In Our Time - The Iron Age

Episode Date: March 24, 2011

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the dawn of the European Iron Age.In around 3000 BC European metalworkers started to make tools and weapons out of bronze. A complex trading network evolved to convey this valuable metal and other goods around the continent. But two millennia later, a new skill arrived from the Middle East: iron smelting. This harder, more versatile metal represented a huge technological breakthrough.The arrival of the European Iron Age, in around 1000 BC, was a time of huge social as well as technological change. New civilisations arose, the landscape was transformed, and societies developed new cultures and lifestyles. Whether this was the direct result of the arrival of iron is one of the most intriguing questions in archaeology.With:Sir Barry CunliffeEmeritus Professor of European Archaeology at the University of OxfordSue HamiltonProfessor of Prehistory at University College LondonTimothy ChampionProfessor of Archaeology at the University of SouthamptonProducer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 907, during the construction of the Brooklyn's motor racing track in Surrey, workmen uncovered the remains of a prehistoric village. The objects they found included a bronze bucket and a horde of Roman coins.

but perhaps the most interesting discovery of all was the remains of a furnace dating from 5th century BC and used for smelting iron. The Brooklyn's furnace was the earliest evidence of iron production yet discovered in Britain. Until the beginning of the first millennium BC, tools had been made from bronze.

The introduction of ironworking to Europe in the following centuries was one of the great technological breakthroughs of history and the beginning of the Iron Age was accompanied by significant changes in societies, lifestyles and cultures, cultures across the continent. With me to discuss the dawn of the European Iron Age are Timothy Champion, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton, Sue Hamilton,

Professor of Prehistory at the Institute of Archaeology University College London, and Barry Cunleff, Emeritus Professor of European Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Oxford. Tim Champion, prehistory is commonly divided into three years. The Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age. What exactly do those terms mean, and how did that classification originate? Well, the classification started in Denmark in the early 19th century as a

means of trying to find order in the rapidly accumulating evidence of prehistory it was building up in what was then called the Museum of Northern Antiquities which is now the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. And it was the work of

the curator called Christian Thompson who noticed that among this massive material there were sort of three groups and with very little other lines of evidence about how to order them he suggested that what we had was three successive phases where different materials were used as the prime material for making everyday tools and weapons so a stone age a bronze age and an iron age as represented in the finds they had in the museum, and that was how he displayed them in the museum. And that

caught on very quickly, didn't you? With some opposition at first, other people had other ideas derived from the classical or biblical chronologies, but... And what would there be? Well, in Britain, for instance, in England, we had a

history of Roman conquest, with the conquest in 43 AD and everything before that was lumped together as ancient British. And there was a very short chronology. People didn't realize how long prehistory was. So the idea that you needed

separate ages in a short prehistory, even that seemed strange to some people. But yes, it did eventually catch on, and by about the 1860s it was accepted by most people, and people were beginning to put absolute dates on it. We're interested this morning

in the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. Can you give us some approximation of when that occurred? I realize these dates have not only long ago, we're very approximate. Very approximate. Well, I think the first thing is it happened at slightly different times in different parts of Europe, but probably the earliest transition would be in Southeast Europe in Greece from about 150 BC

and in Western Europe, including Britain, from about 750 BC. So, Hamilton, the Bronze Age began in Europe around 3,000, 3,000. 3,300 BC. Let's consider, is that right? Let's consider the metal, well, around there you currently, please do. But after that, let's consider the metal, first of all. Tell us about bronze and how it's made and what significance it has. Well, I think the key thing about bronze is that it isn't iron.

And I think it's very easy to lump metals together, as if they all function in the same way. And conceptually, they may have been considered to be quite different things by the historic societies. So bronze is synthetic. It's a combination of copper as its main ingredient, and added to that is tin, maybe up to 8 or 9% of the mixture. And that takes us through to the later Bronze Age till about maybe 1,300 BC, when something else is added, which is lead, and it's added up to about 3%. So it's a synthetic material, it's made of several materials brought together.

and the key to adding them is that it changes the quality of the copper. The copper is soft and malleable, and with some contamination it becomes harder. So tin is added to make it harder, but too much tin will make it brittle. So there's a mixture that has to be achieved. When you add lead in addition, it makes it less viscous, much more fluid, much more easy to cast, and you can therefore do more. once it's lead bronze. You can cast it, all bronze is cast, but by the time you get to lead, you can make more complicated shapes.

