The Ancients - Ancient Brittany with Sir Barry Cunliffe

Episode Date: June 20, 2021

Stretching out from the north west of France, Brittany has long been as identifiable with the Atlantic Ocean as with its continental neighbours in Europe. Whilst Sir Barry Cunliffe’s research and archaeological interests have taken him far and wide over the last six decades, this close neighbour of Britain continues to fascinate him. In this first of two episodes, Sir Barry takes us through the pre-Roman history of Brittany, stretching from the Mesolithic Period to the Iron Age and connections with Ancient Greece. From standing stones to voyages, bronze and lead axes to beakers, Barry explains how Brittany maintained its own identity, and the importance of its relationship with the ocean. His most recent book, Bretons and Britons: The Fight for Identity, is out now with Oxford University Press.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.

And in today's podcast, we'll sound the klaxon because we've got another ancient history legend on the show, Sir Barry Cunliffe. Barry, who's been on archaeological excavations since the 1960s, he was part of the team that uncovered the famous cupid on a dolphin mosaic which you can go and see today at fishbourne roman palace in southern britain barry he's still doing many many projects and one of his most recent books is all about the history of brittany that part of northwest france that jots out into the Atlantic Ocean. So we headed up, Sophie, one of our key history hit podcast editors, and myself to meet Barry in person to talk all about Brittany's ancient history.

And in this first podcast, we focus in on Brittany's ancient history before the arrival of Julius Caesar and the Romans. So we cover thousands of years of history, stretching from the Mesolithic period down to the Iron Age and the arrival of Greek traders and a famous Greek explorer called Pythias. Barry was an absolute delight to meet and to chat to. So without further ado, here is the brilliant Sir Barry Cundiff. Barry, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Pleasure to do so.

Now, ancient Brittany and Brittany before the Romans, first of all, because the whole region of Brittany in antiquity, you mentioned words, and we will mention words, like identity, the importance of the Atlantic Sea. It seems like a region, I know it's so cliche, but unlike any other in the ancient Western Mediterranean, in the ancient world. It is. Really, I think it's its geography that makes it special.

If you think of France, northwest corner of France, it's like a great horn sticking out of the northwest corner of France. And it juts out into the Atlantic. And it's not of France. It's of the Atlantic. It's really rather like Devon and Cornwall and Wales and Ireland and Galicia. It belongs to the Atlantic and it's got its back to France. So throughout prehistory and history, there's always been this tension on the peninsula between going into France, being part of France, being taken over by France or standing up against the French.

And you mentioned how on three sides it's got the Atlantic Ocean, as it were. But what else do we know about the topography, the landscape of Brittany that makes it such an interesting region? Well, it's a wide peninsula. It's not like a little bit of land jutting out into the sea. It's quite wide. If you put sort of Devon and Cornwall and Dorset and doubled it, that would be Brittany. So it's a big slab of land. And it really divides into two parts. There's a great central core, which was essentially forested, or it was what the French call mountains, but the low hills really in Brittany, the Montanoir and the Mont d'Array. So this central core, not very well peopled, a bit impenetrable, although there are some rivers going across it. And then all around the outside, along the north side, the west facing, the Atlantic facing side,

and the south side, you've got very good land with wonderful harbours, good sea resources, and so on. And the Bretons reflected this in their language. They talked about the sea coast as the Amour, which is the land facing the sea in Celtic. And they talked about the inland bit as the Argoat, which is the land facing the forest. So really think of this great central, pretty impenetrable core and this fringe all the way around. And the north side of it, of course, faces across the west end of the English Channel to the southern coast of Dorset, Devon, Cornwall. And the southern coast of Brittany, however, faces across the Bay of Biscay to the north coast of Spain. So it's part of those two worlds. And the west end, the west end of Brittany, of course, just faces the wild Atlantic.

