Professor Tom Moore

But many of the hill forts in Hampshire, for instance, and up the Welsh Marches, are different kinds of settlements.

They're more like small villages, communities.

The Opera don't mark a very different kind of social organisation.

They're probably...

central places for a much larger, the emergence of much larger groups of people.

So Stanek, for instance, that's probably the central place for a whole confederacy of people across, you know, much of what is now Northern England.

The people that are referred to by classical writers as the Brigantes.

That's very different from the roles of hill forts, you know, on a much larger scale.

So this is the emergence probably of larger social entities that we only see really towards the end of the Iron Age, things that we can think of as much larger polities.

Yeah, well, that's one of the things that really interests me about the opera because

One of the things that we're seeing in that period is the movement from, you know, very, very quite localized societies based on perhaps networks of a few farmsteads, you know, exchanging material between themselves, but not perhaps, you know, large social entities.

The late Iron Age with the opera is the formation of those larger entities, but you've got to have places where you negotiate that.

You know, how do you negotiate those relationships?

And the opera and those big empty spaces is perhaps the place you do it for assembling.

And one of the things that...

if we can believe some of the things that people like caesar say is that late iron age societies is about negotiated power the elites have to kind of forge assemblies he talks about this happening in gaul where they have to decide as a group a collective you know are we going to go to war are we having an alliance with these people it's the opera where those spaces happen and you can imagine the empty areas that we have in these sites because much of the interior of them is not full of settlements it's open that's where they're gathering those people together

One of the things that fascinates me is that there's also the impact from the expanding Roman Empire, but you've got to also remember that there's been a large increase in the number of settlements over the later Iron Age.

So from about 300 BC, you just see an increase pretty much everywhere of settlements across Britain.

There's more people in the landscape, there's more people who've got to negotiate access to land, so there has to be places where that takes place.

And I think to some extent maybe Opperdor are the kind of culmination of that.