And something else which is very important is that you can beat it. You can beat it into sheets of metal. You can revet it together. So you can make many different types of objects by the time we have lead bronze. Broadly, what was the significance of bronze over the, as it were, 2,000 years from about 3,300 BC to about 1,200 BC? In a broad sense you have to also see that it starts off as copper. So in some places you have copper first before you have it contaminated with the mixture.

And of course copper is very soft. So the significance of it is potentially social as much as a tool. It's made into ornaments and smaller objects which may be symbolic. By the time you've got tin added, you have potential to make more elaborate tools. Daggers, for instance, if you want to call that, a tool or a weapon or a symbol and jewelry, we have ornament horizons in the middle Bronze Age

so people have ways of adorning and distinguishing themselves but it really takes until the late Bronze Age when you have led to get a full repertoire of tools so by that stage Mattel is a facilitator in a very broad way

in terms of warfare, armour and daily tools for craftspeople a lot of the bronze findings are very splendid and I read of a society of warrior aristocratic elites either in fortresses or in settlements and this was part of not only that ornamentation but their show of wealth and their show of power can you develop that well by the early bronze age we have metal which early bronze age we're talking about it would vary but by 2000 BC you've um it's got established communities by 1,800 BC in britain for instance you would call that early

bronze age. So during that period we have a small scale use of metal but it is found in some extremely rich burials with what I'd call it Zotica. So you would have beaten golden objects, bronze daggers but you'd also have amber beads

shale beads, faeons which is a technology using contaminated glass to make blue glass and these are objects which are symbolic of the power of individual people who are buried under tumuli in the early Bronze Age. So there is an emphasis on identifying people in death with bronze as an

elite material. As we go into the middle Bronze Age, it's quite patchy. Different parts of Europe have different evidence of social stratigraphy, but by the time we get to the late Bronze Age, quite clearly again, metal workers being used to distinguish warrior burials in particular. But by the late Bronze Age, there's a new ideology in terms of most of the burials are cremated burials, and there's a lot of aligned changes alongside the use of bronze to identify warriors and also cross people by range of tools. Barry Conliff, first of all, just to develop this idea of the societies, I sort of skipped through with a couple sentences.

Can you develop that? What were these societies over those 2000 years? Can you give us more detail about Doug? Well, I think everywhere where you've got people living together, they develop ways of articulating with each other, ways of articulating with their neighbours. So you get a palimpsest of different groups relating to each other, and it's a very, very complex picture across Europe.

So really, most of these societies, most humans are acquisitive. They like to acquire materials, partly because it shows their status, partly because some of these materials are beautiful. So societies necessarily have to develop a connectivity, one with another with another, so that gifts are given to maintain good relationships. Those gifts are often these rare, raw materials. are we talking about a time of Barter here then? You're talking really about

gift giving, I think. This is probably the best way to look at it at this stage. Pre-coignage. Oh, way, way pre-coinage. And trade is not quite the correct word, it's a bit too precise a word. It's much more an exchange system. And we talk about reciprocal exchange that you give me a gift, I give you a gift in return, and that's the way that materials flow from one society to another. Are we talking about small, isolated populations,

groups here around settlements with one chief here and another chief 50 miles away? I just would like some idea of the sort of social map. I know it's a big ask, but there you go. It's a very difficult one to answer because archaeology is an imprecise art. But the general model, I think, is that there were big men, there were chieftains,

and that they were the centre of large... larger groups, and that you might have one big man who is revered by a number of surrounding big men. So it's that kind of society. It's not a very complex society at this stage, but it has a degree of complexity. And I've emphasized the word warrior. Is that worth emphasizing? Warrior, the warrior is a kind of aspiration, I suspect, in many of the warrior.

these societies in that they would try and present themselves in that way with warrior gear in their burials. Certainly by the time you get into the Bronze Age, late Bronze Age, warrior gear was very very dominant in the archaeological record.

