Professor Ronald Hutton

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248 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 2 Aug

Professor Ronald Hutton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Empire: World History · 383. Romans vs Druids: The War For Celtic Britain (Ep 1) · 2 Aug 2026 podcast

I'm delighted to be with you both.

A long barrow is the local Southern English name for a particular type of monument that represents the first really widespread architectural tradition of the entire human race.

There are around 40,000 of these structures still surviving in a great arc along the western seaboard of Europe from southeastern Spain right round through the British Isles and Netherlands to southern Scandinavia and northern Germany.

And this enormous area is covered in them from about 8,000 years ago to about 5,000 years ago.

And that's before you have any widespread ceremonial architecture over any other region of the globe.

So they matter.

Over such a big area, there's an enormous variety, both in the nature of the structures and what happened there.

The basic idea with which people play is to build a chamber of huge stones, sometimes huge timbers, covered by a mound that is usually much bigger than is needed to cover the chamber.

In other words, which makes a statement in the landscape.

And you usually find dead human beings or bits of them in the chamber.

So at basis, this is a religion which has mediated at least partly through the dead and which creates enormous structures to which the eye is drawn wherever they're made.

Okay, I'm a gentle self, so I don't throw cats among pigeons.

It's bad both for the cats and the pigeons.

What I can say is that, for sure, the religion of the Long Barrow people and of this huge tradition of great mounds and internal megalithic chambers comes to a halt at different places, different times, but it really grinds to a halt around about 3000 BC.

before the common or Christian era.

And certainly in southern Britain, this is quite a traumatic change because the mounds are not just deserted, the chambers are actually blocked up.

And in some cases, very carefully closed against anybody trying to get in ever again.

This is probably because of the religious reformation

equivalent to that which swept Christianity in the 16th century.

We used to be told, well, we were told by the Victorians that this was the work of an invading force called the Beaker people.

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