The Ancients - Iron Age Britain

Episode Date: May 24, 2026

What if Iron Age Britain was never a land of barbarians at all, but a world of skilled farmers, powerful women, trade, ritual, and spectacle? Tristan Hughes is joined by Professor Tom Moore to reveal a far richer pre-Roman Britain, from roundhouses and hillforts to chariots, feasts, and buried offerings. Archaeology uncovers a society shaped by movement, identity, violence, and belief, where the Iron Age still echoes into Roman Britain and beyond.MOREDruidsListen on AppleListen on SpotifyBefore Rome: The Truth About Late Iron Age BritainListen on AppleListen on SpotifyThe Ancients is now on YouTube! Watch here: @TheAncientsPodcastPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Tim Arstall. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. For a long time, Iron Age Britain has been misunderstood. In the past, this century's 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 can. going to delve into today. Welcome to the ancients. 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 again, Tristan.

It's been too long since we last chatted. We chatted all things, that amazing discovery, the Males and B. Horde, which I gather it's 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 that the public's reaction to it. And so people understand the Melsenby Horde, 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 metal work ever encountered, you know, huge number of artefacts, 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 four-wheel wagons in Britain before, so very exciting. Well, nerdy is what we want beyond the ancients, so don't you are 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 south-east of England, obviously slightly later in northern England, and then parts of Scotland, I never conquered by Rome. That's a little bit of an artificial cut-off 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 generalise 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, definitely. That was 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. 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. Well, 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, no, 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. And so it starts, 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, like 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 a

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, or impassable morasses. 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 full discipline and really understood that. So you could see from that little quote you read there that there's a sort of conflation 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 Caesar'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 it allows us to have 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, and more about how they lived and, yeah, how sophisticated they were,

how they communicated, exchange with each other and so much more. Yeah, I mean, it's a really exciting time for RNA studies, as you say. I mean, you know, they're exciting discoveries, not at 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 INAG 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. key words like roundhouses, hill forts and so on. But first of all, the arrival of the Iron Age in Britain, what should we be thinking? 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 hordes and 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 straight away. 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 to 700 BC. But actually the iron technology, when we get it, for example, traded in sort of 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. Okay. 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 were 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. So 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. 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 an 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 in the climate as well. As an archaeologist, I would never say it gets miserable. It just changes. But it's interesting that gradual process, which I'm hearing again and again now with so

many ancient episodes, 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. valuable is more useful than, let's say, bronze and so on. 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 smith.

You know, there's a different process there. They're not the same technological process. Also, 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, browns 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. That it's 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. Well, let's have a look at the backbone, almost, of Iron Age society and how these people lived. Is it fair there this time? I mean, agriculture, that's at the forefront. for people living in Iron Age, Britain, an everyday figure, they're living in an agricultural type of settlement?

Yes, I mean, throughout the Iron Age, almost everybody is a farmer, even right up to the late Iron Age. We don't have really specialists, perhaps, until the very end of the Iron Age. Most people are farming most of the time. And they are mostly subsistence farmers, in other words, growing enough to feed them and their families, perhaps a little bit of surplus, but they're not creating for, you know, broader economy. And what's the everyday settlement of one of these Iron Age farmers? I know it's a huge period, it's several centuries, but there is one type of settlement that you tend to associate with an Iron Age farmer. There are, you know, a lot of people lived in small farmsteads. I mean,

I would hesitate to say, as we say, the Iron Age is a long period and incredibly diverse. I mean, one of the things we are very aware of now is the diversity of the kind of settlements you lived in. You can contrast it from the big stone brocks of northern and western Scotland down to the courtyard house settlements of Cornwall, to the unenclosed settlements, so these are scattered around houses that you find in the East Midlands. The Cranogs? It's incredibly varied, artificial islands.

Yes, occasionally. You know, they're less common in the British Iron Age, certainly. But Cranogs, yes. So there's a huge diversity. Perhaps most people will think Iron Age Hill forts. And we kind of think, hill forts are the typical Iron Age settlement, But even then, Hillforts are incredibly varied.

So that's interesting. I would have actually thought straightway gets the Hill Forks in a bit, but the Roundhouse, like surely the small farming assessment and the Roundhouse. I mean, you mentioned Brocks and all these things. I mean, they're kidding, they're always round. Well, the Roundhouse is the kind of standard structure that people live in throughout the Iron Age, although they're themselves are also incredibly diverse from, you know, quite monumental structures. I mean, you know, that we see in the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age, really big,

timber-built roundhouses to smaller structures such as stonewalled roundhouses in northern England in the later period. But yes, their roundhouse is the kind of standard structure. I mean, that is in itself interesting as why there's that kind of tendency to build roundhouses, which tells us something about how those households worked, for instance, perhaps even about the way they understood their space in a kind of more symbolic way. So what do we know about the function of roundhouses, It's almost like the house of an everyday person in the Iron Age. So, I mean, it was the main habitation for probably a household, so it's communal living.

