. This is the first time that we can start to identify individuals who are calling themselves kings.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  For instance, they're minting coinage, there are new types of burial rites emerging. So, there are graves with grave goods, something we haven't really seen across the British Iron Age. So, society is changing and the opus are the places where those things are manifest.

• 28:52Tristan Hughes?

  And this is the time when you're starting to get interactions with Rome. So, accounts like Julius Caesar, mentions of tribal names and tribal kings and so on. You mentioned the arrival of coinage as well. This is when that becomes another interesting source, which you can then use alongside the archaeology to learn more.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Definitely, and that is, I mean, it is at the opus that we see much of the interaction with the Roman world. You know, we see imports from the Roman world at sites like Colchester, even at Stade in the north of England. And one of the interesting things there is what that relationship is like. And one of the things I'm really interested in, because we used to, some time ago, think it was about economics, if you like. The Roman Empire expands and this is a place that you, sort of, Iron Age societies are trading with. And certainly that was happening to some extent, but a lot of the items we have in some of the burials at places like Lexington, at Colchester, are probably more like diplomatic goods. So, there's more of a kind of political relationship, you know, as the empire expands and has these kingdoms on its peripheries, which it's kind of managing as a political relationship.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  If you love a good story, why aren't you listening to Dan Snow's History Hit Podcast? It's a show where we tell you every amazing, crazy and important thing that's ever happened in human history. From the perilous voyages of the first Polynesians, the discoveries of Captain Cook, the deadly Viking raids on Britain and Ireland, the rise and fall of the great English kings and queens. We'll tell you how Waterloo was won, the Alamo was lost, and all the history in between. So, make sure you check it out, Dan Snow's History Hit, for the best true stories ever told, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 30:54Tristan Hughes?

  So is it fair to say that it's almost, I know you mentioned that there seems to be a little bit of a break between them, but almost the mid-Iron Age, the bigger centres in Iron Age Britain at least are defined by the great hillforts and activity there. And then the later Iron Age, that's replaced with the emergence of these opeda instead, but maybe they have similar-ish functions?

• 31:16Speaker 01

  I would probably say no, they don't have, they have quite different functions in many ways. Many of those hillforts, I mean, again, you know, it depends where you are, you know, in the South West and Maiden Castles, there's kind of slightly different organisation there. But many of the hillforts in Hampshire, for instance, and up the Welsh marches are different kinds of settlements. They're more like small villages, communities. The opeda mark a very different kind of social organisation. They're probably central places for a much larger, the emergence of much larger groups of people. So Stanic, for instance, that's probably the central place for a whole confederacy of people across, you know, much of what is now Northern England. The people that referred to by classical writers as the brigantes,

• 32:00Speaker 01

  that's very different from the roles of hillforts having on a much larger scale. So this is the emergence probably of larger social entities that we only see really towards the end of the Iron Age, you know, things that we can think of as much larger polities.

• 32:14Tristan Hughes?

  And people going still from their like in a roundhouse farmsteads and maybe like communal gathering places inside these earthworks at these opeda sites?

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that's one of the things that really interests me about the opeda, because one of the things that we're seeing in that period is the movement from, you know, very, very quite localised societies based on perhaps networks of a few farmsteads, you know, exchanging material between themselves, but not perhaps, you know, large social entities. The late Iron Age with the opeda is the formation of those larger entities. But you've got to have places where you negotiate that, you know, how do you negotiate those relationships? And the opeda and that, those big empty spaces is perhaps the place you do it for assembling. And one of the things that... If we can believe some of the things that people like Caesar says, that late Iron Age societies is about negotiated power. The elites have to kind of forge assemblies.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  He talks about this happening in Gaul, where they have to decide as a group, a collective, you know, are we going to go to war? Are we having an alliance with these people? It's the oper, where those spaces happen. And you can imagine the empty areas that we have in these sites, because much of the interior of them is not full of settlements, it's open. That's where they're gathering those people together. One of the things that fascinates me is that there's also the impact from the expanding Roman Empire, but you've got to also remember that this is, there's been a large increase in the number of settlements over the later Iron Age. So from about 300 B.C., you just see an increase pretty much everywhere of settlements across Britain. There's more people in the landscape, there's more people who've got to negotiate access to land. So there has to be places where that takes place.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  And I think to some extent, maybe oper are the kind of culmination of that. How do we negotiate who owns what land? How do we negotiate between those?

