Professor Tom Moore

In many ways, iron doesn't necessarily define the Iron Age.

The Late Bronze Age ends with the kind of, people might know that in the Bronze Age, and particularly the Late Bronze Age, there's large hoarding of bronze objects and then depositing them in wet places or in hoards on land.

And that ceases around 800, 700 BC, which is kind of the end of the Bronze Age.

But iron technology doesn't come in

In fact, iron technology is actually, there's some evidence that it's been around for a few hundred years before the end of the Bronze Age, confusingly.

So there is iron technology in the Bronze Age.

Yes, oddly, but yes, or at least hints at it.

So there's a site in Berkshire which has smithing.

So that's when you're smithing objects, so you're not actually smelting the ore.

That dates from about 900 BC.

So very early, when we're firmly in the Bronze Age.

Iron technology then smelting, so that's actually taking the ore, doesn't happen until about maybe 800, 700 BC.

But actually the iron technology, when we get it, for example, traded in ingots, for instance, doesn't really happen until about 400 BC.

So iron technology kind of is there in the background and emerges through the early part of the Iron Age, if you see what I mean.

So it's a little bit... Now, in the past, people used to think that there was these people called the Celts who brought iron technology, also perhaps brought Celtic art.

We know from particularly things like DNA studies that's certainly not true.

The influx of peoples is more perhaps in the Bronze Age than it is in the Iron Age.

Is that the so-called the Beaker people?

Yeah, so that's when we can see more evidence of an influx of people coming from the continent.

So in terms of how the Iron Age adopts, it's more of an insular development and perhaps a relationship between changes in the economy, society and ritual in the end of the Bronze Age and new technology coming in.