And it is the end of the world. And that's the Departement of Finistère now, the end of the world. The Romans called it the end of the world. So that gives you some idea of the character of the peninsula. Although we think of it as one, it's a whole series of micro-environments interacting with each other. We'll definitely get back to the Romans and this idea of it being the end of the world, especially with Britain right next door as well, how the Romans perceived that island. But quickly, it is the Ancients podcast. So Barry, we're going to go back thousands of years. First of all, we're going to go back to a time before farming, the Mesolithic. And you mentioned a variety of landscape there. But what do we know about the people who inhabited Brittany, let's say, at the time of the hunter-gatherers,

before farmers, during this Mesolithic period? Well, it was pretty densely occupied in the Mesolithic period, during the hunter-gatherer period. The coastal regions more so than the inland regions. And along the south coast, there are some wonderful sites that are very, very well preserved. A place called Weddick, which is an island, and Teviek, which is a peninsula. These were shell middens where hunter-gatherers came together for long periods of time,

literally to feast on all the seafood that they were able to gather. And these are archaeologically so important, these shell middens, because the soil of Brittany is very, very acid and it eats bone. So you don't get many skeletons there. But in the Mesolithic period, people buried their dead in these shell middens. And because of the calcium in the shells, the bones are perfectly preserved. So we get a very good idea of what the Mesolithic population looked like and how they buried their dead. They were very keen on careful burial. They had kists made of stone slabs and they put the bodies in these kists. They decorated the bodies with

shell beads and with antler headdresses and they use red ochre, I suppose, because it looks like blood to smear on the bodies. And all that evidence is preserved in these remarkable shell middens. It's incredible how one sort of archaeological evidence can tell us so much about this population that was there in that region before the advent of farming, as it were. Does it seem to suggest these are coastal hunter-gatherers? They rely on the coast, or this group rely on the coast. But there's a very interesting piece of work that's recently been done with the human teeth. When they looked at the human teeth, and you can tell from the elements in the teeth and the isotopes of the elements where those people grew up when their teeth were growing, and what sort of environments they came from. And they were able to show that most of the men all had the chemistry of the teeth which suggested they lived all the time on the coast.

But some of the women, a percentage of the women, had teeth chemistry that suggested they came from inland. So what we've probably got are two totally different communities with exogamous marriage. So you can begin even to think about how society worked. And if you've got hunter-gatherers inland and hunter-gatherers on the coast, they need to have good relations to share commodities and so on. And intermarriage is a good way to make sure you've got good relations. Oh, absolutely. And at the same time, as well as looking inland, seems like it's around this time that you also see some of these communities taking to the sea itself and voyaging. Yes, I think we've got to assume that they were hunting and gathering in the sea as much as they were hunting and gathering inland.

This would assume that they were good at boat building, though we don't have any of the boats. There are some dugout log canoes that have been found in other parts of Western Europe, not in Brittany. But their boats were almost certainly made of skin attached to a wickerwork framework, sort of coracle kind of boat. And these are very good on the sea. They bounce quite nicely and they're very stable. And we must imagine that some of them going inland to hunt the deer and following the deer and navigating by the stars and then coming back, and others going out to the sea and navigating by the stars and coming back. And once you get out to sea, you get curious. What's that island over there? Let's go and look at it. And you might be following shoals of fish

that might take you further and further and further away. And in that way, I think these initial contacts were built between these peninsulae, between Brittany and between southwest Britain and Ireland and Galicia. So I think our maritime networks start in this hunter-gatherer period. And the ability to navigate by stars and at sea probably starts in this hunter-gatherer period. And the ability to navigate by stars and at sea probably starts in this period. I've got to ask, because it was in my notes as well, could the Channel Islands also be a key part in this? The Channel Islands do feature in this.

They become more important in the later Neolithic period. So you mentioned the Neolithic period. So let's move on then to around, I believe it's the 6th millennium BC, because it's around that time, Barry, correct me if I'm wrong, but we seem to see a new group of people arriving in the area of Brittany. Yes. What happens, our hunter-gatherers living on those shalm mittens are there. They're well entrenched in their landscape. And then they begin to experience people moving across Europe. Now, there are two movements at this stage. These are farmers moving across Europe.