• 33:58Tristan Hughes?

  I'm trying to think if it's almost the Iron Age equivalent to an extent of something like Glastonbury, you know, but if you know what I mean. Lots of people in an area together, probably very smelly as well after several days there. But for an important event, of course, we can use the word ceremonial, but of course, big decisions for the larger polity that they're part of, maybe they'll see the figure at the top of the, you know, a king or a queen and so on there too.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I mean, you know, I like your analogy with Glastonbury, but in assembly places, so, you know, anybody who's sort of looked at early medieval world, you can think of assembly places there being somewhere where even if you have a king, that king has to negotiate their power. They have to come and they have to have the other members of those communities come together and negotiate their authority, you know, make that decision as a collective. And again, this is a rural community, so people are most of the time in their farmsteads still. They're perhaps sending one member to come to those assemblies, represent them, make those decisions as a collective. So this is a really exciting time because it's that idea that we have kings, but these are not kings as you might think from the high medieval period. This is more about a negotiated power structure.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  Opida are perhaps, and why I find them exciting, is that those societies are trying to work out, how do you do that? You know, how do you negotiate power in a different way that that hasn't really existed before?

• 35:19Tristan Hughes?

  Do you think this is a good place? I think we can bring in chariots here and go back to the Melsonby hoard, because processions we can be thinking about maybe happening there, a display of power, a display of wealth, you know, happening at places like Opida. And of course, one of the big vehicles we associate with Iron Age Britain is the chariots. Or is wagons elaborate vehicles?

• 35:42Speaker 01

  Certainly, chariots, you know, are something that shows is sort of characteristic of the British Iron Age. I mean, we only know them from from burials, really, from East Yorkshire in the Middle Iron Age, but in the Late Iron Age, we know they existed from the the parts we find. And even Caesar mentions how important chariots are in warfare for the Britons. Yeah, I mean, one of the exciting things about Melsonby is the idea that we have some other vehicles as well, these four wheeled wagons, you know, which, if we compare them to what's happening on the continent, where they're thought of as being sort of ceremonial vehicles, as you say, either for the funerary event or for display. Yes, you can imagine people kind of processing around in these vehicles, you know, perhaps being taken to

• 36:24Speaker 01

  the funerary rite on these vehicles. Yeah, I mean, one of the other exciting things from Melsonby, and we kind of get a bit obsessed by the vehicles and the chariots, which are exciting, don't get me wrong, but is the kind of is the cauldron, is the wine mixing vessel that we have there from the earlier hoard that was discovered there, a large bucket for drinking beer. So there's communal feasting going on. And you can, again, imagine that if your authority is about trying to negotiate with other people, you throw feasts to perhaps, you know, show to get support from those individuals, you know, that's that's the way power is manifest.

• 36:58Tristan Hughes?

  And in time as well, maybe even in places like Yorkshire, in Stannick, do we think that? You know, they're bringing in things like amphora, they're bringing in Roman goods as well. They're they're very much adopting those those ideas, those objects, those luxuries from beyond the borders of Britain.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  Certainly in the opera by the late Iron Age, some of the the elite, if you like, that are emerging are adopting items from the Roman world, drinking vessels, beakers, or from Gaul as well, as that's now part of the, you know, Roman Empire, and drinking wine. So, yes, they are. And I mean, that's another interesting thing, because there's clearly an imitation of Roman, but also Gallic, you know, Gallic elites, they're imitating as as well at the time of conquest, to imitate their kind of their their partner elites on the continent, if you like, in a different way. I mean, one of the things that's really fascinating, in a sense, that's also changing identity. One of the things that you see from much of the early and middle Iron Age, it's quite hard to see the individual for most of the Iron Age. You know, you don't, we don't have burials or grave goods, there

• 38:00Speaker 01

  are exceptions like East Yorkshire, but for most of the time, that's the case in Britain. It's hard to see, and people are not, or not many people are using things like brooches and stuff. It's quite hard to see the individual in the archaeological record. Once we get to the end of the Iron Age, with the burials and so on associated with opera, you can start to see individuals, but also through the way they're eating. We have beakers and platters. You know, this is, this is about individual drinking. It's your cup, it's your plate, you know, that doesn't exist before. So clearly, the individual is becoming more important. So there's a change in some people's identity to to sort of express the individual identity, which is perhaps, again, related to how power changes. You know, it's more about you than the collective.