Swords, shields, headgear, bronze plates for the chest and so on. So you're dressing up as a warrior. How much you were actually fighting another matter, although there is evidence of a fair amount of aggression, but you were

presenting yourself as a warrior. One thing that struck me very strongly reading for this programme was the elaboration of the trade routes as Sue's pointed out, bronze we're talking about copper and tin and lead, certainly not perhaps, and lead, and lead, later, copper and tin, these are found in

small quantities, very rarely in the same place, often at great distances, and so to get the stuff together, let alone the technology of actually turning into points, was quite a business. Can you talk about these trade routes? They do seem to be quite wonderful. Yes, to me, that's one of the most exciting things about archaeology, is the networks that link people.

That tends to be the focus of a lot of research at the moment. Let's just go back a bit to, let's say the third millennium, and there was a source of jadeite, a beautiful greenstone in the eastern Alps. And people made axes, polished axes from that. Those jadeite axes got just about everywhere in Western Europe. They're right up in northern Scotland, for example. We're talking about 4,000, 3,000 BC. So there must have been very complex networks of exchange,

and we can trace them by the distribution of these axes all over Western Europe. You can see how the rivers were important. There were root nodes joining one route to another. Mainly sea, water transport, isn't it? Yes, a crossland along the river routes and across interfluos, but also by sea. C was very important.

Atlantic was very important. So you've got these networks, they exist. They're there by the time that people discover copper and then bronze. And to start with, as you were saying, copper and bronze is they're just another material that can be acquired and can show your status. After all, it's bright and shiny, and it's magic to look at it.

so that the copper moves into these existing networks but because as you say these metals copper and tin particularly very very rare or comparatively rare the movement of these materials becomes as the materials as copper and bronze become desirable so the networks that enable them to move

become more and more complex and other materials hop into those like amber and jet and so on Tim, sorry to learn dates on you again, but can you give us some... I date man, can you give us some idea when the Bronze Age came to an end? And there's something called the Bronze Age collapse or the bronze collapse. Can you just introduce us to that? Try.

It's certainly true that if you look at Southeast Europe, Greece and the Near East, there was a major collapse of a lot of the more complex societies towards the end of the second millennium. So, for instance, the world of Mycenaean Greece, which is a Bronze Age society, but a very elaborate one, collapsed somewhere around 1,100 or just before. BC.

And there are other comparable collapses of complex palace-organised societies around the Near East. And it does look as though in that part of the East Mediterranean, in the Near East, something quite dramatic happened, to cause the collapse of a lot of these interlinked. These societies are all interlinked and were trading with each other, sometimes allied with each other, sometimes fighting each other, but the whole system seems to have collapsed somewhere towards the end of the second millennium.

Do we know why? I think it's one of the big problems. No, there's all sorts of explanations that people have suggested, including climatic change or environmental destruction caused by over-exploitation or internal revolution by the exploited peasantry. or alternatively external invasions caused by, but then what caused the external invaders to invade. So probably no generally agreed explanation

for what looks like a major event. Quite soon after that, iron began to appear, it had appeared before, we know that it was, well, from you, we know that it was my, it was around sometime, in some places in 1600 BC, is that right? Well, I think... 1800 BC. Recent research, I think, would suggest even earlier.

The earliest iron that we know of, well, there are suggestions that it could be even as early as 7,000 BC, but all the early... Does that iron got out of meteorites? Yes, all the early objects are meteoritic iron because it's got a very high nickel content which isn't matched by any terrestrial iron. But in a way that's a bit misleading

because this is native iron which can be simply worked, doesn't need smelting, it can be worked at very low temperature. What is really different is the development of a technology that smelts the iron from the iron ore. And there, recent research, beginning to suggest that it's perhaps rather earlier than we'd thought

with evidence perhaps from India going back to as early as 1800 BC, some sites in the Near East, perhaps even as early as 2,500 or a bit earlier. So, interestingly, there's a non-year... of how to do it, but it's not really exploited for perhaps as much as 1500 or even 2,000 years before it becomes really common. What all of you are saying, with this age age, these ages overlay each other. Stone is still there in bronze, bronzes still in the Iron Age, Stone is still there in the Iron Age,

bone is and so on and so forth. We're still talking generalisations, but they do make a certain sense, too, Hamilton. So can we get some idea when Iron began to appear in Europe? and appear to have elbowed out bronze. I'm sorry about the crudeness of that phrase. Well, first of all, when it appears, it's by about 1,200 BC, there is iron in the Mediterranean, Greece, for instance. It's becoming more present in Italy

between about 1,000 BC through to about 900 in northern Italy and in Eutruria. So there's a bit of a background there that's gradual. But I think what's most interesting is that suddenly around about 1,100 BC or the 11th century BC, it's cropping up in a lot of places. And we're getting more and more detail on it, either by the presence of slag, which is the waste, or bloom, which is the material which is produced through smelting, or hammer-scaling from annealing and beating.

