Chapter 1: What misconceptions exist about Iron Age Britain?
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Chapter 2: What archaeological discoveries are reshaping our understanding of Iron Age societies?
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For a long time, Iron Age Britain has been misunderstood. In the past, this centuries-long period of British prehistory, just before the Roman conquest, has been portrayed as a shadowy world, dominated by warriors in blue paint. A land of so-called barbarians, living rudimentary lives on the edge of the known world. But we now know that that's not quite right.
Across Britain, objects have been pulled from rivers and earth that tell a different story. Objects so intricate and so deliberate, crafted by highly sophisticated pre-Roman societies, each with their own traditions, their own beliefs. It is archaeology that has started to shine an incredible light on who these Iron Age Britons actually were and how they lived.
New discoveries are being unearthed and revealed to the world for the first time in more than 2,000 years. We are in a golden age for Iron Age archaeology. It is archaeology that is revealing a world of striking elites, both men and women, of complex settlements, beautiful metalwork, long-distance trade, and of profound beliefs that shaped entire landscapes.
It's this archaeology that we're going to delve into today. Welcome to the Ancients.
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Chapter 3: How did the Iron Age in Britain evolve over time?
I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is an introduction to the exciting yet still very mysterious world of Iron Age Britain. Our guest is Durham University's Professor Tom Moore, one of the leading experts on Iron Age Britain. Tom, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Lovely to see you again, Tristan. It's been too long since we last chatted.
We chatted all things that amazing discovery, the Melson B. Hoard, which I gather is going on display very, very soon.
Yep, there's going to be the first exhibition in Yorkshire Museum on the 15th of May. So excited to kind of see the public's reaction to it.
And so people understand the Melsenby hoard, we did a whole film on it with you and other key people involved in the project. But this is one of the largest, the most significant Iron Age discoveries in the north of England in recent years.
Yeah, I mean, one of the largest discoveries for the Iron Age in the whole of Britain, I would say, probably the largest forward of Iron Age metalwork ever encountered, you know, huge number of artifacts, particularly really exciting bits of vehicles, chariots, but also possibly wagons, which we haven't seen before, which sounds a bit nerdy, but it's really interesting for Iron Age specialists, because we've never seen forward wagons in Britain before.
So very exciting.
Well, nerdy is what we want beyond the ancients. I don't know why we're going to be doing much more of that nitty gritty detail on Iron Age Britain. But of course, Iron Age Britain, it's a large topic. So we're going to hop from topic to topic within Iron Age Britain during our chat and seeing how much we can get through.
But first off, with the background, when someone says Iron Age Britain today, how large a period of time are we talking about?
So the Iron Age starts around about 800 BC. It depends when you define the Iron Age, all the way through to the Roman conquest, really. So AD 43 in the southeast of England, obviously slightly later in northern England, and then parts of Scotland are never conquered by Rome.
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Chapter 4: What role did agriculture play in Iron Age communities?
That's a little bit of an artificial cutoff for the end of it, because, of course, that's just the conquest, but actually much of... Iron Age life in many parts of Britain carries on for a long period into the Roman period. But that's what we define as the Iron Age.
It's a huge period, isn't it? It's like from today all the way back to the time of the Crusades. So when talking about Iron Age Britain, I guess we're going to need to get our head around straight away that there's a lot of... development, a lot of evolution that you can see in these societies over that period.
Definitely. And in the past, sometimes we've kind of tended to kind of think of Iron Age life and society and settlement as all being one thing. But like you say, there's a huge change between the end of the Bronze Age, the late Bronze Age, all the way through to the Roman period.
And also it's worth remembering there's a huge diversity just in Britain in terms of the way people lived, the societies they lived in, the settlements they lived in. So Sometimes it's quite hard to kind of just generalize and say, this is what the Iron Age was like.
There used to be a tendency to think with the coming of Rome, that was the coming of civilization as it was. And what was in Britain before, it was mysterious, but it was the land of backward barbarians almost.
Yeah.
Yeah, definitely. That was the kind of the old way of looking at it. I mean, much of what was happening in the late Iron Age was a precursor to what happened in the Roman Empire. I mean, if we think about how farming was in the late Iron Age, most of those developments had already happened under Iron Age societies.
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Chapter 5: How did roundhouses function in Iron Age settlements?
Rome brought innovations of urbanism, for instance, but much of the rest of society was already highly developed and complex before Rome ever turned up.
And this is where archaeology, it really shines a light on Iron Age Britain unlike anything else.
Yes, because of course you've got to remember that Iron Age societies didn't leave any written records. Interestingly, some of them in the very late Iron Age could probably read and write Latin, but there's very few people. And the only written evidence we have is a few sources from Greek and Roman writers which suffer from their own problems of propaganda and so on.
So it's only archaeology that can really tell us about Iron Age societies.
What I have here, I wanted to bring this because it was discovered deep in an attic quite recently, but it's a history book. from I think it's the 1850s or 1840s, so it's quite an artifact in itself.