• 38:39Tristan Hughes?

  And what is a, let's say, a high ranking individual of the late Iron Age? What do you think, what are they supposed to be in the eyes of the community? What skills are they supposed to have? What can we gather from that, you know, with the surviving archaeology? What insights can we get into late Iron Age community from those burials and and things like that?

• 38:58Speaker 01

  That's a really good question. And one possibility is that they are to sort of negotiate, you know, that community, perhaps negotiate with external groups to offer also power. I mean, in terms of of support in warfare, you know, to to lead. Lead that group when warfare is being consulted to consult the interaction with the Roman Empire. So I think that's one of the roles that they have is that kind of they are the sort of, I mean, often, you know, you can think of them as leaders, you know, the negotiating with with with the outside world, if you like.

• 39:30Tristan Hughes?

  And it's not just men we should be thinking about in these positions of power in Iron Age Britain, is it, Tom?

• 39:35Speaker 01

  No. So, I mean, we've known from Roman historians like Tacitus that there were powerful women in Iron Age Britain, Boudica, but also Queen Carta Mandua, who's in North Yorkshire. What's exciting is the archaeological evidence is really kind of emphasizing that in the past, you know, historians have sort of struggled. Is this is the Romans making a point of this because it's exceptional.

• 39:57Tristan Hughes?

  There are two queens in that city.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and this is and they make a big thing of it because perhaps it's it's unusual, but actually it's probably not unusual. So there's fantastic evidence from ancient DNA evidence now of which is showing, particularly in southwest, but also in East Yorkshire, of the sort of the relatedness of of females. So that the power seems to be going through the female line. So there might be that women sort of, so women stay in the same place. They have maybe more power over land and that men come into those communities and perhaps they do other things in societies. But there is that there's also been, you know, we've known for some time, if we go back to East Yorkshire, burials and you mentioned chariots with chariots and wonderful grave goods from Wetwang Slack in Yorkshire.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  For instance, where we have fantastic iron mirror, it's very enigmatic being so that, you know, high status grave goods, which indicate that women are getting the same kind of treatment as some men. So.

• 40:49Tristan Hughes?

  Also, women, so some of those graves in East Yorkshire with with chariots in them also belong to women?

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Yes. Oh, yes. Yeah. And they have, you know, wonderful grave goods, you know, I mean, iron mirror, this is a wonderful one, which has this kind of what's called a bean counter, which does underplays it. But this is very enigmatic, copper alloy object, you know, which we don't really know what it's for. So that's always hinted to us that the the the women have, you know, can have status and have status. I think the DNA evidence is really exciting because it's kind of it's emphasizing that that's, you know, that there's clear evidence for that, you know, and the relatedness. And also that it's not just Dorset, that it's probably happening in other parts of Britain. So. So when we have the individuals that Tastus mentions, like Queen Cartamandia, we shouldn't be so surprised in that perhaps we only know about them because

• 41:38Speaker 01

  Roman historians, they came into contact with the Roman world, but there were others.

• 41:41Tristan Hughes?

  Those are the high status women, you know, that they're interacting with, but that, you know, that evidence from graves in East Yorkshire and also in Dorset, kind of the two main areas where we find a lot of human remains from the Iron Age.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  Yes, and that's one of the, you know, the, one of the kind of interesting issues, the burial record from the Iron Age is incredibly varied, but it's only really in Dorset and East Yorkshire that you have what we call an incumation, right?