There's very little evidence that they were divided into sort of different rooms or any spaces like that. And it's where most of the activities would have taken place within perhaps the doorways, through the lights, you know. So that's where everything is going on. One of the interesting things that's always been fascinating, if somewhat controversial, is this sort of orientation of the doors of houses because they faced east or southeast a lot of the time.

there's big discussion about whether that's to avoid wind direction coming from the southwest. So it keeps you your house less windy and cold, but also the light is coming from the east. But also there's a kind of that tendency towards the southeast might be having something to do with symbolic orientation between towards the sunrise, for instance. And can we imagine these smaller settlements? I've been to Batser, ancient farm before. I always think of that. But we'll get to the hill forts and the larger settlements in a bit.

But with these kind of farmsteads, these roundhouses. Generally speaking, do we think from archaeology that you would probably see maybe like three, four or five roundhouses in one of these settlements in like a very small, tight-knit community? Yes, again, you know, it's

a little bit difficult to generalise, but certainly, I mean, there is actually quite a change over much of, basically, southern Britain from the early Iron Age. That's a period from about 800 BC through to about 400 BC where we have more unenclosed settlements. Just a scatter of roundhouse

So perhaps just a few households. So you're talking very small populations. And then as we move into the period after about 400 BC, people live in what we would call small enclosed farmstead. So they're digging ditches round their settlements. And again, those are perhaps just one or two round houses. So small households. So most of those communities are pretty small.

They're the extended household rather than there are very few sort of villages, if you like, large numbers of households together. And livestock crops and the building of the round houses house itself. Is this where we get the word wattle and d'orb quite a lot? Certainly most of those would have been Wotl and Daube constructed. Yes, there are a few where we have stone footings

for roundhouses, particularly in sort of Northern England, for instance, in Northumberland. But yes, most of them are kind of timber-built structures. It's worth remembering, I mean, particularly if you've been to Butzer, you can think of some of particularly actually the late Bronze Age or early Iron Age roundhouses. These are pretty impressive structures.

You know, big use of timber. They're not, you know, the idea that these are kind of mud huts, as you're kind of earlier, you know, reference was talking about. Well, exactly. We're kind of already displacing that. These are complex structures, big structures. And of course, when we're talking about brocks and big monumental structures in Scotland, these are incredibly highly architectural buildings. Don't get me started on the brocks. That's another episode, isn't it? But hopefully we'll have some pictures, some shots of Butts for ancient farm. We filmed there in the past.

And with Wassil and Dorb, it's kind of the binding together of lots of sticks. and then the painting over with the kind of... Yeah, so you're weaving... You're weaving, yeah. Yeah, together and then covering it in clay. It's clay, yeah. And then you can paint it. It's done and stuff.

Yes, I mean, we have... And insulation. Yes, yeah. Okay, so that's kind of the everyday farming settlement of the Iron Age that we think of. You mentioned the word... Hillforts. So, Tom, when we're talking about the British Iron Age,

when should we be thinking with Hill Forts and what should we be thinking? So again, Hillforts is... One of those terms we use all the time, but actually hill forts are very varied. You know, we can think of really large hill forts. You know, people are perhaps be aware of Maiden Castle down in Dorset, to quite small hill forts like those in Northumberland. The Cheviot Hills is covered in Hillforts, but those are probably only, you know,

including a couple of households. They're incredibly well-constructed monuments with quite substantial ramparts, but they're not big. And again, another thing with Hill-Forts is we think of it as the Iron Age, but we now know that Hillforts start in the late Bronze Age. So they're one of these things that continues and develops and changes. And they change over time in terms of their roles as well. So some of the early Iron Age hill forts,

so again, thinking about sort of 800 to 600 BC, somewhere like Uffington and Berkshire, probably most people are not living in that hill fort. It's probably a central focus for a wider community. It's probably a storage place for food resources, perhaps for some surplus. But they're probably not actually living there. But then we think of Dainbury in the Middle Iron Age.

So, what I mean? I mean, about sort of 400 to 250 BC. There's quite a lot of people living in there. And Maiden Castle as well. Maiden Castle, yeah. There's a few hundred people living in those hill forts. So hill forts are very varied. And I guess also you also think about the big ramparts.

If you visit one of these places today, one of the stunning things is getting through those ramparts and then being in there, that open plane in the middle. For instance, if you're in Maiden Castle and seeing the sheep and all of that. But it is the ramparts and how deep they are even today that you can't help but think about when you visit one of those sites. Yes, and I mean if you think of the size and the entrances as a way,

the complex entrances, if anybody's been to Maidencastle or Dainbury, of kind of getting into these things. There's a huge amount of labour expended on those sites. I mean, one of the big questions for archaeologists is who's constructing them? So is it that there is sort of vassal peoples who are constructing them, or is it the inhabitants? I think most archaeologists now for the Iron Age would assume that it's largely done by the inhabitants

or as part of the community. This is not sort of, Hillfoots are not necessarily at the top of a settlement hierarchy where there are lots of other people who are kind of dependent on these sites. Because when these hill forts are being built in the Middle Iron Age, this is still centuries before the Romans arrive.

