Professor Tom Moore

But pulling chariots, by the late Iron Age, we get some coinage which depicts people on horses, the cavalry is becoming perhaps more important in terms of violence and warfare.

And I mean, one of the things that fascinates me is that they're exchanging horses over long distance.

We haven't done lots of the work yet, but...

some of the initial isotopes.

So, you know, telling where things come from, from the bones in terms of the strontum and the oxygen.

From my own site showing that the horses at Badgerdon have come from Wales, there are other sites.

So they're exchanging horses over long distance, you know.

So horses are probably a form of status.

And if you can imagine them pulling your chariots, imagine riding them, you can see that that's a high status animal and something that you want to depict as

You know, that's why it's on coinage.

How many horses you have is probably how powerful you are.

Not at all, no.

I mean, many people lived in roundhouses well into the Roman period, you know.

And that wasn't because they were backward.

That was because that was a way of living, a choice of living.

You might think of Celtic art.

We often refer to it as Latin style art in archaeology.

But that goes on and has a life of its own.

The gold torques and stuff like that.

Yeah, well, the stylistic art, the sort of curvilinear art that people are familiar with, that comes from the Iron Age and is then used in different ways and adopted and adapted in Roman Britain.