One of the movements comes, as it were, through the great European rivers into the Seine Valley and then pushes west into Brittany. And the other movement comes through the Mediterranean and across through the Carcassonne Gap into the Garonne Valley and out into the Bay of Biscay, and up the west coast to Brittany as well. So you've got this sort of pincer movement on Brittany. And the idea of farming sort of penetrates that way, with people bringing farming techniques as well, and bringing their own kind of house building. And that happens, it starts around 5,500 and then goes on until about 4,500. I know we sometimes look back at these times, especially in deep ancient history,

as these have been quite short periods of time, but that's still, for those migrations, and that's a huge time period that we're covering. It is. It's many, many, many generations. And the Mesolithic population, the hunter-gatherers, just assimilated the new people coming in. And they became one people with these various traditions, these two Neolithic traditions and the indigenous Mesolithic tradition. And these traditions, it's around now, Barry, that we start seeing some of those incredible monumental structures emerging in that part of the world. Yes, I think we really need to go back to those shell middens. They're so important. If you think of it, these are long, low mounds, a metre, metre and a half high,

and they would have been white and shiny with the shells, and they were quite dominant in the landscape. And these Mesolithic hunters buried their dead in them, in kists. And I think that created the idea of the burial in a chamber in a mound. And it's that idea, it's one of the ideas that develops in Brittany in the Neolithic period, the idea of these chambered tombs in the mounds. The other thing that develops at the same time are standing stones. And they are absolutely remarkable. On this island of Weddick, very close to the Shalmitten, there is a line of standing stones, only about six of them, but big, rough old stones that are placed in a line.

The effort of doing that, you know, why do it? And that goes back to somewhere in about 5000 BC. And then it gets more and more and more sophisticated until you get what, what is the absolute pinnacle in many ways, Grand Menhir in Loc-Marie-Caire, an amazing stone. It's a great granite stone that is broken into three pieces. It's brisee. And when it was all together and standing, it would have been something like 18 to 20 meters above the ground and about a meter or a meter and a bit below the ground. So massive standing stone.

And imagine just putting that up with ropes and nothing much else and just muscle power. And you had to bring it something like 10, 20 kilometers across country from where it was quarried to put it there. And it was one of 18 in a row. And more to the point, they were roughly shaped and carved. They had creatures that looked like whales on them and big horned animals on. And that must have been a most incredible sight to see. It's incredible now, broken and fallen. But you can imagine that once that was there, people would have come from all over the place to see it. It was one of the great grand sights of the world. So it would have been a great draw on people. So you've got these two traditions developing from the Mesolithic base with this Neolithic overlay, one of careful burial

in mounds, in kists, and one of these standing stones. And both of these traditions then developed throughout the Neolithic period. And talk about the development, because there is one particular site alongside Le Grand Menhir that I'd like to focus on. And these are another incredible site, the Karnak stones. Yeah, that is a development of the idea of the row of standing stones. And okay, Mariacare, Grand Menia is 18 standing stones in a row, which are impressive enough. The Karnak monuments are incredible. They are rows of standing stones, not terribly large, one or two meters high, but impressive. high, but impressive. Twelve rows. In one case, this big one at Menwick, running for a kilometre across the countryside, twelve rows of stones running for a kilometre. And there is one near Carnac. There are 11 of these rows in the region of Carnac, and one of them is two kilometres long. And think of the effort that goes into building them. They didn't do them in one go. Quite a lot

of very interesting fieldwork's been done. And you can see that sometimes there were only two or three rows and not terribly long. And then a few more rows were added and then they were lengthened. So these are monuments that grew over time. And the community's effort went into creating them. The change they adapted in shape and size if need be. I mean, just keeping on the stone circles

for a bit longer, because Barry, I did a podcast some time ago with Professor Timothy Darvell on stone circles in Britain, and it sometimes always seems as if stone circles, they're quite a British phenomena, as it were. But it also seems, as you said, in Brittany as well. Is Brittany quite unique in continental Europe for having standing stones? It is unique to the extent that it has got so much and so much variety, I think. It has not only these rows, it has individual standing stones, it has circles attached to the rows and so on. It's got a huge variety there. And some of the earliest are found there. But it is part, again, of this sort of Atlantic tradition. It's the idea of the standing stone or the stone circle, which you find all the way along the Atlantic coast from

Spain right up to Scotland, part of this connectivity that's so interesting. Just going to keep on the Neolithic for a bit longer, because you mentioned the kists from the Mesolithic and how these seem to develop in the Neolithic. Is this where we start seeing, therefore, the passage tombs? Yep, the passage tomb is a development and a very interesting one. I mean, some of the earliest kists were, as it were, closed. And once you put your dead bodies in and put the capstone on, you couldn't get back to them. In the Mesolithic period, it's interesting that in some cases, they actually took the capstone off and put another body or two in and then put the capstone back and then did it again.