Is there very much a feeling there's not written literature down about these people that we can't label them with the tribal names that we have later from the Romans. It's just too far back. No, very much so. I mean, I think trying to kind of identify them to the tribal names. We can talk more about those in the late Iron Age is quite problematic. These are much smaller size communities than those larger entities. So, no, I think that's, you know, these are not, they don't work in the same way. I mean, if you look at Dainbury, for instance, in Hampshire, the hill fort there is not the sort of residents of an elite. It's more like a large

village, if you like, a large group of brown houses and communities together, but it doesn't seem to be of any higher status, really, than many of the other settlements around it. And you said elites there, because I guess we can't know whether it was a king or a warlord, or as you mentioned, if there even was one for those. Yeah, I mean, that's been a big discussion in Iron Age studies for, well, for 40, 50 years, really, the idea of whether there is elite. We always assume, and this comes back to sort of things like classical sources, you know, Roman writers, because Caesar describes Iron Age society in Gaul as being elite and having kings and druids.

We kind of think that that must be how the Iron Age in Britain was for all of the Iron Age. But actually, archaeologically, there's very little evidence for an elite. You know, the things that you might think of as an elite, burial practices and grave goods, that there would be a larger house or more rich material goods at someone like Dainbury. That doesn't exist in the archaeological record. If you look at Dainbury, for instance, the kind of... things that happened at Dainbury, the kind of goods they were using, these signs of objects that are using, are very similar to the smaller farmsteads we were talking about earlier.

So it's very hard to distinguish any obvious elite. That doesn't mean there wasn't difference in status between people. And status can be measured in things like the number of cattle you have, the number of sheep you have. But I think to think of it as sort of hierarchy with a king or a chief, I think most Iron Age specialists would suggest that's probably a little bit simplistic. Is it fair to say they probably had a defensive function, or at least some of them would have had a defensive function? Again, you know, you're sort of saying, you know, you're getting these controversial topics here. That's what I do. I'm sorry, Tom.

No, that's right. In terms of those ramparts, yes. The key distinction there is thinking, were Hillforts attacked all the time? Were they meant to be defended from? Or to deter or to impress people, I guess. Yeah, I think both those things. I mean, we know that some Hillforts had violence. take place at them. Walbury, for instance, in Somerset, Breeden Hill in South Worcestershire.

You know, there's evidence of what we might call massacres. You know, people were killed at Hill forts and they probably were attacked from time to time. I think, you know, we kind of get away from that. But those ramparts also, as you just intimated, have a function just showing the amount of labour that you can consume. It is a demonstration of your power. But it's also a demonstration of how important your community is perhaps. So I think, you know, the idea that they're always fighting from Hillforts is perhaps not quite right. Fair enough. I always think back to Maiden Castle and hearing from Dr. Mars Russell how back then actually with the chalk beneath the grass, you don't realize it, but back then gleaming white would have been visible for miles

around. And, you know, that is a statement in yourself. So just remembering that. And also what mentioned earlier with the roundhouses and the colour that would have been visible. You know, yes, okay, chalk is white, but it's not just black and white almost in the Arnage back then, you know, full of technicolor, full of wanting to impress and stand out, whether it's with the monumental hill forts or with probably an everyday roundhouse. Yes, definitely. I mean, I think, you know, I mean, if you want to talk about colour in the Iron Age, you perhaps want to talk about some of the objects that are using in the middle and later Iron Age,

which are, of course, you know, some of them bronze, shining bronze. and then adorned with glass and coral and so on, as we were mentioning with Melsenby and so on. So, I mean, colour is definitely used to intermate various different identities and attitudes. So, yeah, I think it's good to kind of remind people that the Iron Age is not a black and world or a green and brown world completely.

Well, let's move on then to this other key type assessment and one that I know you've done, a lot of work around. That seems so tied to the later story of Britain's Iron Age. So what are these things called Opida? Right. So Opada are these range of monuments that emerge at the very end of the Iron Age really. So towards the end of the first century BC.

We call them Opoda because that's a term that was used on the continent, particularly by Julius Caesar to refer to sites he encountered in Gaul, and the things that we see in Britain emerge around the same types of these sites in Gaul. So we've kind of transferred the term. And it means, from Latin, you can translate it as enclosed settlement or town. The confusing thing for the British sites is they are not towns, not towns as we would understand it. So the classic operetta in Britain, places like Camelodon and Modern Colchester. It's a Colchester.

Yeah, underneath Colchester, underneath the medieval and Roman town. It's an INAIDS center also underneath Modern Centalbans, Sainte named Melsenby, Stannock. These are the sort of classic operetta. They're characterized by these. huge, enormous ramparts. I mean, one of the things, you know, we talked about hill forts, but these things have huge earthworks. For many of them, like Colchester, confusingly, these earthworks don't define a nice enclosed area like our hill forts like Dainbury. They often define huge areas of landscape. So I worked at Bajendan, for instance, encompasses about 200 hectares.

