Professor Tom Moore

So...

And as I say, for most of the Iron Age, for most of the time, ritual practice seems to be something that's done perhaps more by and within the community.

And to identify those ritual specialists is quite difficult.

And as you can tell, something that's going to be quite controversial, really.

Certainly individuals died violently.

So, you know, in terms of, and perhaps some people were sacrificed, but again, you know, how and why they were killed is often quite hard to see archaeologically.

And I think we have to be a bit kind of careful of that.

This all comes from sort of trying to take the classical sources and say, can we see that in the archaeological record?

And I think that's always a little bit difficult to sort of interpret it through the lens of the classical writers, rather than thinking, how did these people die?

Why was that?

And certainly, some of those bog bodies are treated in ways which suggest...

They were sacrificed.

But why and what that means, I think is really interesting.

I mean, I think, I'm going to give you an example.

There's a burial that I excavated at Badgenden.

So it's a female burial, buried in the ditch.

And she's buried in a very unusual way.

So she was placed in the ditch so that she sort of was on her knees and she fell backwards.

Now, she was an elderly female, so we can't, archaeologically, you can't say how old, but she was certainly over 50.

And we know from her isotopes that she'd come from long distance.