Professor Tom Moore

Were they meant to be defended from?

Or to deter or to impress people, I guess.

Yeah, I think both.

I mean, we know that some hill forts had violence take place at them.

Walbury, for instance, in Somerset, Breeden Hill in South Worcestershire.

You know, there's evidence of what we might call massacres.

You know, people were killed at hill forts and they probably were attacked from time to time.

I think we kind of get away from that.

But those ramparts also, as you just intimated, have a function just showing the amount of labor 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 hill forts is perhaps...

If you want to talk about colour in the Iron Age, you perhaps want to talk about some of the objects they're using in the Middle and Late Iron Age, which are, of course, some of them bronze, shining bronze, and then adorned with glass and coral and so on, as we were mentioning with Melsenby 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 a black and world or a green and brown world completely.

Right.

So opida are these range of monuments that emerge at the very end of the Iron Age, really, towards the end of the first century BC.

We call them mopita 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 types of these sites in Gaul.

So we've kind of transferred the term.