• 42:05Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  The body going into the ground and in both areas, sometimes with grave goods, so things buried with people. Of course, that's really useful because then you've got the bodies, you can associate with the grave goods, you can do things like DNA analysis, isotope analysis and so on. For much of Britain, throughout much of the Iron Age, that's not what happens to the dead. It's incredibly buried, what happens to the dead. You do have incumation burials, in hillforts, in farmsteads, for instance, but often just, it's obviously clearly just a small proportion of the population who lived there. What happened to the rest of the population is quite a complicated story. We don't know, but, I mean, you know, if you dig any

• 42:48Speaker 01

  Iron Age site really across Britain, you will often find fragments of human remains in ditches, in roundhouses, post holes and so on, bits of leg bones, bits of skull. So.

• 42:59Tristan Hughes?

  Your dead relative buried under the floorboards sometimes?

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, that's, yeah, maybe not quite that, but I mean, there is, there is an interesting question there because we are still sort of trying to establish what happened to the dead. For a long time, we suspected that it was exhumation, so in other words, placed in, on platforms or in trees and sort of, you know, left out to sort of rot and to be picked up by yeah, animals and birds and so on. And then the remains went into archaeological features. It's somewhat more complicated than that because there's been some wonderful studies that show that sometimes bodies went in the ground and then were dug up again and moved around and sometimes bodies were probably mummified, they were probably kept above ground.

• 43:42Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  And then deposited. So what's interesting, so we're there, I mean, some wonderful examples of it's a skull which have holes drilled in them. And so people are, you know, hanging bits of bodies up. So, I mean, it's really interesting because I think, you know, the attitudes towards the dead are probably much more varied, fluid. And this, I think, you know, you can sometimes think, oh, isn't that disrespectful, but perhaps not, you know, it's more about actually the dead being part of the community.

• 44:09Tristan Hughes?

  Well, once again, and like we've done Ice Age examples of cannibalism, where actually it's actually a part of the ritual, not saying that for Iron Age stuff at all, but once again, getting our mind around different ways that they honour the dead.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:20Tristan Hughes?

  That, you know, of their family and so on. And there's some bog body examples, aren't there, quite a few from Iron Age.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the famous one is Lindar Man, obviously. Again, the bog bodies perhaps are part of that sort of continuum, if you like, you know, the bog bodies are there and certainly treated in special ways, wet places are almost certainly have significance in the Iron Age, but in a sense, the bog bodies are perhaps part of the continuum that we see in other forms, which are now skeletons, if you like, not preserved, but actually part of this, we're treating the dead in different ways. And, and one of the things that interests me is that that might also relate to what you did in life. Did you die in battle? Therefore, you get one treatment, perhaps you're interred, you're in, you're in infumation, perhaps somewhere on the settlement site, you know, if you died in a different way, you get treated in a different way, so.

• 45:06Tristan Hughes?

  We're going to explore a bit, one particularly grim other way of dying in a bit, if we're going to explore human sacrifice. But before we get there, you mentioned fighting in battle. Is this a clear part of Iron Age British society? Because in the past, we always, you look at the Great Hillforts, you look at the ramparts, the chariots and so on, and you think warrior society. How far? Can we say that, you know, the people, like the men of Iron Age Britain, that they were warrior societies, that they were expected to fight?

• 45:38Speaker 01

  Certainly violence is part of Iron Age society. You know, we have individuals who have sword cuts to the head. You know, we were talking about Stannick earlier. You go Stannick, there's a wonderful example with a skull with a sword cut. It is obviously a sword cut to the head buried in the ditch, yeah?

• 45:55Tristan Hughes?

  And just cut into the skull.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I mean, and then we have many examples of that. I guess one of the interesting things is when we then take that to say about, is it a warrior society? So when we talked about Hillforts, you know, it's very hard to see a warrior elite living at Hillforts. In many ways, it's hard to see a warrior elite. So we have some burials of what you might call warriors. There's a wonderful one at Millhill in Kent, where you have an individual buried with shield, sword. And so you can say this individual is a warrior, but but most people are not treated like that to the Iron Age, you know. So they're they're actually relatively unusual. So if if it was a warrior society, wouldn't we find more of those?

