Professor Tom Moore

It's in your everyday experience.

Certainly certain places in the landscape have symbolic significance.

So you're right.

We have less metalwork deposition in rivers than we had in the Bronze Age, but it's still happening and it's interesting.

So you mentioned some of the shields, something like the Witham Shield from Lincolnshire, where there are places where people go and deposit material.

There's a great place called Fiskerton.

where there's a kind of platform that goes into the river and they're clearly depositing valuable objects, probably sometimes human remains.

Some of the dead, you know, and that's another enigma of what happens to some of the dead.

Maybe they go into rivers and there are special places where that happens.

Again, what's interesting about some of that is those objects, you know, like Witham Shield, you know, this is perhaps, again, a communal act and it's a community coming together.

The fact that you put it into a wet place, you don't bury it with your warrior, is perhaps saying this is about the communal act.

So we know about druids really from Roman writers, particularly Julius Caesar mentions druids when he's in Gaul.

And he mentions the fact that druids existed in Britain and they were important.

Archaeologically, it's very difficult to see the existence of druids.

So there are exceptional burials.

We have these kind of little burials.

bronze spoons which divide into quarters which are kind of weird objects and there's you know there's a burial in Scotland which has one of them and these could be kind of ritual items but actually trying to identify druids in the archaeological record is is very difficult for the Iron Age and we don't see them in burials we don't see them so it's hard to know how significant they were certainly for much of the Iron Age and perhaps if they were significant it's only towards the late Iron Age.

I mean, the thing with the Druids is, archaeologically, it is hard to see them.

So one of the burials associated with Colchester at Stanway, which has very medical equipment in it, people saying, oh, is this for divination?

But it's really hard to make that leap archaeologically to these individuals.