Professor Tom Moore

It's more like a large village, if you like, a large group of roundhouses and communities together.

But it doesn't seem to be of any higher status, really, than many of the other settlements around.

Yeah, I mean, that's been a big discussion in Iron Age studies for, well, for 40, 50 years, really.

The idea of whether there is elite.

We always assume, and this comes back to sort of things like classical sources, you know, Roman writers, because Caesar describes Iron Age society in Gaul as being elite and having kings and druids.

We kind of think that that must be how the Iron Age in Britain was for all of the Iron Age.

But actually, archaeologically, there's very little evidence for an elite.

You know, the things that you might think of as an elite, burial practices, grave goods, that there would be a larger house or more rich material goods at somewhere like Danebury, that doesn't exist in the archaeological record.

If you look at Danebury, for instance, the kind of things that happened at Danebury, the kind of goods they were using, the kind of objects they were using, are very similar to the smaller farmsteads we were talking about earlier.

So,

It's very hard to distinguish any obvious elite.

That doesn't mean there wasn't difference in status between people.

And status can be measured in things like number of cattle you have, the number of sheep you have.

But I think to think of it as sort of a hierarchy with a king or a chief, I think most Iron Age specialists would suggest that's probably a little bit simplistic.

Again, you know, sort of saying, you know, you're getting into controversial topics here.

That's what I do.

I'm sorry, Tom.

No, that's right.

In terms of those ramparts, yes.

The key distinction there is thinking, were hill forts attacked all the time?