the iron. So there's a range of things. It's not just the artefacts, but odd fines of different parts of its manufacture. And be it France, Central Europe, Britain, we're beginning to get those fines round about the 11th century BC. And this is really much earlier than we ever imagined. And we're getting blooms that weigh a kilogram, two kilograms. So this is the product that you anne to make the iron. So it's reasonably substantial. But we're getting blooms that weigh a kilogramme, two kilograms. So this is the product that you enneal to make the iron. so it's reasonably substantial. But what it doesn't do is really replace in a major way. So it's odd tools, axes, or maybe iron rivets in a bronze tool,

so combinations of materials. And really it takes down to about 500 BC for iron to be very regularly there, to be used for swords and a range of agricultural tools. So it's actually quite quick in its sense. small-scale appearance and then quite slow to really pick up and of course you'd have to say, well,

why? Iron's very abundant it's not like copper, it's not like tin, it's completely available in most places and where settlement is, because copper and tin are often where settlement is not. So iron corresponds with the best agricultural land.

It's in places where there are lots of people so why is it so slow? And it's what Tim's alluded to. It's the most amazing technology. It is not intuitive in any way. To smelt copper, it's coloured, you can see it. It melts. It flows into a crucible. It's all completely intuitive. You have a golden liquid. But iron, oh my goodness, you know, it doesn't melt. You'd have to melt the impurity out. Your left was a sort of ugly bit of cauliflower in your furnace. You have to bang it and beat it. to get the rest of the impurities out.

And it's a dark material. It's dark matter. So I think that's why it's so useful because it's abundant. But it is completely mysterious and magical to actually create it. So this was a difficult technology. I said at the beginning of the program

that this was a big revolution, technological revolution. So can we develop that idea? Is it difficult technology? In what way was it a revolution? What could it do, as it were, the bronze, the stone and bone couldn't? Well, it is a difficult technology.

You were not using, it was much as Sue said, you're not using extra high temperatures or very different techniques. You're using much the same range of techniques. But it isn't as clear-cut. you get this curious substance, which you then have to really work on. So the knowledge of that technology, the knowledge is what really fascinates me. How did that knowledge spread?

And where did it spread from the old view? And I think there's still quite a lot of good sense in it. The Hittites were producing iron in quite a lot of quantity. Tutankhamun has got an iron dagger and a couple of iron bracelets in the 14th century. in his tomb. They probably came from the Hittites in Anatolia. And you get the Assyrians writing to the Hittites saying, can we have some iron now?

And the Hittites writing back saying, well, no, sorry, it's not the right time for making iron. And we'll get around it. We'll send you some eventually, but here's a dagger to keep you quiet for a while. So it looks fairly closely guarded. And then, as I said, the technology spreads much more rapidly

and much more quickly. And that may partly be, It's very easy to jump on the bandwagon, say it's because. But one of the things that we have to take bear in mind is break down of this Hittite community in Asia Minor might well have disrupted this tin supply coming from Afghanistan. Tin is rare. Tin, if you diminish the quantity of tin, you're more ready to take up these new technologies which might just be a bit more difficult.

And once you've done it, of course, you've got a material that is infinitely better in many ways than bronze. Tim Champion, can you tell us in what ways it was infinitely better than bronze? At the beginning, probably not much, but certainly once they'd mastered the techniques of how to work iron...

Was that difficult? I mean, did you have a small core of people, men, I presume, working it out over a long time and finding out various levels of... beating and heating and so on. I think this is one of the things we don't really know. It's the, we don't know quite where it started, we don't know quite when it started. And in some ways, the interesting question is why they didn't do it earlier, because there's certainly the ability to do it, but they didn't.

