The Ancients - Iron Age Wales: Before the Romans

Episode Date: May 22, 2022

The residents of Britain during the Iron Age are often collectively called 'Celts'. However, both before and during the Roman occupation, this term is a huge generalisation. In this episode we explore the real characteristics and variations of the lifestyle and communities of present day Wales in the 1st millennium BC.The people of Southern Britain were written about in part by both Ptolemy, who gives us the geographical location of different groups, and Tacitus who gives a slightly more colourful account of the people the Romans encountered. But with ongoing excavations and discoveries registered with the Portable Antiquities Scheme, more and more of the realities of their lives are revealed. Tristan speaks to Dr Oliver Davis from Cardiff University to find out more about what this evidence tells us about the people of Iron Age Wales. In particular, they discuss Caerau hill-fort, which once was home to between one and two hundred people, and is an incredible example of hill-forts from this area and period.To find out more about Caerau, please find it here: https://www.caerheritage.org/iron-ageFor more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient 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. It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast, well, it was great to see how well received our previous Iron Age episode was on the ancients so once again we're going to be talking about the Iron Age in Britain but we're going to be focusing in on the Iron Age in present day Wales in the first millennium BC both before and during the Roman occupation of southern Britain. We're going to

be focusing on several aspects, several topics such as hill forts, people such as the Silures and the Ordoviques, what's the truth behind the naming of these peoples and also we're going to be delving into a specific archaeological excavation at the site of Cairo between Swansea and Cardiff because today I am chatting to one of the lead excavators, one of the overseers of that excavation, which is Dr Oliver Davis. Oliver, he is a senior lecturer of prehistory at Cardiff University. It was wonderful to chat to him. He is a great speaker. We recorded this episode a few months back and I'm delighted we're finally releasing it because it was such

an engaging chat. So without further ado, to talk all about Iron Age Wales, here's Oliver. Ollie, it's great to have you on the podcast. Thanks, lovely to be here. Now, you archaeologists in South Wales, looking at ancient history in particular and prehistory, this is exciting times for you as more and more archaeology seems to be now coming out the ground, which is revealing more invaluable evidence, information about the region's ancient history. Absolutely. I mean, I've been a lecturer at Cardiff University for a number of years now, and a lot of my research is focused on particularly the southeast of Wales,

but really I'm interested in all of Wales and southwestern and southern Britain, I guess. Often from the outside, people think of Wales and think, oh, you don't find anything there. In reality, it's not as rich in terms of stuff that comes out of the ground as, say, I don't know, somewhere in the southeast, like Essex or something. But increasingly, there's more and more being found and more and more being declared as well. That's really important because there's lots of metal detectorists, for instance, who work in South Wales. And through the Portable Antiquities Scheme over the last decade or so, lots more of the material that they've been finding, they've been handing in and it's being recorded, particularly by the museum.

So we've got a much bigger data set now to work with, lots of really interesting stuff that's coming out the ground and lots of really interesting projects going on as well, not least my project at Cairo Hill Fort, just outside Cardiff. I'm going to go a bit weird now I'm going to go away from the archaeology for a second because I'd like to first of all talk about the literature the ancient sources that survive which talk about South Wales in antiquity particularly by the Romans and in particular what does the surviving literature only what does it tell us about the people that occupied South East Wales

in the late Iron Age, in the early Roman period? Who were these people? We have a variety of sources, mainly what we call classical sources. So these are people from the Greek and Roman world who are writing about Britain and then specifically about South East Wales as well at particular times in the very late part of the Iron Age, so just before the Roman conquest and then in the sort of the period, in the aftermath, I guess. The main ones we're concerned with in this part of the world are Tacitus and Ptolemy.

Ptolemy provides a kind of geographic description of the lay of the land, if you will, of Britain around the time of the conquest and afterwards. Yeah, that's been used by linguists, by historians, by archaeologists to kind of piece together the sort of the perceived mosaic of Iron Age communities that are living in this part of the world. of Iron Age communities that are living in this part of the world. Tacitus, a famous Roman historian, he provides a much more colourful account that actually gives us names and gives us the colour of prehistory to our stories. And he talks about the peoples that live in South East Wales, who he calls the Silurys. that live in southeast Wales, who he calls the Silurys. He defines these people as a tribe living broadly in the areas of the old counties of Glamorgan and Gwent.