• 46:36Speaker 01

  You know, if we think of East Yorkshire, there are individuals who are buried with weapons, but not all of those people and not most of those people. So and when we look at the evidence of trauma, so violence on bodies, you know, it's only about eight percent of the remains from somewhere like Danbury have trauma on it. Now, it's a question of what proportion you'd expect, but what I mean by that is that violence is a part of those societies, but there's a big difference from it being a warrior elite. You know, I always love, there's a great quote by an Iron Age specialist, who said, it's, you know, farmers who fight. You know, they are farmers most of the time who do fight. As I said before, you know, if you think of, there are massacres, there's Woldbury, there's Breeden Hill, where you have violence.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  You know, people who were clearly killed, probably massacred at the site. So there is interpersonal violence, but I think it's from the evidence we have from the human remains that I think it's unlikely that this is happening all the time, everybody. And For some people, you may get status through warfare, through violence, but I think this is probably not always the case and perhaps not often the case.

• 47:37Tristan Hughes?

  Because you might want to think of somewhere like an operator like Stanek or somewhere or somewhere similar, Colchester, Carmeludnum, where you mentioned how the gathering of people all together, I guess, could there be a theory that maybe once in a while, if they'd had a disagreement with a nearby people, the elite, they gather there in their charis, the farmers are expected to gather with their spears and slings and that's the kind of the classic and then off they go for a quick fight.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's certainly uncertain in the late Iron Age, those kind of, you know, battles between groups of Iron Age people certainly happened and throughout the Iron Age, you know, certainly violence was part of society, there was warfare. I think what where I'm sort of distinguishing, I guess, is from the kind of assumption that status is always gained through violence. I mean, we're just talking about female power and that's probably more through ownership of land. And so it's probably land that's most important. So is that kind of, is that difference between saying is violence part of society or is it a warrior elite? And I think that might sound like, you know, nitpicking, but actually I think it's really important to think, how do you gain status? And violence

• 48:49Speaker 01

  is probably one way, but it's perhaps not common all the time.

• 49:00Speaker 02

  If you love a good story, why aren't you listening to Dan Snow's History Hit Podcast? It's a show where we tell you every amazing, crazy and important thing that's ever happened in human history, from the perilous voyages of the first Polynesians, the discoveries of Captain Cook, the deadly Viking raids on Britain and Ireland, the rise and fall of the great English kings and queens. We'll tell you how Waterloo was won, the Alamo was lost and all the history in between. So make sure you check it out. Dan Snow's History Hit for the best true stories ever told, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 49:50Tristan Hughes?

  So let's talk about religion. Does Iron Age religion, or for most of the Iron Age period in Britain, is it quite invisible to see examples of ritual and religion?

• 50:03Speaker 01

  So for much of the Iron Age, there is little in the way of temples or sanctuaries. They appear at the very end of the Iron Age. Where we see belief is through things like remains buried on settlement sites, both human remains, but also animal remains, structured sometimes, so arranged in unusual ways, which are probably some kind of ritual activity offerings on settlement sites. Even the structure of the way their settlements are organised, mentioning about the way round houses that can be orientated towards the rising sun. So the way you structure your space of your settlement is also about reflecting ritual and belief. But it's not, you know, there's not a place probably where you go and do ritual for much of the Iron Age.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  It's in your everyday experience.

• 50:49Tristan Hughes?

  And so is, but is there an importance of the natural landscape? Can we gather that? I mean, I might also think of objects like the Battersea Shield or the Waterloo Helmet, which you can go and see in the British Museum today. Do we get a sense that there is a real attachment to wooded areas, to rivers and so on throughout the Iron Age?

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Certainly, certain places in the landscape have symbolic significance. So you're right. So some of the, we have less metalwork deposition in rivers than we had in the Bronze Age, but it's still happening and it's interesting. So you mentioned the, some of the shields, something like the Witherm Shield from Lincolnshire, where there are places where people go and deposit material. There's a great place called Fiskerton, where there's a kind of platform that goes into the river. And they're clearly depositing valuable objects, probably sometimes human remains, you know, some, some of the dead, you know, and that's another enigma of what happens to some of the dead. Maybe they go into, to rivers and there are special places where that happens. Again, what's interesting about some of that is those objects, you know, like Witherm Shield.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  You know, this is perhaps again, a communal act and it's the community coming together. The fact that you put it into a wet place, you don't bury it with your warrior, is perhaps saying this is about the communal act.