And that's a bit laborious. But the idea there is of collective burial. And it's already there in the Mesolithic period of one place for your generations to go. And the passage tombs are a more sophisticated response to that idea that you have your central chamber, but because you want to get to it every time another grandfather dies, you have a passageway that you can open up the passage and go in and put your next dead relative in there or fumigate it or put in offerings or whatever you want to do or celebrate in some way. So the passage grave grows out of that. In Brittany, they date to the 5th, 4th millennium.

And there's been a big debate, where did the passage grave idea develop? And it's been debated backwards and forwards by archaeologists. The most recent work, looking at all the radiocarbon dates that exist at the moment, suggests that it started in Brittany, probably in the Montbillon, in the area where all the monuments are most concentrated, and spread from there down to Spain and spread from there along the Atlantic seaways through the Irish Sea to Ireland and Scotland. Barry, keeping on things spreading elsewhere from Brittany at this time period, because it does seem that certain resources in particular do go elsewhere in continental Europe and probably to Britain as well, which originate from Brittany. Yes. One of the things that people loved, seemed to have admired in that period was stone of various sorts. And stone that is not just purely functional, but stone that is decorative and attractive. And the Bretons were using local stones,

greenish stones. They liked green to make small axes and make beads. They were importing variscite, which is a greeny blue stone, from Spain. So we know that the seaways were working across the Bay of Biscay, or at least around the edge of the Bay of Biscay, bringing stone from Galicia and northern Spain up to Brittany. And it's being used to make necklaces, which were deposited in some of these graves. And the Bretons themselves had various sources of stone. And one is this dolerite. It's just a grey, fairly grainy, igneous stone. It doesn't look spectacular. But there is one quarry right in the middle of Brittany that was used to make axes.

These are polished axes, just like a sort of elongated axe head, as you can imagine, a polished stone which would have been hafted in a wooden haft. They reckon that this quarry produced something like six million at least axes. And this is understandable if you look at the distribution of them, because archaeologists using geological techniques can recognise the stone. So you can plot the distribution of these axes. And since that stone only comes from one place, they must have been distributed from that one place. And you can see them all over Brittany, spreading right up the Loire Valley, right into the Seine Valley, and spreading right down the

west coast of France, down towards Bordeaux and that area, and some of them coming across to Britain as well. So that one stone was revered. And it wasn't because the axes were special. I mean, they didn't look special in any way, but they must have had something associated with them, some value over and above the norm associated with them. They came from a special place and they had huge value. And it wasn't as though they were sort of sold by a

tinker or something like that, that they were probably given in gift exchange and spread from one community to another, to another, to another as a thing of huge value. And they are very fine. Some of them are sort of 30, 40 centimetres long with a sort of knobbed end, beautifully polished. And you can imagine them being revered and stories being told about them, presumably. Absolutely. It really seems to emphasize, doesn't it, Barry, that during this time, this period in ancient history, rather than being on a far edge of periphery of the world,

Brittany, it's this centre for trade, both land trade and maritime trade, and a centre for connectivity. Absolutely so. And it's not just the sea. I mean, the sea is crucially important to it. If you think of the Atlantic seaways from Spain to Northern Scotland, Brittany is right in the centre and is commanding the Atlantic seaways. If you're going from Galicia and you want to go north, you can't miss Brittany. You've got to include it in your journey and similarly the other way. But it's also, of course, attached to France.

And the overland route is important, too, particularly along that I mentioned earlier, along the Loire Valley. And that enables people to get right into the heart of Western Europe. And we can trace these journeys through the distribution of the axes and also things that were coming the other way from north and west Europe coming down into the Seine Valley and then into the Loire Valley and into Brittany. So there's another great corridor of communication into the heart of Europe. Have you heard of the teenage werewolf prosecuted in 1603? Did you know that the 17th century British government relied heavily on female spies? And do you want to know about chin-chucking and thigh sex?