And they resisted the Roman conquest or advances into Wales for around about 30 years, quite successfully, using guerrilla-style military tactics. So they wouldn't kind of be nice and kind of turn up for a big dust up, a big battle where the Romans could quite easily quash them. They would sort of appear out of nowhere, out of the trees and attack a legion or attack a small cohort or whatever, and then disappear again back into the countryside. And it was very difficult for the Romans to stop this kind of activity

and conquer this part of the world. We get descriptions of them having red hair and looking a bit swarthy. And this sort of account of the Silurian War is really a well-documented piece of writing, particularly the conquest of the Silurians is accounted in not an insignificant amount of glee. This is a formidable enemy who managed to hold out for a long time and then the Romans triumph and they quash them and they basically kill everybody and take all their

weapons, take all their land and civilise, in adverted commas, this part of Iron Age Wales. Now that's the literature, the striking story of the Silurians that has survived from these ancient sources. But I've got to ask now about the archaeology, because, Ollie, it seems as if the archaeology, this idea that South East Wales, it was all part of one big tribe, one big identity, the archaeology, can we say, is shining some significant doubt on this portrayal?

Well, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's always been recognised as a bit of a problem, the archaeology, in this part of the world in terms of defining the Silures as a people. Because in a broad sense, the archaeology seems to suggest political fragmentation. It doesn't suggest that you've got a unified ethnic group living in this part of the world. And that's problematic if we're talking about a people called the Siluris, because that's exactly what the Romans are telling us they are. They're telling us that this is an ethnic group who have a distinct identity from other peoples. And so, you know, shouldn't we be able to distinguish them archaeologically as well as historically?

There's a significant issue here around matching up the archaeology to the history and whether or not we should actually try and match archaeology to history anyway. I think we need to kind of just take a brief sort of step back and think about some of the terms that we're going to be using and sort of define a few things. So when I'm talking about kind of an ethnic group, I'm really talking about a group that sort of is set apart by themselves or by other people on the basis of their distinctive cultural aspects or their common descent. And I'm also going to use in this discussion the term ethnogenesis. And that means the kind of the formation of an ethnic group. We can talk about an ethnic group at the end of the period, but where does that actually come from? And that's

what I've been trying to explore through the archaeology. You know, you would expect perhaps to see increasingly kind of increasing similarity between the types of material culture that people are using in this part of the world, maybe, or the ways in which they are living. So the types of settlements they live in or the way in which they're burying people. So maybe they're sharing a burial tradition or something like that. And so through archaeology, we can begin to kind of ask some of those questions. So can we see that sort of similarity in material culture? Can we see that similarity of burial tradition? And the short answer in Southeast Wales is we can't. They're virtually quite dissimilar.

And so that then begs the question, how can we define them as an ethnic group? If this archaeology is revealing this about this area of ancient britain ollie what are some of like the leading theories at the moment as to what the society was like how fractured was it could there have been an overarching identity in the late iron age what are some of the leading theories right now? Well, I mean, the traditional model for late Iron Age Britain is the one that's kind of outlined by the classical texts. It suggests that you've got a series of tribal units, so ethnic groups, tribal peoples. They're relatively large in geographic extent, you know, regional in size.

And there's a whole series of these right across the British Isles. And in southern Britain, you know, you've got the Adrabates and the South Coast or the Iceni in East Anglia. Now, they've all been assigned their kind of locations and their names based on those historical texts. They are then assumed to be fossilized in what's known as the Kivitatis, the Roman Kivitatis, which are the sort of political units that the Romans used to divide up Britain. These tribal units are thought to have evolved from early to middle Iron Age hillfort societies. So in the early to middle Iron Age, people start building hill forts and living in hill forts. And, you know, these are relatively substantial settlements in some cases. And these are kind of the basis of these tribal units.

So over time, they kind of coalesce into bigger and bigger entities. The hill forts are abandoned and new settlements called opida are introduced right at the end of the period. And it's thought that these are the kind of the central capitals, if you will. The boundaries of these tribes are described in a little bit of detail by the classical sources, but they've also been defined archaeologically through things like coin distribution. So in the late Iron Age, we start to find people in Britain are minting coins, bronze, silver and gold coinage. Beautiful items. I mean, they've got some beautiful designs on them. And you can kind of look at groupings of similar types of coins.