And I suspect it may be because actually it was labour intensive, but also quite difficult and very, very different from the casting technologies of copper and bronze and gold. but for whatever reason it did take quite a long time to master the techniques of the black, first of all the smelting to produce raw iron but then the blacksmithing techniques

to turn that into workable tools but once you've done that and you learned how to incorporate just about the right amount of carbon to harden the iron you could produce objects which were much harder capable of being much sharper, much longer

lasting and hence much more effective as both weapons and tools. Can you give us some specific examples on how they change things over a few hundred years, Jim? Well, in the early stages, you see some of the earliest iron obitur copying bronze. So some of the earliest iron swords become what are made in exactly the same fashion of the latest bronze sword. So there's a sort of imitation of that, but that's not necessarily the best way to use it. and I think eventually we find the techniques of amalgamate of using different qualities of iron so you harden the edge of a sword

which is something you just can't do in the same way with bronze it's especially hardened metal along the blade edge I'd like to get into the nuts and bolts about what changes this brought about what the iron was doing better than or superior to or different from bronze because

it has been talked of as a technical revolution well actually sort of let's have it. What did they, what happened? Okay. It was a more effective metal for cutting to start with. You could kill people more easily and you could chop your wood more easily. It's a better metal. Once you've mastered it, as Tim said, once you've understood that there are different sorts of iron and you've got to communicate that sense of different sorts of iron

and your skilled craftsman has got to be able to choose the different kind of iron for the right sort of job. But once that is done, then you can use iron, for example, for, you can't, of course, cast iron at this stage. You can't reach those temperatures, so it's all wrought iron. You can use it to make, for example, tires on wheels. You can actually make an iron tire, you can heat it, it expands, you can drop it over, the felly of a spoked wheel and it will shrink onto the wheel. Now that's a very sophisticated

technology. You couldn't do that with bronze. You could use bronze in a different way on a wheel. But that really is very sophisticated making a wheel in the same way that a wheelwright would in the 19th century. You could use the same technology. You can make barrels in the same way. One of the things I think

is quite important that iron will allow you to do as well is to make long nails, long strong nails. And that enables you to do things with carpentry that you couldn't do before, particularly in shipbuilding. And I think the use of iron in shipbuilding is something that we really haven't looked at enough. And that that does revolutionise in many ways travel by sea.

How? Well, it means you can make bigger, stronger boats. Caesar, looking, it's a bit later of first century BC, but looking at the ships of the Veneti says they've got these massive foot square timbers and nails as thick as a man's thumb which they hammer through the timbers and keep the streaks on the ribs and so on. And you can make really big strong boats

that are capable of Atlantic sailing. And the trade networks were fading away, the old trade networks, either they weren't needed or there are several interpretations of that event, aren't there really? Yes. You still needed copper. You still needed tin. And to make luxury goods, to make sheet bronze for caldrons and buckets and things like that.

So you still needed those. The tin trade was still a very important one, and the Greeks write about the tin trade, getting tin from the Atlantic countries, particularly Britain. So those networks existed. But some archaeologists write about the democratisation that iron brings. As we said, it's local. You can find it everywhere. You know, it's a Chairman Mao attitude, getting every Chinese peasant to make iron in their back gardens.

It means that everyone can have access very easily to metal. It's a much cheaper thing. But the trade changes. Trade is always there. Acquisition is always there. And if it's not focused on one material in particular, the focus changes to another material. Sue Hamilton, so now, for a while, Bronzer 9, well, for a long time, Bronzer 9 co-existed, Can you give this the sense

as specific as you could make it the way that iron was replacing bronze or advancing bronze? Things were happening with iron that bronze could not do. Well, first of all, it does release bronze to do other things and we have some of our best masterpieces of Letean or Celtic art or whatever you wish to call it from Iron Age Britain

which come out of the fact that bronze can take up the development of using, making, shields have made, enameled objects and bronze harness equipment. So it releases crafts people to focus on bronze in a different way. In terms of tools that change things, as Barry was talking, I was thinking of a few more to add, which really do come in by about 500 BC.

There's agricultural tools. For instance, clouds get iron shares, which means that you can cut the soil more easily on heavy soils, clays for instance. So the ionage is very much a period when more landscape is taken up and more difficult soils. It also affects how you take the harvest in, which is very key to supporting populations, because by the middle iron age we have bill hooks for actually cutting the corn, and then by the late iron age we actually have sickles. So the speed of agricultural production and surplus is changed by it.