Wow. You can quite, yeah, to get people's heads around that, you can quite easily plonk a Roman town within that quite happily and still have space, but they don't define a nice sort of enclosed area. So one of the things that we've been working on and I've been interested in is how do they, what are they doing? How do they use that space? So it's more about defining landscapes for activities. And that's probably telling us about the change in society. So by this time, Hillforts in many parts of Britain had sort of fallen out of use, probably some time before Opper really kind of emerged actually. So society is changing in the late first century BC. This is the first time that we can start to identify individuals who are calling themselves kings, for instance,

they're minting coinage, they're a new types of burial writer emerging, so there are graves with grave goods, something we haven't really seen across the British Iron Age. So society is changing, and the opera are the places where those kind of things are manifest. And this is the time when you're starting to get interactions with Rome. So accounts like Julius Caesar, mentions of tribal names and tribal kings and so on. You mentioned the arrival of coinage as well. this is when that becomes another interesting source, which you can then use alongside the archaeology to learn more. Definitely, and that is, I mean, it is at the opeter

that we see much of the interaction with the Roman world. You know, we see imports from the Roman world at sites like Colchester, even at Stannock in the north of England. One of the interesting things there is what that relationship is like and one of the things I'm really interested in it, because we used to, some time ago, think it was about sort of economics, if you like. Roman Empire expands, and this is a place that you, sort of Iron Age societies are trading with.

And certainly that was happening to some extent, but a lot of the items we have in some of the burials at places like Lexton at Colchester are probably more like diplomatic goods. There's more of a kind of political relationship, you know, as the empire expands and has these kingdoms on its peripheries, which it's kind of managing as a political relationship.

So it's a fair to say that it's almost, I know you mentioned that there seems to be a little bit of a break between them, but almost the mid-iron age, the bigger centres in Iron Age Britain at least are defined by the great hill forts and activity there and then the later Iron Age that's replaced with the emergence of these

opeter instead but maybe they have similarish functions I would probably say no they have quite different functions in many ways many of those hill forts I mean again you know it depends where you are you know in the south west so Maidencastles as kind of slightly different

organisation there, but many of the hill forts in Hampshire, for instance, and up the Welsh marches are different kinds of settlements. They're more like small villages, communities. The Yopoda mark a very different kind of social organisation. They're probably central places for a much larger, the emergence of a much larger groups of people. So Stannick, for instance, that's probably the central place for a whole confederacy of people across, you know, much of what is now northern England, The people that referred to by classical writers as the Brigantes, that's very different from the roles of health force, you know, on a much larger scale. So this is the emergence probably of larger social entities that we only see, really,

towards the end of, the in age, things that we can think of as much larger polities. And people going still from their like roundhouse farmsteads and maybe like communal gathering places inside these earthworks at these operas sites? Yeah, well, that's one of the things that really interests me about the opeter, because one of the things that we're seeing in that period is the movement from, you know, very, very quite localized societies based on perhaps networks of a few farmsteads, you know, exchanging material between themselves, but not perhaps, you know, large social entities.

The late Iron Age with the Operator is the formation of those larger entities, but you've got to have places where you negotiate that. You know, how do you negotiate those relationships? And the operator and those big empty spaces is, is perhaps the place you do it for assembling. And one of the things that, if we can believe, some of the things that people like Caesar say, is that late Iron Age society is about negotiated power.

The elites have to kind of forge assemblies. He talks about this happening in Gaul, where they have to decide as a group, a collective, are we going to go to war? Are we have an alliance with these people? It's the opera where those spaces happen. And you can imagine the empty areas that we have in these sites, because much of the interior of them is not full of settlements,

it's open, that's where they're gathering those people together. One of the things that fascinates me is that there's also the impact from the expanding Roman Empire, but you've got to also remember that this is, there's been a large increase in the number of settlements over the later Iron Age. So from about 300 BC, you just see an increase pretty much everywhere of settlements across Britain. There's more people in the landscape. There's more people who've got to negotiate access to land.

So there has to be places where that takes place. and I think to some extent maybe Opper are the kind of culmination of that. How do we negotiate who homes what land? How do we negotiate between those? I'm trying to think if it's almost the Iron Age equivalent to an extent of something like Glastonbury. But you know what I mean? Lots of people in an area together, probably very smelly as well after several days there. But for an important event, of course, we can use both ceremonial,

but of course big decisions for the larger polity that they're part of. Maybe they'll see the figure at the top, you know, a king or a queen and so on there too. Yeah, I think, I mean, you know, I like your analogy with Glastonbury, but, you know, assembly places. So, you know, anybody who's sort of looked at early medieval world, you can think of assembly places there being somewhere where even if you have a king, that king has to negotiate their power. They have to come and they have to have the other members of those communities come together and negotiate their authority, you know, make that decision as a collective. And again, this is a rural community, so people are most of the time in their farmstead still. They're perhaps sending one member to come to those assemblies, represent them, make those decisions as a collective. So this is a really exciting time because it's that idea that we have kings, but these are not kings, as you might think, from the high medieval period.

This is more about a negotiated power structure. So operador are perhaps, and why I find them exciting, is that those societies are trying to work out, how do you do that? You know, how do you negotiate power in a different way that hasn't really existed before? Do you think this is a good place? I think we can bring in chariots here and go back to the Melsenby Horde because processions we can be thinking about maybe happening there, a display of power, a display of wealth, you know, happening at places like Opidae,

and of course one of the big vehicles we associate with Iron Age Britain is the chariots or is wagons elaborate vehicles? Certainly chariots are something that shows it's sort of characteristic of the British Iron Age. I mean, we only know them from Burroughs, from burials really from East Yorkshire in the Middle Iron Age, but in the late Iron Age, we know they existed from the parts we find, and even Caesar mentions how important chariots are in warfare for the Britons.