Of course you do. I'm Susanna Lipscomb, and my new podcast, Not Just the Tudors, is a deep dive into what I like to think of as the long 16th century. We'll be talking about everything from Aztecs to witches, Velazquez to Shakespeare, Mughal India to the Mayflower. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. And in regards to voyaging on the open at Planzig, it seems, there's an increase, a build-up in voyaging,

perhaps evidence from the archaeology too, of voyages between Brittany and southern Britain at this time. Yes, we can see when Neolithic farming methods are being introduced into Brittany with domesticated animals. And Britain at this stage is still Mesolithic. Brittany becomes Neolithic a thousand years before Britain does. But on two Irish sites, one on the east coast of Ireland, one on the west coast of Ireland, in Mesolithic contexts, they've found bits of domesticated cattle. Now, how on earth they got there is a fascinating debate. But the simplest explanation is that they were smoked or salted joints of meat that were taken on voyages from Brittany

along the Irish seaways and used for gift exchange and so on. And it suggests that the Atlantic was very alive at that stage for people making quite long journeys from Brittany to the west coast of Ireland, for example, is no mean journey. So it gives an idea of this connectivity. And just a bit later, around about 4000, when Neolithic had spread into Britain, we find the idea of the passage grave developing in Brittany, spreading again along that same route across Brittany, across into southwest Britain, south Wales, Ireland, Irish Sea, and into Scotland. And some of the earliest megalithic tombs in those parts of Britain are of a Breton type. So that's another link between our island and the peninsula.

Those links are absolutely incredible. And how far back those links stretch. Barry, we're going to move onwards in ancient history now to the Bronze Age. And I've got something in my notes here, which I need to ask about, because Brittany is hit by something, interesting name, the Beaker phenomenon. Barry, what is the Beaker phenomenon? Oh dear. Good luck. Answer. It's a good examination question that we've all answered, we'll try to answer. There have been lots of views. Essentially, what happens is that in the period about 2800, 2700, 600, 800, 2700, 600, there appears over a lot of Europe a type of burial, quite often single burial,

as opposed to collective burial, with sets of grave goods in it and a particular kind of pot, which is a beaker or a range of beakers made very finely in often red-fired. So it's new technologies and new burial rites. And the question is, how does it happen? Where does it come from? Well, essentially, it looks as though there are two things happening here, Western and East. And the West thing is the development of this economy in Portugal, around Lisbon, where beakers are being made first. Some of the earliest beakers are being made and where they are metallurgists. They're working copper. And this is some of the first copper in Western Europe. So this is the Portuguese coastal area. And there is a thread of beakers spreading up again, our Atlantic seaways. And they spread to Brittany and they spread to Britain

and to Ireland. That's one of the threads. And these are the earliest beakers. They're called maritime bell beakers, a sort of bell-like shape. And people in Brittany have found these in tombs and have analysed the fabric. And the fabric is local. They're made locally. So someone with the knowledge and the idea of those beakers has come to Brittany. It isn't the pot that's come to Brittany. It's people that have come to Brittany to make it. So we've got people on the move along the Atlantic seaways, very probably prospectors looking for metal coming from Spain, Portugal, that area. And at the same time, there's another movement which doesn't impact on us too much, which is a movement coming right across Northern Europe, bringing again single

burial and a beaker-like pot, but quite a separate one. And they meet in Western Europe and create a real complex which impacts on Britain. That's the simple story. a real complex which impacts on Britain. That's the simple story. Well done. Full marks on that. I mean, but Barry, you mentioned metal prospectors there coming to Brittany because it feels like this time during the Bronze Age, this is when we see the metal-rich environments, the ores of Brittany, they really come into their own.

Yeah. Western Spain, Brittany, South West Britain, South Wales, southern Ireland. They are all old hard rocks which are permeated with metals. So not the same metals, but lots of different metals in different percentages. And if you're looking for metal, you're a Spaniard or Portuguese and you're looking for copper, you go north and you're in contact with the Bretons anyway, and you have been and your grandfather has and so on. And you know they've got these funny green stones which you've smelt. So it's logical that people should move and look for metals in Brittany.