• 52:05Tristan Hughes?

  So let's talk about druids. What do we know about druids in Iron Age Britain?

• 52:11Speaker 01

  So we know about druids really from Roman writers, particularly Julius Caesar mentions druids when he's in Gaul, and he mentions the fact that druids existed in Britain and they were important. Archaeologically, it's very difficult to see the existence of druids. So there are exceptional burials. We have these kind of little bronze spoons which divide into quarters, which are kind of weird objects. And there's a burial in Scotland which has one of them. And these could be kind of ritual items. But actually trying to identify druids in the archaeological record is very difficult for the Iron Age. And we don't see them in

• 52:53Speaker 01

  burials, we don't see them. So it's hard to know how significant they were, certainly for much of the Iron Age. And perhaps if they were significant, it's only towards the late Iron Age.

• 53:02Tristan Hughes?

  Gosh, but do we know, can we say anything about them at all?

• 53:07Speaker 01

  I mean, the thing with the druids is archaeologically, it is hard to see them. So one of the burials associated with Colchester Stanway, which has Roman medical equipment in it, people saying, oh, is this divination? But it's really hard to make that leap archaeologically to these individuals. So and as I say, for most of the Iron Age, for most of the time, ritual practice seems to be something that's done perhaps more by and within the community. And to try identify those ritual specialists is quite difficult. And as you can tell, something that's going to be quite controversial, really.

• 53:44Tristan Hughes?

  Fair enough. I mean, one thing I would then ask, though, is the human sacrifice question. Is archaeologically, is it more clear to see evidence of human sacrifice in Iron Age remains?

• 53:54Speaker 01

  Certainly individuals died violently. So, you know, in terms of, and perhaps some people were. Sacrificed, but again, you know, how, how and why they were killed is often quite hard to see archaeologically. And I think we have to be a bit kind of careful of, this all comes from sort of trying to take the classical sources and say, can we see that in the archaeological record? And I think that's, that's always a little bit difficult to sort of interpret it with through the lens of the classical writers rather than thinking, how did these people die? Why was that? And certainly, you know, some of those bog bodies, you know, are treated in ways which suggests they, they, they were, they were sacrificed. But why and what that means, I think is, is really interesting. I mean,

• 54:39Speaker 01

  I think, I'm going to give you an example. There's a burial that I excavated at Badgendon. So it's a, it's a female burial, buried in the ditch. And she's buried in a very unusual way. So she was, she was placed in the ditch so that she sort of was on her knees and she fell backwards. Now, she wasn't elderly female, so we can't, archaeologically, you can't say how old, but she was certainly over 50. And she, we know from her isotopes that she'd come from long distance. Now, it looks, we couldn't find any evidence that she'd sort of had a throat cut, any kind of nicks on the, on the throat or anything. But the burial is kind of, you might interpret as being kind of sacrificed, or she's placed in the ditch and it's very unusual, looks like she didn't want to go in. It's not, but I actually, if you think of her being an elderly female, and the fact that she's come

• 55:23Speaker 01

  from long distance to the site in her childhood, she's probably somebody who's really important in society. So, you know, how, does her treatment and death denote something that she was sacrificed? Or does it denote actually something that was really, she was a really important member of society? So I think that's where the, the archaeology, you know, we have to be a little bit nuanced about how we interpret it.

• 55:42Tristan Hughes?

  Understood. You mentioned earlier, Uffington, and that being a prime Iron Age centre. Now, when someone mentions Uffington, I do think of the, the beautiful white horse, the chalk horse on the side of the hill there. And Iron Age roots, do we believe, to that white horse?

• 55:57Speaker 01

  Early Iron Age.

• 55:58Tristan Hughes?

  Early Iron Age, which leads me to the question of horses in general in the Iron Age. How symbolic, how important do we think horses became to Iron Age societies?

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Horses are really kind of intriguing when we think about the Iron Age. And certainly throughout much of the Iron Age, in the Middle Iron Age, for instance, they're clearly treated differently. So when we're talking about ritual, bits of horse remains are deposited on sites, and there's great examples from Danbury, you know, a leg of a horse, you know, so they seem to be treated in different ways than, say, cattle, sheep. When we get to the late Iron Age, lots of the late Iron Age coinage, they really focus on the horse imagery.

