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

It's when the circles, the round circles are abandoned and before we get into Romanization and Christianization.

Tell us about the nipples.

Well, this is prehistoric, so of course we can't be sure.

If we relate it to a medieval Irish text…

which stated that part of homage to an early Irish king is to suck his nipples as though he's acting as a kind of mother to you, then this is a form of homage, in which case your dead man could have been an unlucky king deposed by his own people or killed by an enemy people who has his nipples cut off to destroy his royalty.

On the other hand, it could just have been something really nasty being done to an enemy warrior whom you'd captured and were putting to death horribly.

Or a warrior on your side or just a man of your tribe who'd committed a heinous crime and was being stripped of his dignity and his place in the community before being killed and tipped into the bog.

But there's...

No, it's certainly not random, but ritual can cover an enormous number of different things.

One is the slaughter of enemies.

In other words, you've had a successful war.

You execute selected prisoners as part of weakening the enemy.

And then you ritually dump them in a place in which they are out of the community.

Explanation two is they're executed criminals.

They're people who have offended the community and are from the community.

And they are then sentenced to death.

And they are placed outside the bounds of the community.

order to rid them of the malefactors in death as in life and the third one is human sacrifice that these people are actually offered up to deities like material objects and they're put into the bogs because the bogs are portals liminal places gateways to other worlds actually

All three of those explanations have equal probability, but there's a tendency to home in on human sacrifice because it's sexiest.

Human beings across the planet believe in other worlds in the sense of worlds in which spirits or deities live.

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