And I was interested in Barry's discussion of the nails, because I think about nails for the large centres of the late Iron Age, which we have across Europe and to some extent in Britain, which have huge ramparts around them, which Caesar describes, the wall of the goals, which have checkerboards of wood, nailed together at every joint and then filled up with earth and wood. which make the most amazing barriers and would be incredibly impressive, as it were, iron-studied walls

surrounding the settlements for later ion age or some of the major ones. So, Tim, let's move towards the impact on society now, if we can, the people there. Well, we can take that from, extract that from what you've been saying. But still, did iron occupy a different place in society? What difference? What differences did it bring to society? One of the key differences is that as Sue has already said, it's local.

Iron is in fact one of the most common elements in the earth's crust, and it's pretty well everywhere in Europe has got access to workable iron. So you don't need access to these long-distance trade routes to get metal. And certainly by the middle of the iron age, much of Western Europe, it's becoming pretty common. It's there. Much of it must have been worked locally, but by the end of the iron age, you're beginning to see major centres of production of better iron emerging.

So it does become much more readily available as a tool. And it's partly, as we were saying, in these knock-on effects, the producing of tools for other purposes. So by the middle or later part of the iron age, you've got a toolkit which everybody would recognise now, axes, adzes, hammers, chisels, prasps, files, swords, everything except the screwdriver, which is a much later invention. But they're there as recognisable tools with the impact on everything

from agriculture to carpentry to leather working. And that must have transformed the whole productive capacity of society. Can we develop that, Barry Conley, please. Can you tell us how society changed? I'm trying to pursue this idea of it changing society being revolution, like, as it were, the next big one, perhaps it was the Industrial Revolution, but let's... Anyway, so can you develop how it changed society?

over 2,300 years, we're... Right, thank you. Well, I think there were major changes in society, but I don't think they were the result of iron. Right. That's the issue. There were many, many factors that were at work on European society

in the first millennium, which is basically what we're talking about. Timsoe have explained how iron contributes to that, but it's only one of the contributing things. And if I wanted to sort out a couple of issues that were actually changing society, I would say it's all this connectivity, again, links with other people, a sort of globalisation of Europe taking place.

The horse, the acquisition of the really efficient riding horse from the east, comes in slowly, but it really gets underway about 800, and you can see them in the animal bones. Pontic step horses coming in with sort of culture, that brings them into the Great Hungarian Plain, and then being exchanged as items of immense prestige, a good riding horse with all its gear properly trained, is a very valuable thing.

And one finds those moving into society in the West and horse riding taking over as an item of display in the social structure. Let's say roughly around 800. And the other thing that happens that really does change, society is the links with the Mediterranean develop. And remember, at this time in the Mediterranean, you're getting, the Etruscans are still there, you're getting the Greeks and the Phoenicians, wanting to establish trading networks with barbarian Europe to get raw materials and manpower.

And around about 600 Greek colonies founded on the Mediterranean coast of France, and those colonies trading Greek gear and Greek ideas and Greek standards into barbarian Europe and these being taken up by local communities. So lots of things affecting Europe. Yes, so there's a broad movement there, but to narrow it again to our mutants as it were, Tim Champion. Can you talk about how iron changed farming in Britain and how farming changed society? I think we have to look a little bit further back.

If we're looking mainly at Western Europe or Britain in particular, Looking back into the Middle Bronze Age, although we've had agriculture of some sort since the early Neolithic, perhaps a couple of thousand years, it's really only from about 1500 BC that we get intensive organised landscapes, field systems, driveways, wells, water for the intensive management of cattle and sheep, but also intensive production of cereal crops. And that from then onwards through the rest of the late Bronze Age and through the Iron Age, It does look as though management of the land and control of land or the labour or the products of the land are becoming increasingly important as elements in social economy. For instance, another thing that you get is the first evidence for textile production.