Yeah, I mean, one of the exciting things about Melsenby is the idea that we have some other vehicles as well, these four-wheeled wagons, you know, which if we compare them to what's happening on the continent, where they're thought of as being sort of ceremonial vehicles, as you say, either for the funerary event or for display, Yes, you can imagine people kind of processing round in these vehicles, you know, perhaps being taken to the funerary right on these vehicles. Yeah, I mean, one of the other exciting things from Melsonby, and we kind of get a bit obsessed by the vehicles and the chariots,

which are exciting, don't get me wrong, but is the kind of is the cauldron, is the wine mixing vessel that we have there from the earlier hoard that was discovered there, a large bucket for drinking beer. So there's communal feasting going on. And you can again imagine that if your authority is about trying to negotiate with, other people, you throw feasts to perhaps, you know, show, to get support from those individuals, you know, that's the way power is manifest. And in time as well, maybe even in place like Yorkshire

in Stanek, do we think that, you know, they're bringing in things like amphora, they're bringing in Roman goods as well, they're very much adopting those, those ideas, those objects, those luxuries from beyond the borders of Britain? Certainly in the operetta by the latehine, some of the the elite, if you like, that are emerging, are adopting items from the Roman world, drinking vessels, beakers, or from Gaul as well as that's now part of the Roman Empire, and drinking wine. So, yes, they are. And I mean, that's another interesting thing, because there's clearly an imitation of Roman, but also Gallic, you know, Gallic elites, they're imitating as well at the time of conquest to imitate their kind of, their partner elites on the continent, if you like,

in a different way. I mean, one of the things. that's really fascinating in a sense that's also changing identity. One of the things that you see from much of the early and middle Iron Age, it's quite hard to see the individual for most of the Iron Age. We don't have burials or grave goods.

There are exceptions like East Yorkshire, but for most of the time, that's the case in Britain. It's hard to see, and people are not, or not many people are using things like broaches and stuff. So it's quite hard to see the individual in the archaeological record. Once we get to the end of the Iron Age,

with the burials and so on associated with Oppeter, you can start to see individuals, but also through the way they're eating, we have been beakers and platters, You know, this is about individual drinking. It's your cup. It's your plate. You know, that doesn't exist before.

So clearly the individual is becoming more important. So there's a change in some people's identity to sort of express the individual identity, which is perhaps again related to how power changes. You know, it's more about you than the collective. And what is a high-ranking individual of the late Iron Age? What do you think, what are they supposed to be in the eyes of the community? what skills they're supposed to have, what can we gather from that, you know, with the surviving archaeology? What insights can we get into late-ar-inage community from those burials and things like that?

That's a really good question. One possibility is that they are to sort of negotiate, you know, that community, perhaps negotiate with external groups to offer also power. I mean, in terms of support in warfare, you know, to lead that group when warfare is being consulted, to consult the interaction with the Roman Empire. So I think that's one of the roles that they have is that kind of they are the sort of, I mean, often, you know, you can think of them as leaders, you know, negotiating with the outside world, if you like.

And it's not just men we should be thinking about in these positions of power in Iron Age Britain, is it, Tom? No, so, I mean, you know, we've known from the Roman historians like Tacitus that there were powerful women in Iron Age Britain, Boudicca, but also Queen Carter Mangua, who's in Northe O'clock, Yorkshire, what's exciting is the archaeological evidence is really kind of emphasising that. In the past, you know, historians have struggled. Is the Romans making a point of this because it's exceptional?

Two queens and that's it. Yeah, and they make a big thing of it because perhaps it's unusual. But actually, it's probably not unusual. So there's fantastic evidence from ancient DNA evidence now, which is showing, particularly in southwest, but also in East Yorkshire, the sort of relatedness of females so that their power seems to be going through the female line. So there might be that women stay in the same place. They have maybe more power over land

and that men come into those communities and perhaps they do other things in societies. But there's also been, you know, we've known for some time, if we go back to East Yorkshire, burials, and you mention chariots with chariots and wonderful grave goods from Wet Wang Slack in Yorkshire.

For instance, where we have fantastic iron mirror. It's very enigmatic being. So that, you know, high-status grave goods, which indicate that women are getting the same kind of treatment as some men. So women, so some of those graves in East Yorkshire with chariots in them also belong to women. Yes. Oh, yes. Yes. And they have, you know, wonderful graveyors. I mean, Iron Mirror, this is a wonderful one which has this kind of, what's called a bean counter, which does underplays it, but this is very enigmatic copper alloy object, you know,

which we don't really know what it's for. So that's always hinted to us that women have, you know, can have status and have status. I think the DNA evidence is really exciting because it's kind of, it's emphasising that that's, you know, there's clear evidence for that, you know, and the relatedness. And also that it's not just Dorset, that it's probably happening in other parts of Britain. So, so when we have the individuals at Tastas mentions like Queen Cartamandia, we shouldn't be so surprised and that perhaps we only know about them because Roman historic, they came into contact with the Roman world, but there were others. Those are the high status women, you know, that they're interacting with, but that, you

You know, that evidence from graves in East Yorkshire and also in Dorset, it's kind of the two main areas where we find a lot of human remains from the Iron Age. Yes, and that's one of the, you know, one of the kind of interesting issues, the burial record from the Iron Age is incredibly varied, but it's only really in Dorset and East Yorkshire that you have, what we call an incumation right, so the body going into the ground, and in both areas, sometimes with grave goods, so things buried with people.

