Professor Tom Moore

So there's a wonderful site in Wales where you've got an import of a sword, which is made from iron from the continent.

And then there are objects made in iron, but copying bronze types.

So people are clearly kind of,

playing around with this technology, but perhaps not seeing the advantages of it or needing the advantages straight away.

Yes.

I mean, throughout the Iron Age, almost everybody is a farmer, even right up into the late Iron Age.

We don't have really specialists, perhaps, until the very end of the Iron Age.

Most people are farming most of the time.

And they are mostly subsistence farmers.

In other words, you know, growing enough crops

feed them and their families, you know, perhaps a little bit of surplus, but they're not creating for, you know, a broader economy.

There are, you know, a lot of people lived in small farmsteads.

I mean, I would hesitate to say, as we say, the Iron Age is a long period and incredibly diverse.

I mean, one of the things we are very aware of now is the diversity of the kind of settlements you lived in.

I mean, you can contrast it from the big stone brocks of

of Northern and Western Scotland down to the courtyard house settlements of Cornwall, to the unenclosed settlements, to these scattered roundhouses that you find in the East Midlands.

The Cranogs, artificial islands.

Yes, occasionally.

They're less common in the British Iron Age, certainly.

But Cranogs, yes.