What is amazing is the speed of this prospecting. It starts, as I say, somewhere around 2800-ish in Portugal. And in 2400, there are people working copper ores of Western Ireland, a little island in a lock called Ross Island in the southwest of Ireland. So these beaker prospectors must have got right up into Ireland, were quarrying Irish oresres and the same ores that they were quarrying in Portugal and they were extracting copper from them. And Brittany is part of this, but what happens is once their mind is fixed on metal, they discover gold in quantity in Brittany and in Cornwall and in Ireland, and they discover tin in quantity in Brittany and in Cornwall.

So you've got this metal-rich sort of arc of peninsulae in the Atlantic, and they all seem to work together as a great community. So that lunially, these are sort of chest decorations made of gold plate, which are made either in Cornwall or some of them may be made in Ireland, being traded across to Brittany. You find the ores that were being extracted on Ross Island in Southwest Ireland also coming to Brittany because Brittany is not very good on copper, but what it is good in is tin. And what I still find difficult to get my mind around is that sometime around 2200, 2100, this community of metal workers worked out that if you add 10% of tin to 90% of copper, you get an alloy, which we call bronze, which is superior.

It's better in colour, it casts more easily, and it's tougher. And in that area, that technology was worked out. So it's this group of people who were moving around these peninsularly were really experimenting and doing very advanced metallurgy. And in fact, tin bronze was being made in most of Europe much earlier in our little western arc than in the rest of Europe. It's mind-boggling, first of all, to think of the amount of trade that was going on between those three peninsulas. And then you say the actual being able to create bronze itself from the tin and the copper that they had. Barry, keeping on that a bit longer, because you mentioned bronze there. So there is a question I'd like to ask, and it's about the bronze axe head hordes.

We talked about axes earlier, and it seems like this is all kind of linked together. Yes, the axe is quite a symbolic thing throughout the Neolithic, and Mesolithic for that matter, but certainly in the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. They are functional. You can kill someone with one, which is useful, or you can chop a tree down, or you can do both. So they've got a function, but they've also got a value over and above that. And some of them may have a value because or you can do both. So they've got a function, but they've also got a value over and above that. And some of them may have a value because of what they've done. This axe did so-and-so. You know, it killed the great giant.

So you can have values attached to individual tools and weapons. And they also take on a value as literally as a commodity, as an ingot. literally as a commodity, as an ingot. So if you wanted to export bronze, you turned it into axe forms, and that would be a recognised value. An axe ingot of bronze would have a recognised value. So the axe was used for lots of things. And this goes to the most incredible proportions right at the end of the Bronze Age in Brittany, where we're coming to the time when iron is beginning to appear. And iron is superior in many, many ways. And it's much easier to get at. There's lots of it. So the value of bronze is going down a bit. And in Brittany, you find these incredible hordes of hundreds of bronze axes, which have never been used.

They've been cast. They've never been used. And most of them have got a very high lead content, which means that they're not very good anyway. So they're axes in form and everything, but they're not very functional. They're symbolic. And where you find them are in these big hoards buried in the ground. This is not burying something in the ground so that you can come back to find it. I think it is taking the value of the metal out of circulation and putting it in the realms of the gods. And in that way, perhaps, making the metal rarer, because not so much around, so that what there is around maintains its value. There's so many questions asked about Bronze Age and the tombs as well.

I know there's a new type of burial tomb. So quickly, what is this new type of burial tomb that we see at that time? In the sort of middle part of the Bronze Age, after the beakers, we find these barrow burials or tumuli burials, just round mounds with burials in the centre, of the kind we get all over the British countryside, around Stonehenge, for example. And you get really two big clusters of them, one in Brittany, called the Almorecan tumuli, which are the burials of individuals, wealthy individuals, with a lot of gear, pots and arrowheads and bronze things, and sometimes gold. And you get them in Wessex too, all around