And people have been doing that for a very long time. And this suggested that the way you get sort of similar groupings of coins, they are representing one of these tribal units. Other ways of doing it have been to look at kind of distributions of other types of material culture like pottery people have suggested that pots equal people that you know these particular peoples are using particular types of pottery in academia in the sort of the the ivory towers that i exist in that kind of model has really been challenged over the last decade or so. People have been looking at the coin evidence, for instance, and seeing really subtle patterns that kind of challenge the idea of kind of broad brush generalizations of coins equaling people. Actually, they're much more subtle and fluid patterns that are emerging at this time. Those old ideas of a distinctive tribal identity are

starting to be unravelled and undermined to some extent. And Ollie, so just before we go on to Hillforts in particular, let's then focus quickly on the figure of Caratacus, who I know we've chatted about recently. So of course, Caratacus, he goes to South East Wales during his resistance against the Romans. Based on what you said right there how do you think he does go about therefore garnering up support in southeast Wales? From what it sounds from what you're being saying it doesn't seem very likely that he would have just gone to one central place in southeast Wales and from there been able to garner the support of the whole area. It seems like it would have been, from the evidence, something completely different.

The Roman authors start to give us not only a little bit of information about what people were like in the Iron Age, they also give us names. And suddenly we've got individuals who are named in the literature. How fantastic is that? Iron Age individuals that we can put a name to our face, but we can put a name on these people. And you get individuals like Caraticus appearing at this time. Now, he's the son of Cunobelin of the Catalu-Velloni tribe. So that's one of the tribes that supposedly exist in southeastern Britain. And they resist the Roman invasion in the mid-first century AD, so when the Romans kind of rock up the Claudian

invasion in the 40s AD, there's a big battle at Medway in which the British are defeated. Carthage, who was involved in the battle, flees, firstly into sort of what's now Gloucestershire, and then over the Bristol Channel into southeast Wales, where we're told he meets with the Silurys and attempts to build up a resistance force, garner enough support from those peoples in this part of the world to create a new army, if you will, that can then face off against the Romans. And then we're told that he kind of moves off out to Southeast Wales. The problem is that southeast wales we haven't got these big kind of central locations these big opida that you get in southern britain so we haven't got a sort of a verulamium type you know modern what's now modern saint albans is a late iron age opera we haven't got that type of site in southeast wales so we haven't got

these central locations where you could imagine large numbers of people could gather and make decisions. So yeah, where does Caraticus actually, where does he come to when he comes to southeast Wales? He would have been faced with a rather sort of fragmented settlement pattern. If he is garnering support, it's very likely that he's having to sort of move on a regular basis from relatively small settlements to small settlement. And he's moving between perhaps the settlements of the elites, maybe in this part of the world, trying to persuade them through his own charisma, that know, we've got to keep these Romans out, keep these others out. Maybe, you know, some people probably have rallied to the cause, promises of power, wealth, whatever, whatever he was promising. And some people probably didn't. So it'd been quite a difficult process, I think, for him to try and persuade people. I mean, that's certainly what the archaeology would probably suggest would be the way that it would have worked, I think.

would probably suggest would be the the way that it would have worked i think so let's move on then we've mentioned the word a few times now hillfort no such thing as a stupid question to start it all off really ollie i mean the characteristics of a nine-inch hillfort what is a hillfort in wales uh well what is a hillfort at all it seems obvious doesn't it it says it in the name it's a fort on a hill i mean that's quite problematic actually the phrase hill within the name is quite important so the location of these sites on hilltops or ridgetops in distinctive locations that afford some kind of defensive capability to the site, but more significantly, perhaps, provide them with panoramic views over a very large area. Previous to the Iron Age, we haven't got a great deal of evidence for settlements being placed

right on the tops of hills. They're often, they kind of hang off the sides of valleys and things like that. So this is a very distinctive place to put something. And it could be seen from all the sort of the lowland areas around. The etymology of hillfort itself, you know, is from the 19th century where these sort of enclosed sites on tops of hill were just seen as classically defensive in their form and location. When we've dug these sites, when we've excavated hill forts, there doesn't seem to be that much evidence for them have being military establishments.

They seem to be settlements. A number of them, particularly in southern Britain, seem to be intensively occupied, maybe by a few hundreds of occupants, which would have been an extraordinary number in the Iron Age. I mean, it's a small hamlet to us today, but in the Iron Age, you know, this would have been an incredible number of people being brought together in one place and living together. And you can imagine all the sights and the sounds and moreover, the smells that would kind of fill your senses as you walked into one of these places. They wouldn't be the lovely grassy kind of hilltops that we visit and walk through today. They would have been smelly, muddy, smoke billowing out of houses,

people doing things, noises going, animals walking around, people walking around. They are surrounded by walls sometimes, but more often banks and ditches and palisades or fences. It provides them with protection if needed, but really it's a way of showing off, showing off to other communities, to other individuals. And it's something that helps bond the community. Actually through the construction of the boundary helps to bring the community together because you all have to get in and get your hands dirty. Some of these hillforts would have taken an awful lot of effort to construct so the long and short of it is the term hill fort is slightly misleading i don't think they are forts and archaeologists have put forward a variety of different terms in recent

