Professor Tom Moore

And it means, from Latin, you can translate it as enclosed settlement or town.

The confusing thing for the British sites is they are not towns, not towns as we would understand it.

So the classic operda in Britain, places like Camelodyne and modern Colchester.

So Colchester was originally an Iron Age centre.

Underneath Colchester, underneath the medieval and Roman town is an Iron Age centre, also underneath modern St Albans, a site near Melsonby, Stanwick.

These are the sort of classic operda.

They're characterized by these huge, enormous ramparts.

I mean, one of the things, you know, we talked about hill forts, but these things have huge earthworks.

For many of them, like Colchester, confusingly, these earthworks don't define a nice enclosed area like our hill forts, like Danebury.

They often define huge areas of landscape.

So I worked at Badgenden, for instance, encompasses about 200 hectares.

Wow.

You can quite, yeah.

To get people's heads around that, you can quite easily plonk a Roman town within that quite happily and still have space.

But they don't define a nice sort of enclosed area.

So one of the things that we've been working on and I've been interested in is how do they, what are they doing?

How do they use that space?

So it's more about defining landscapes for activities.

And that's probably telling us about the change in society.

So by this time, hill forts in many parts of Britain had sort of fallen out of use.