Of course, that's really useful because then you've got the... bodies, you can associate with the grave goods, you can do things like DNA of analysis, isotope analysis, and so on. For much of Britain throughout much of the Iron Age, that's not what happens to the dead. It's incredibly buried, what happens to the dead. You do have inhumation burials, in hill forts, in farmsteads, for instance, but often just, it's obviously clearly just a small proportion of the population who live there. What happened to the rest of the population is quite a complicated story. We don't know.

But, I mean, if you dig any Iron Age site really across Britain, you will often find fragments of human remains in ditches, in roundhouse, post holes and so on. Bits of leg bones, bits of skull. So... Your dead relative buried under the floorboard sometimes? Well, I mean, that's... Yeah, maybe not quite that. But, I mean, there is an interesting question there,

because we are still sort of trying to establish what happened to the dead. For a long time, we saw. suspected there was exclamation. So in other words, placed in on platforms or in trees and sort of, you know, left out to sort of rot and to be picked out by animals and birds and so on. And then the remains went into archaeological features. It's somewhat more complicated than that because there's been some wonderful studies that show that sometimes bodies went in the ground and then were dug up again and moved around. And sometimes bodies were probably mummified. They were probably kept above ground.

and then deposited. So what's interesting, where there are, I mean, some wonderful examples of, it's a skull which have holes drilled in them. And so people are, you know, hanging bits of bodies up. So, I mean, it's really interesting because I think, you know,

the attitudes towards the dead are probably much more varied, fluid. And I think, you know, you can sometimes think, oh, isn't that disrespectful, but perhaps not. You know, it's more about actually the dead being part of the community. Well, once again, and like we've done Ice Age example, of cannibalism when actually it's actually a part of the ritual. I'm not saying that for Iron Age stuff at all, but once again, getting our mind around different ways that they honour the dead,

that, you know, of their family and so on. And there's some bog body examples, aren't there? Quite a few from Iron Age Britain. I mean, the famous one is Lindau Man, obviously. Again, the bog bodies perhaps are part of that sort of continuum, if you like. You know, the bog bodies are there and certainly treated in special ways. Wet places are almost certainly have significance in the Iron Age. But in a sense, the bog bodies are perhaps part of the continuum that we see in other forms,

which are now skeletons, if you like, not preserved, but actually part of this way of treating the dead in different ways. And one of the things that interests me is that that might also relate to what you did in life. Did you die in battle? Therefore, you get one treatment. Perhaps you're interred. You're an inhumation, perhaps somewhere on the settlement site.

You know, if you died in a different way, you get treated in a different way. We'll explore a bit. One particularly grim other way. of dying in a bit, we're going to export human sacrifice. But before we get there, you mentioned fighting in battle. Is this a clear part of Iron Age British society? Because in the past we always, you look at the Great Hill forts, you look at the ramparts, the chariots and so on,

and you think warrior society. How far can we say that the people, like the men of Iron Age Britain, that they were warrior societies, that they were expected to fight? Certainly violence. is part of Iron Age society. You know, we have individuals who have sword cuts to the head. We were talking about Stannick earlier. You go, Stannick, there's a wonderful example with a skull with a sword cut.

It is obviously a sword cut to their head buried in the ditch. Yeah. They're just cut into the skull. Yeah. So, I mean, and then we have many examples of that. I guess one of the interesting things is when we then take that to say about, is it a warrior society? So when we talked about Hillforts, you know, it's very hard to see a warrior elite living at Hillfort.

in many ways it's hard to see a warrior elite. So we have some burials of what you might call warriors. There's a wonderful one at Mill Hill in Kent, where you have an individual buried with shield, sword. And so you can say this image is a warrior. But most people are not treated like that to the Iron Age. So they're actually relatively unusual. So if it was a warrior society, wouldn't we find more of those?