Stonehenge. And it's very interesting. People used to argue, you know, did the Bretons invade Wessex? Did the Wessex people invade Brittany and so on? Well, we don't do that now. But what we can see are the parallels developing. And these are two chieftain-like communities developing in parallel and exchanging ideas, possibly even intermarrying. But you find, for example, a particular kind of Breton dagger, which has got little gold pins in the wooden handle just to make it very shiny and gold-like, and a very specialised thing. And some of those are found in these Wessex burials near Stonehenge. thing. And some of those are found in these Wessex burials near Stonehenge. They must have been exported. And in some of the Breton burials, you find amber and jet, which is coming from the north, but through Wessex and being traded across or given across. So I like to think of it in terms

of people making ceremonial journeys between these two great areas for long periods of feasting, exchanging gifts, making friendships, exchanging women, you know, exogamous marriage again, and then going back again, and then perhaps five years later coming for another great feast. It's that sort of relationship. But that is binding our central southern Britain very much to what's going on in Brittany. See, Certainly not being any boundary whatsoever, it sounds like right there. I mean, Barry, we've got to move on to the Iron Age quite quickly, because this is the part I've been really looking forward to, because this is where we start seeing an influence from the Greeks on Brittany,

and in particular, the Greeks of the Western Mediterranean. Yes, this is a very, very interesting set of questions. How much did the Greeks interact themselves with Brittany? Now, we know that Breton tin was very important in the Mediterranean world. And Herodotus, in fact, the Greek writer writing in the 5th century, talks about these Cassidides, the islands, tin islands out in the West, in the sea. So he's talking really about Brittany, about southern Britain, and probably northern Spain. He's very vague about it. He said, I heard about them. I don't really know very much apart from what people

tell me. But these are the places where tin comes from, which we use. So even in the 5th century, there is tin coming probably from Britain, certainly from Brittany. And we know that the roots, some of it goes along the Loire Valley and then down the Rhone to Marseille. And some of it goes from Brittany down the west coast of France and along the Garonne and then over the hills in Languedoc to the Mediterranean again, and just along the coast to Marseille. So the people living in Marseille, the Greeks living in Marseille in the 5th, 4th, 3rd centuries, would have been aware of this very rare, very valuable material coming from these very distant parts. And they wanted to know about it. And at some time, around about 320,

one of these people who lived in Marseille, a man called Pythias, decided to find out. And what he did, there are two views. One is that he got on a boat and sailed out through the Straits of Gibraltar and then all the way around to Britain. My own view is that he did what I would have done. I would have followed the traders back. So I would have gone from Marseille and followed the trade route back along the Garonne River until I got to the Bay of Biscay. And then I would meet some locals and say, well, now you bring the tin, where do you bring it from? Will you take me back there? So I think he hiked on ships. And it's a remarkable story because we

know he explored the Breton Peninsula. He sailed up the Irish Sea. He sailed around the Northern Islands of Orkney Shetland, came down the North Sea and came back to Marseille. And he wrote a book called On the Ocean and told all these stories about all the peoples he saw. He was a real explorer and he was particularly interested in tin. He was interested in amber, where the amber comes from. He may even have been a trader, you know, trying to steal the march on someone. But he wrote the book. And the book doesn't exist anymore, but bits of it are quoted by other writers so that we can piece together part of this story. So he was certainly one of the people who would have sailed around the Breton Peninsula. And he did one very special thing.

He wanted to know how far north he'd gone. You know, if you're making this northern journey, you want to measure it. You want to know how far you've gone from home. So the only way he could do it was measure the sun height above the horizon on midsummer. So he made a number of these sun height measurements, one from home. midsummer. So he made a number of these sun height measurements, one from home. And then as he sailed, he made another one, which would have been somewhere on the north coast of Brittany. And you couldn't do it at sea, you had to go to land to do it. So he must have landed on the north coast of Brittany. And then he made others roughly on the Isle of Man,

roughly on the Isle of Lewis, that sort of latitude, and one further north, probably Shetland. So we've got these measurements, and they can now be turned into latitudes. So we know he made this journey, and we know that he was in Brittany. So he may have been one of the first Greeks that the Bretons ever saw. That is absolutely incredible. I mean, how do we know about this? This is the fourth century BC we're talking, and we're talking about a Greek explorer who may have gone all the way around the British Isles and further. Well, it's just the fortunate chance that lots of people will have read his book. And some who did read his book, like Strabo, said it was absolute rubbish. He was just telling lies and wouldn't have anything to do with it.