But it has like the first page, kind of gives you an insight into how they viewed the Iron Age back then and how different we can, and we can like dissect it all and going through the archaeology today. But it's interesting how it, like this book, you know, for kids more than 150 years ago, it starts basically with the Romans and a quick explanation of what was there before, what they thought.
It talks about Caesar's arrival in Britain and talks about the people of Britain. Its inhabitants, who were then thinly scattered over the island, were not civilized at all. They resembled barbarians, barbarous tribes. In old tombs or fields of battle, specimens of their arms and tools are still dug up. These consist of spear and arrowheads, hatchets and knives, ingeniously made of flint.
They were not acquainted with the use of lime in building, but lived mostly in subterranean dwellings covered with large slabs of stone. With the same rude material they erected many remarkable monuments, which astonished and confused the modern architects.
Such are the druidic circles of Stonehenge and other places, consisting of huge upright masses of rock, surmounted by transverse blocks of immense size." And it kind of goes on and on. It's like the soil was poorly cultivated and many districts, which are now fruitful cornfields, were then barren wastes or impassable morasses.
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Chapter 6: What significance did hill forts hold in Iron Age Britain?
It would seem at the present day but a poor boast for a powerful and civilized empire like Rome to gain victories over such tribes. Immediate thoughts on that, Tom?
Yes, well, obviously archaeology has changed. I mean, when you look at something like that, obviously it's written in a time before archaeology was really a...
a full discipline and really understood that so you could see from that little quote you read there that there's a sort of conflation of flints and neolithic and with the iron age so they're not really they haven't got that understanding of deep time that we now understand in the iron age and of course when we think about the sources they were using like julius easer's account
of the conquest or his invasions of Britain. You know, that's what they're using to understand periods like the Iron Age. Archaeology now, you know, since throughout the 20th century and now, you know, allows us to have a much better understanding of those societies.
Better understanding, better dating, more insights into how they lived. Still, presumably, many mysteries still abound, but we are learning through new discoveries in the north and south of Britain, more about how they lived and, yeah, how sophisticated they were, how they communicated, exchanged with each other, and so much more.
Yeah, I mean, it's a really exciting time for RNA studies, as you say. I mean, they're exciting discoveries, not least Melson B, but also huge advances in scientific analysis. So ancient DNA studies telling us about relationships between people, perhaps where they came from. Isotope studies also telling us about diet and also perhaps the origins of individuals.
And I have to say, and it sort of perhaps doesn't grab the headlines so much, but also what we would call developer-led archaeology. So, you know, most people perhaps don't realize that over 90% of archaeology in Britain happens before development, before road schemes and building.
And that's constantly providing new Iron Age settlements so that we can chart the kind of houses they live in, the settlements they live in, and even perhaps, you know, the increase in numbers of settlements over time. So it's a really exciting time to be able to bring all that together to try and sort of understand Iron Age societies as a whole.
So we'll get to these settlements very quickly, keywords like roundhouses, hill forts, and so on. But first of all, the arrival of the Iron Age in Britain, what should we be thinking?
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Chapter 7: How did rituals and beliefs manifest in Iron Age society?
So in terms of people think of the Iron Age, and we think of iron obviously as being defining that, 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.
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Chapter 8: What was the impact of Roman interactions on Iron Age Britain?
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. So the idea that there is a new group of people coming in is not the case. It's more of a change in society.
To add to the complexity there, it's also worth remembering that there is almost certainly a change in the climate between about 800 and 400 BC. So it gets a bit colder and wetter. So all of these things are happening concurrent with each other and societies are changing. So that's why when you say, when does the Iron Age start?
It sounds like a really easy question, but actually it's not quite so easy.
Well, at a time when Britain gets a bit more miserable, then it sounds like it hurts the climate as well. As an archaeologist, I would never say it gets miserable. It just changes. Yeah.
But it's interesting, that gradual process, which I'm hearing again and again now with so many ancient episodes, that when new technology comes in, how long it takes people over generations realizing or being able to get their hands on these new tools, this new metal that they now realize in their new settlements is more valuable, is more useful than, let's say, bronze and silver.
Yes. I mean, one of the things you've got to think about with iron technology compared to bronze, it's a very different kind of technology. So with bronze, if you're casting them, iron has to be smeltaged and then smithed. There's a different process there. They're not the same technological process. Also, it's
It's worth thinking that people don't necessarily see the advantages of iron or perhaps even need the advantage of iron. If you've built an entire economy on bronze working and obtaining bronze or the materials like tin and copper to make bronze, and you build your whole society on that, iron technology is not necessarily something you want or need to adopt straight away. So
We can be a little bit kind of assuming that as soon as people find iron technology, it's better. Actually, when you first make iron, it's not necessarily better than bronze for the things you need it to do. So there is a long period where people are playing with that technology. They're imitating it.
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.
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