If we think of East Yorkshire, there are individuals who are buried with weapons. but not all of those people and not most of those people. So, and when we look at the evidence of trauma, so violence on bodies, you know, it's only about 8% of the remains from somewhere like Dainbury have trauma on it. Now, there's a question of what proportion you'd expect, but what I mean by that is that violence is a part of those societies,

but there's a big difference from being a warrior elite. You know, I always love there's a great quote by an Iron Age specialist. You said it's, you know, farmers who fight. You know, they are farmers most of the time, who do fight. As I said before, you know, if you think of, there are massacres, there's Whirlbury, there's Breeden Hill where you have violence. You know, people who were clearly killed, probably massacred at the site. So there is interpersonal violence, but I think it's from the evidence we have from the human remains that I think it's unlikely that this is

happening all the time, everybody. And for some people, you may get status through warfare, through violence, but I think this is probably not always the case and perhaps not often the case. Because you might as want to think of somewhere like an operetta, Stanick or somewhere similar, Colchester, Cameludan, where you mentioned how the gathering of people all together, I guess could there be a theory that maybe once in a while if they'd had a disagreement with a nearby people, the elites, they gather there in their charries, the farmers are expected to gather with their spears and slings, and that's the kind of the classic, and then off they go for a quick fight.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's certainly, and certainly in the late Iron Age, those kind of, you know, battles between groups of Iron Age people certainly happened and throughout the Iron Age. You know, certainly violence was part of society. There was warfare. I think where I'm sort of distinguishing, I guess, is from the kind of assumption that status is always going through violence. I mean, we were just talking about female power, and that's probably more through ownership of land. And so it's probably land that's most important. So is that difference between saying is violence part of society, or is it a difference between saying is violence part of society, or is it?

to warrior elites. And I think that might sound like, you know, nitpicking, but actually I think it's really important to think, how do you gain status? And violence is probably one way, but it's perhaps not common all the time. So let's talk about religion. Does Iron Age religion, or for most of the Iron Age period in Britain, is it quite invisible to see examples of ritual and religion? So for much of the Iron Age, there is little in the way of temples or sanctuaries. they appear at the very end of the Iron Age. Where we see belief is through things like remains buried on settlement sites, both human remains, but also animal remains, structured sometimes,

so arranged in unusual ways, which are probably some kind of ritual activity offerings on settlement sites. Even the structure of the way their settlements are organized, mentioning about the way round houses that can be orientated towards the rising sun. So the way you structure the space of your settlement is also about reflecting rich and belief. But it's not, you know, there's not a place probably where you go and do ritual for much of the Iron Edge. It's in your everyday experience. And so is, but is there an importance of the natural landscape? Can we gather that? I mean, I might also think of

objects like the Battersea Shield or the Waterloo Helmet, which you can go and see in the British Museum today. Do we get a sense that there is a a real attachment to wooded areas, to rivers, and so on throughout the Iron Age? Certainly certain places in the landscape have symbolic significance. So you're right. So some of the, we have less metalwork deposition in rivers than we had in the Bronze Age, but it's still happening and it's interesting. So you mentioned some of the shields,

something like the Witham Shield from Lincolnshire, where there are places where people go and deposit material. There's a great place called Fisketon, where there's a kind of platform that goes in. into the river and they're clearly depositing valuable objects, probably sometimes human remains. Really? Some of the dead, you know, and that's another enigma of what happens to some of the dead. Maybe they go into rivers and there are special places where that happens. Again, what's interesting about some of that is those objects, you know, like Witham Shield, you know, this is perhaps, again,

a communal act, and it's a community coming together. The fact that you put it into a wet place, you don't bury it with your warrior, is perhaps saying this is about the communal act. So let's talk about druids. What do we know about druids in Iron Age Britain? So we know about druids really from Roman writers, particularly Julia Caesar, mentions druids when he's in Gaul, and he mentions the fact that druids existed in Britain and they were important. Archaeologically, it's very difficult to see the existence of druids. So there are exceptional burials. We have these kind of little bronchurches. spoons, which divide into quarters, which are kind of weird objects, and there's a burial in Scotland which has one of them, and these could be kind of ritual items. But actually trying to identify druids in the archaeological record is very difficult for the Iron Age, and we don't

see them in burials, we don't see them. So it's hard to know how significant they were, certainly for much of the Iron Age, and perhaps if they were significant, it's only towards the late Iron Age. Gosh, but Doina, can we say anything about them at all? I mean, the thing with the tree is, archaeologically, it is hard to see them. So one of the burials associated with Colchester at Stanway, people, which has very medical equipment in it, people are saying, oh, is this for divination?

But it's really hard to make that leap archaeologically to these individuals. And as I say, for most of the Iron Age, for most of the time, ritual practice seems to be something that's done perhaps more by and within the community. And to try identify those ritual specialists is quite difficult. And as you can tell, something that's going to quite controversial, really. Fair enough.

I mean, one thing I would have asked, though, is the human sacrifice question. Is, archaeologically, is it more clear to see evidence of human sacrifice in Iron Age remains? Certainly, individuals died violently. So, you know, in terms of, and perhaps some people were sacrificed, but again, you know, how and why they were killed is often quite hard to see archaeologically. And I think we have to be a bit kind of careful of, this all comes from sort of trying to take the classical sources and say, can we see that in the archaeological record? And I think that's always a little bit difficult to sort of interpret it with through the lens

of the classical writers, rather than thinking, how did these people die? Why was that? And certainly, you know, some of those bog bodies, you know, are treated in ways which suggests they were sacrificed. But why and what that means, I think is really interesting. I mean, I think, I'm going to give you an example. There's a burial that I excavated at Bajendon, so it's a female burial, buried in the ditch. And she's buried in a very unusual way, so she was placed in the ditch so that she sort of was on her knees and she fell backwards.