But he quotes bits of it. And then other writers quote bits of it and say, well, you know, this is what Pythias said, as though they believed him. So we've got all these little snippets that enable us to gently piece the journey together. And he obviously spent quite a lot of time on land as well. And there is a curious thing in Brittany, which I find very difficult to explain. In the Iron Age in Brittany, they still had standing stones. They still continued this long Brittany, they still had standing stones. They still continued this long tradition, thousands of years after the first standing stones. They were still putting stones up. And the stones were quite nicely treated at this stage.

Sometimes they were squared and faceted and they weren't any rough old bit of rock anymore. And there's one little group down in the Penmach Peninsula, which is right down in the southwest of Brittany, which are decorated and they're fluted. And some of them have got Greek key patterns carved out all around the top with a running scroll around the top and Greek key patterns around the bottom. Now, the closest parallel of these patterns come from Greek temples, columns in the Mediterranean. Now, that's all you can say. Now, how to explain it? Is it pure coincidence? Or is it just possible that one of these Greek travelers, not necessarily Pythias, actually came onto land and did what any self-respecting Greek making a journey would do, put up a temple to his goddess, put up a wooden temple to his goddess, you know, in Greek style, simple, simple one.

And the locals liked the decoration and copied it. That's the only thing I can think of. I don't think the Greeks carved these standing stones. They're still in the Iron Age tradition, but they were inspired, I think, by Greek models. And it could well be that explanation of a Greek-built temple. And we do find Greek coins and other odds and ends. There's, I think, a shard of pottery with Greek lettering on of this particular period. So they're not entirely without evidence. I think, Barry, just before we wrap this all up, I mean, is this Greek link, is this a good example? And are there more examples, evidence for showing how

the communities of Britain, they seem to change quite significantly during this Iron Age, during this particular period in antiquity? Yes, it must have been a shock to people in Brittany and Britain to be made suddenly aware of this very exotic world and these people with knowledge, all kinds of weird knowledge. So a shock. But I don't think it had any noticeable effect as far as I can see on culture or attitudes. attitudes. What was happening in the Iron Age was really a breaking down of the more distant contacts, because the more distant contacts were really based on the exploitation of copper and tin and things like that. Once you're using iron, you can find it more or less anywhere. You don't need the elaborate trade routes. And what you find in Britain and in Brittany is more of an isolation. People are turning in on themselves a bit, developing their own very distinct cultures

and identities. And so, well, we'll get onto that when the Iron Age meets the Romans in due course. But I mean, to wrap this all up, all that we've been talking about, whether it's the Mesolithic, whether it's the Neolithic, whether it's the Bronze Age, whether it's the Iron Age, been talking about whether it's the Mesolithic, whether it's the Neolithic, whether it's the Bronze Age, whether it's the Iron Age. Brittany, incredible communities, the identity of Brittany, meeting with other cultures at the time. But does it really seem to emphasise how long-standing there has been connectivity, particularly between Brittany and the island of Britain? Yes, yes. I think what it does show, when you really get down to archaeology in a lot of detail, the more you see how connected people were. We've tended to

think of separate communities developing and so on in isolation. But no, there was far more connection and probably connection on a whole range of different levels. Connection of you going to your neighbours and having a party and coming back and them going on and taking things you've given them to another neighbour and that kind of down the line connectivity, but also long distance connectivity. And I don't think we should forget that humans are incredibly acquisitive. And one of the things they want to acquire more than anything else is knowledge. And one of the things they want to acquire more than anything else is knowledge. And knowledge is enormously valuable

and was always valued. So that encouraged travel and it encouraged people to go on journeys. So the story we've been telling really is of people who've wanted to go on journeys, have gone on journeys, have been successful and have been followed by others.

And that builds up this very intricate network of connectivity, which binds the whole of the Atlantic sea-facing lands together. Sir Barry, this has been an absolutely incredible chat. Last, but certainly not least, you have written an incredible book on this topic, which is called? Breton's and Britain's The Fight for Identity. Barry, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast. Thank you for asking. least you ever written an incredible book on this topic which is called bretons and britain's the fight for identity barry thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast thank you for asking

you Thank you.