Professor Ronald Hutton

speaker

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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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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

You have perfect dedication to the subcontinent.

The simple answer is we don't know enough about the Druidic traditions to say.

But what we can say is if artistic designs travel with great precision across the highest mountains in the world and the vast open steps of Eurasia as far as the Black Sea, then stories and ideas are going to travel even more easily because you don't actually have to pack them and carry them.

So there's a huge amount of...

super-racial, super-cultural transmission going on across the old world before our bit of it gets anywhere near history.

Well, it happens at the beginning, which is why we get a Stonehenge at all.

What people do when they give up making malefic tunes and communing with the dead inside them is to get out in the open air and worship inside circles of whatever happens to be easiest to hand to make them.

In soft soil without big stones, you simply dig a ditch and pile up a circular bank.

In areas where you have lots of trees, you put up rings of timber posts.

And where you have big rocks lying around handy, you put them up on end and create a stone circle.

And Stonehenge comes in in this tradition.

It has all three.

It has the bank, it has the timbers, and eventually it has the stone circle.

But the thing about Stonehenge is it's unique.

It's a logo, nothing else like it.

It's created by demented megalomaniac woodworkers, carpenters, who take enormous stones and shape them and fit them together as if they were timbers.

It's a brilliant idea.

It's so impossibly difficult that nobody tried it again.

I'm saying we don't know that.

It might have happened.

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