Now, she was an elderly female, so we can't, archaeologically, you can't say how old, but she was certainly over 50. And we know from her isotopes that she'd come from long distance. Now, it looks, we couldn't find any evidence that she'd sort of had a throat cut, any kind of knicks on the throat or anything. But the burial is kind of, you know,

might interpret as being kind of sacrifice or she's based in the ditch, and it's a very unusual. It looks like she didn't want to go in. But actually, if you think of her being an elderly female and the fact that she's come from long distance to the sight in her childhood, she's probably somebody who's really important in society.

So, you know, does her treatment in death to note something that she was sacrificed or does it denote actually something that was really she was really important member of society? So I think that's where the archaeology, you know, we have to be a little bit nuanced about how we interpret it. Understood.

You mentioned earlier Uffington, and that being a prime Iron Age centre. Now, when someone mentions Uffington, I do think of the beautiful white horse, the chalk horse on the side of the hill there. And like, Iron Age roots, do we believe, to that, white horse? Early Iron Age. early Iron Age, which leads me to the question of horses in general in the Iron Age.

How symbolic, how important do we think horses became to Iron Age societies? Horses are really kind of intriguing when we think about the Iron Age. And certainly throughout much of the Iron Age, in the Middle Iron Age, for instance, they're clearly treated differently. So when we're talking about ritual, bits of horse remains are deposited on sightseeing. There's great examples from Dainbury, a leg of a horse. So they seem to be treated in different ways than, say, cattle, sheep. When we get to the late Iron Age, lots of the late Iron Age coinage,

they really focus on the horse imagery. And that coinage is beautiful. Oh, it's beautiful. The surviving coins of Iron Age Britain, those horses that, they look immaculate. Yeah, and they're really stylistic. And, you know, if you think of the after horse, it has some similarities to some of the depictions on much of the Iron Age coinage. I mean, what I always think about that is,

remembering that Iron Age coinage is originally imitating coinage coinage that comes from the Greek world and the Roman world, but they pick the horse, you know, they make a choice to focus on the horse because perhaps of its significance in terms of wealth. And we think of horses, or really they should be thought of as ponies. They're quite small, actually, you know. They're small horses, but pulling chariots. By the late Iron Age, we get some coinage which depicts people on horses.

The cavalry is becoming perhaps more important in terms of violence and warfare. And, I mean, one of the things that fascinates me is that they're exchanging horses over long distance. We haven't done lots of the work yet, but with some of the initial isotopes. So, you know, telling where things come from from the bones in terms of the strontomium oxygen from my own site, showing that the horses that badgeron come from whales. There are other sites. So they're exchanging horses over long distance, you know. So horses are probably a form of status.

And if you can imagine them pulling your chariots, imagine riding them, you can see that. you can see that that's a high status animal and something that you want to depict as, you know, that's why it's on coinage. It's how many horses you have is probably how powerful you are. Well, there you go. Tom, we've covered a lot of ground and admittedly it's been a big subject to try and tackle. So I appreciate you hanging on in there with my questions going from one thing to the next. Really appreciate it.

The legacy of the Iron Age, of course, we had a look at that passage earlier and how it was seen as kind of backward and uncivilised compared to Rome. But in regards to actually on the ground itself, following the Roman conquest, is it fair to say that the Iron Age way of life, roundhouses and so on, I mean, it doesn't just disappear like that? Not at all, no. I mean, many people lived in roundhouses well into the Roman period, you know. And that wasn't because they were backward.

That was because that was a way of living, a choice of living. you might think of Celtic art we often refer to it as Latens style art in archaeology but that goes on and has a life of its own and the gold talks and stuff like that there's beautiful art well the stylistic art

the sort of curvilinear art that people are familiar with that comes from the Iron Age and is then used in different ways and adopted and adapted in Roman Britain it becomes and takes on a life of its own and so of course beyond the Roman Empire so the Iron Age doesn't just disappear it becomes

part of Roman Britain and Britain long after the Iron Age seems to end. Yes, Tom, how do you think, how should we view Iron Age Britain today? That's a very good question. I would say Iron Age Britain really sets up what we think of Britain. You know, if you think of the landscapes, intensively farmed by the end of the Iron Age, you know, they are establishing the Opeter, these large places, many of which become Roman towns. They're still towns today like Colchester. So it really sets the framework for much of what is Britain, I would say, and intensively farmed and occupied landscape.

Tom, this has been fascinating, so much ground covered. We could do several more hours talking about Iron Age Britain, but we'll leave it there. It just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Thanks for everyone. Well, there you go. There was Professor Tom Moore giving you an introduction to this amazing, but still very mysterious world of Iron Age Britain.

Still much debate around so many topics regarding Iron Age Britain, how different places in Britain were in those centuries before the Roman invasion. We will put in the show notes linked to a couple of other episodes we have recorded over the years about Iron Age Britain, one all about the druids with the one and only Professor Ronald Hutton, and another one about late Iron Age Britain, what we actually know about the very end of the Iron Age at the time that the Romans invade, which also does feature Tom for part of it. Put a link to those episodes in the show notes. Thank you once again for listening.

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