• 56:33Tristan Hughes?

  And that coinage is beautiful, the surviving coins of Iron Age Britain, those horses, they look immaculate.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they're really stylistic. And you know, if you think of the Officer Horse, it has some similarities to some of the depictions on on much of the Iron Age coinage. I mean, what I always think about that is that remembering that Iron Age coinage is originally imitating coinage that comes from the Greek world and the Roman world, but they pick the horse, you know, they make a choice to focus on the horse because perhaps of its significance in terms of of wealth and we think of horses or really they should be thought of as ponies, they're quite small actually, you know, they're small horses. But pulling chariots, by the late Iron Age, we get some coinage which depicts people on horses, the cavalry, you know, is becoming perhaps more important in terms of violence and warfare.

• 57:25Speaker 01

  And I mean, one of the things that fascinates me is that they're exchanging horses over long distance. We haven't done lots of the work yet, but with some of the initial isotopes, so you know, telling where things come from, from the the bones in terms of the strontium and oxygen, from my own site showing that the horses at Badgenham have come from Wales, there are other sites, so they're exchanging horses over long distance, you know, so horses are probably a form of status. And if you can imagine them pulling your chariots, imagine riding them, you can see that that's a high status animal and something that you want to depict as, you know, that's why it's on coinage, it's how many horses you have is probably how powerful you are.

• 58:04Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. Tom, we've covered a lot of ground and admittedly it's been a big subject to try and tackle. So I appreciate you hanging on in there with my questions going from one thing to the next. Really appreciate it. The legacy of the Iron Age, of course, we had a look at that passage earlier and how it was seen as kind of backward and uncivilized compared to Rome. But in regards to actually on the ground itself, following the Roman conquest. Is it fair to say that the Iron Age, I mean, Iron Age way of life, round houses and so on, I mean, it doesn't just disappear like that?

• 58:38Speaker 01

  Not at all, no. I mean, many people lived in round houses well into the Roman period, you know, and that wasn't because they were backward, that was because that was a way of living, a choice of living. You might think of Celtic art, we often refer to it as Latent style art in archaeology, but that goes on and has a life of its own.

• 58:57Tristan Hughes?

  The gold talks and stuff like that, there's beautiful.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the stylistic art, the sort of curvilinear art that, you know, people are familiar with, that comes from the Iron Age and is then used in different ways and adopted and adapted in the Roman, in Roman Britain, you know, it becomes and takes on a life of its own. And so, of course, beyond the Roman Empire. So the Iron Age doesn't just disappear, it becomes part of Roman Britain and Britain long, long after the Iron Age seems to end.

• 59:24Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, Tom, how do you think, how should we view Iron Age Britain today?

• 59:28Speaker 01

  That's a very good question. I would say, Iron Age Britain really sets up what we think of Britain. You know, if you think of the landscapes, intensively farmed by the end of the Iron Age, you know, they are establishing the opeda, these large places, many of which become Roman towns. They're still towns today like Colchester. So it really sets the framework for much of what is Britain, I would say, an intensively farmed and occupied landscape.

• 59:53Tristan Hughes?

  Tom, this has been fascinating. So much ground covered. We could do several more hours talking about Iron Age Britain, but we'll, we'll leave it there. It just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:00:07Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Professor Tom Moore giving you an introduction to this amazing, but still very mysterious world of Iron Age Britain. Still much debate around so many topics regarding Iron Age Britain, how different places. in Britain were in those centuries before the Roman invasion. We will put in the show notes links to a couple of other episodes we have recorded over the years about Iron Age Britain. One all about the Druids with the one and only Professor Ronald Hutton. And another one about late Iron Age Britain, what we actually know about the very end of the Iron Age at the time that the Romans invaded, which also does feature Tom for part of it. Put a link to those episodes in the show notes.

• 1:00:51Tristan Hughes?

  Thank you once again for listening. Now, if you've been enjoying the ancients, please make sure to follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us, you'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, maybe even a comment too, well, we'd really appreciate that. We love interacting with you. Don't forget, you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. Sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe. That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.