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

who brought a new cultural package like big drinking vessels and metals and stone circles and urban circles and so on.

The Victorians thought that everything was due to invasions by new and superior races with new and superior technologies.

because this was exactly the treatment the Victorians themselves were meeting out to indigenous peoples all over the world as part of the imperialism with which both of you are historically so deeply interested.

We in the 1990s in Britain tended to abandon this idea largely because the changes associated with the so-called Beaker people

proved to have turned up in this country really slowly, spread over about a thousand years, instead of arriving altogether.

And the bodies you find in the burial places don't look ethnically much different from each other.

However, there really is a cat among the pigeons at present produced by geneticists, the DNA specialists, who claim to have found that round about halfway through the third millennium, we're talking round about 2500 BCE or BCE,

There's a genetic makeover.

In other words, most of the people in Britain seem to be replaced by foreigners.

The trouble is there's no sign of invasion, no sign of warfare, no sign of trauma, no sign of any change in the way people live or worship, no sign of big change in their technology.

So whatever this cataclysm is, it doesn't measure up to the archaeology.

and we're still trying to get our heads around it.

So the message is, since the 1990s, the Beaker people are out, and this has nothing to do with me.

The answer is we at present have no idea.

So it's open season on the facts.

What we can say is that Indo-European languages do engulf most of the old world.

But there's big argument over when.

Some think they arrived with the long barrows, with the megalithic tombs.

Others put them as late as the first millennium BC or BCE.

And there's no consensus.

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