Professor Tom Moore

Rome brought innovations of urbanism, for instance, but much of the rest of society was already highly developed and complex before Rome ever turned up.

Yes, because of course you've got to remember that Iron Age societies didn't leave any written records.

Interestingly, some of them in the very late Iron Age could probably read and write Latin, but there's very few people.

And the only written evidence we have is a few sources from Greek and Roman writers which suffer from their own problems of propaganda and so on.

So it's only archaeology that can really tell us about Iron Age societies.

Yes, well, obviously archaeology has changed.

I mean, when you look at something like that, obviously it's written in a time before archaeology was really a...

a full discipline and really understood that so you could see from that little quote you read there that there's a sort of conflation of flints and neolithic and with the iron age so they're not really they haven't got that understanding of deep time that we now understand in the iron age and of course when we think about the sources they were using like julius easer's account

of the conquest or his invasions of Britain.

You know, that's what they're using to understand periods like the Iron Age.

Archaeology now, you know, since throughout the 20th century and now, you know, allows us to have a much better understanding of those societies.

Yeah, I mean, it's a really exciting time for RNA studies, as you say.

I mean, they're exciting discoveries, not least Melson B, but also huge advances in scientific analysis.

So ancient DNA studies telling us about relationships between people, perhaps where they came from.

Isotope studies also telling us about diet and also perhaps the origins of individuals.

And I have to say, and it sort of perhaps doesn't grab the headlines so much, but also what we would call developer-led archaeology.

So, you know, most people perhaps don't realize that over 90% of archaeology in Britain happens before development, before road schemes and building.

And that's constantly providing new Iron Age settlements so that we can chart the kind of houses they live in, the settlements they live in, and even perhaps, you know, the increase in numbers of settlements over time.

So it's a really exciting time to be able to bring all that together to try and sort of understand Iron Age societies as a whole.

So in terms of people think of the Iron Age, and we think of iron obviously as being defining that,