So instead of eating the sheep or drinking the milk, you can turn them into wool, which you can then turn into textiles which can be traded. And another industry is salt. So foods can be preserved on either store. or traded, and we get plenty of evidence for the long storage of food. So foods and food stuffs look as though they're becoming increasingly important. And the impact of iron on that would be to contribute to the productive capacity of a landscape which is being used more to produce food for a variety of purposes. So Sue Hamilton can go and develop this change in communities.

I mean, what sort of settlements were there in the Iron Age? If we can stick to this country, just... Well, I think Britain's a marvellous country to stick to, because it's had such an intensive study of Iron Age settlement. One of the things that's so striking is how variable it is. And increasingly with archaeology, developer archaeology, where new landscapes have archaeologists going in, we're finding all sorts of niches of the landscape

with settlement and settlement structures. And so it varies from enclosed individual farmsteads, so it's quite substantial enclosures around them, to open settlements in eastern... Britain and which are virtually you describe them as hamlets. So we have a range of individual and clustered settlements, and we do have things at bigger scales. We have the biggest monuments of the Iron Age,

which are, in fact, they're really one of the biggest monuments of British Free History, which are hill forts. Much discussion asked of what they're about. They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but quite clearly they are collective constructions. They would take many people to construct them, and in some way they represent communities. So we have those.

And then by the end of the Iron Age, we've got what we call territorial operetta. It's the Latin means town. It's not a town like we'd see in a Greek or a Roman way, but these are huge areas. Colchester, Iron Age Colchester, something like 2,000 hectares. It takes up a vast area,

which is defined by banks and ditches. And then within it, I think what's very important is there's zonation, there's different areas of settlement, craft, burial, and this is something that we see across later on age Europe, the development of monumental enclosures of the landscape

which have zonated space within them. And of course that's one definition of a town by modern geography standards that it takes, it has subdivision with different craft areas, etc. So I think there is quite a lot going on to do with subdivision of spacecraft and regionality. We're moving towards in now by Connolly,

but there are these two Halsstadt and Latene cultures. I don't think we've got time to do both of them, but it's just developing the idea of the sort of change that was brought about by iron age. And you brought in other very strong elements in this. But so can we just develop that further and keep it to iron, as it were? Well, Halstatt and Latien are pieces of archaeological terminology,

Halstatt referring to the early part of the Iron Age and Latien to the middle and later part of the Iron Age. The biggest change, I think, if one's looking on a European basis, and the change takes place, let's say around about 500 BC between Halstatt and Lattein, the biggest change, I think, is the most obvious change, is the development of art styles, the development of real focus, foci for particular craftsmen who are being very, very innovative

in terms of art and craft to serve elites to start with. And this is where we get what is broadly called Celtic art coming in, this wonderful free design, tendril-like design, plant-like design, with a mystery about it creeping in. And this comes about as, a result of an interaction in Europe.

It's a real barbarian European development, an interaction between local craft skills and desires emerging from the beginning of the Iron Age and an overlay of Etruscan and Greek and possibly even Eastern Scythian things and a melding, a creation of a real identity for the first time. Tim Champion, when did the Iron Age, when did it sort of come to an end and what replaced it?

I think this is really a matter of sort of conventional terminology in different parts of Europe. By convention we don't really talk about the Iron Age of Greece. We begin to talk about archaic classical Greece, although it is effectively Iron Age Greece. For much of northern and central Europe, the conventional end is the beginnings of the Roman conquest. So the 50s BC in France, perhaps AD 43 in southern England. But in those northern areas which escaped the Roman conquest, the Iron Age... Why are we calling it the end of the Iron Age then? It's really just a conventional terminology for organising the archaeological evidence.

If we're thinking more, not just in chronological terms, but about technology, some people would say we were living in the Iron Age until possibly the Industrial Revolutionary, even that might be the late Iron Age. We've only just recently moved into the Electronic Age. But, for instance, in Scandinavia, the Vikings are late. Iron Age. And finally and briefly, Sue, you think there's so much more,

I don't know whether they've got time for this, so much more to discover in the Iron Age, it'll change our view of it. Well, I think particularly the ethnographies of iron work is very interesting because conceptually iron is seen as a very mystical material which is gendered and

very, well, it's part of a mythology which I think we can investigate via ethnography. Thank you very very much for them. Thank you, Sue Hamilton, Tim Champion and Barry Cunleif. Next week we'll be talking about a Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, and thank you very much for listening.