years from the hilltop settlement to defended enclosure whatever none of them seem particularly satisfactory either so we're kind of stuck with this name. We're stuck with this name, Hillfort, but don't get too distracted by the military connotations of it, is what I would say. Do we see, for instance, dating to prehistory, do we see regional variations, shall we say? And do we also see, let's say, rich concentrations of Hillforts in certain areas of the country? Absolutely. I mean, Wales is one of the highest concentrations of hill forts anywhere in Britain. I mean, incredible number of these sites, stunning sites that you can go and visit. And I would encourage you all to go and visit your local hill fort and go and have a look at it and see the views from it. And absolutely,

it's been recognised for a very long time that there's very significant amount of regional variation in terms of the morphology, so what these things look like, the kinds of things that happened inside of them, and the things that they were constructed out of. In North West Wales, so in modern Gwynedd, many of the hill forts in that part of the world are constructed from stone. So you think of the sites as just tricheria,

fantastic side of tricheria on the clean peninsula. Incredible stone-built wall that defines a huge internal area that's cram-packed full of tens of stone-built roundhouses. In the southwest, so when you go into kind of what we call Dovid, Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire, Carydigion, the hillforts there seem to be very small. There are some stone constructions, but more often they're earth and timber constructions. And by small, I mean they're enclosing anything from about half a hectare to 0.2 of a hectare. So big enough for perhaps a family or an extended family, but not a really substantial community. So when you start to go into Glamorgan and into Gwent and into the eastern parts of Wales, particularly the marches, that's where you start to find some really, really sizeable hill forts

and very, very large sites that enclose five hectares plus, some of them much bigger than that. The evidence from these sites where they have been excavated seems to suggest that many are settlements. And the implication is that they were homesteads to large communities. There's questions about why do you get the small ones in the west and the larger ones in the east? You could argue that the capacity of the land, agriculturally, is better in the eastern parts, in the marches and along the coastal fringe. That's where you can

produce more surplus so that's where you can sustain bigger communities and that's why you get these bigger hill forts and then out west the land isn't quite as productive and you've got different social system evolves where you've got perhaps the family or extended family retains a lot of power we're going to now focus in on the southeast as we get closer and closer to Cairo itself because before the 2010s you've shined a bit of a light on hill forts in the southeast Glamorgan, Gwent already but really before the 2010s and maybe even up to the present day there's still so much information there's still so much about these hill forts that remains enigmatic that we do not know about them yet, is there?

So where I work in Glamorgan is a sort of a buffer zone between this sort of the small hillforts out west and the big hillforts out east. We were sort of in the middle of that. So we get a sort of a mix of these different types of hillforts. But one of the issues we've got is that whilst the number of sites have been excavated to some extent over the last almost 200 years, the scale of those excavations has been tiny. And that's a problem because you're talking about very large settlements or sites, let's call them, and if you only put a very small hole in them that might be a few metres across, you're not going to get

a particularly good representative sample of what was going on inside these places. So you're not going to get the full story. You're not even going to, you're just looking at a deadly tiny fragment. I guess the analogy would be, think about your house, the archaeologist in 2000 years time who comes along. And if they put a two by two meter trench in an area that your house sits in, they might put it in your garden and they might miss everything in the house or they might put it in the kitchen and you know just think that all you do is cook food or they might put in your lounge and think well how are you living we're not finding

it that kind of scale of excavation is really really significant or the lack of scale of excavation in southeast wales was really significant and we knew very very little about when these hill forts were constructed and what they were used for but that is changing and before 2012 though it seems we did know that Kyra of all these hill forts in this area this is one of the really big ones isn't it this is one of the really complex big hill forts that must have said before 2012 for yourself and others you must have known was hiding was housing all of these secrets all of these incredible artifacts underneath the ground yeah i mean well let's talk about the name kaira first because we do have to address that so kaira is spelled c-a-e-R-A-U, and it's actually a Welsh word, and the word means forts,

forts plural. The settlement that now exists around it, this sort of modern suburb of Cardiff, Cairo is in southwest Cardiff, is actually called Cairo, so it's actually named after the hillfort. If you were in a different part of Wales, you would probably pronounce that word quite differently. You might say Cairo, but we're in the sort of the southwest suburbs of Cardiff there's very particular Cardiff accent so the local people call this Cairo so that's what we follow but yeah so Cairo is a medium to large size hill fort it encloses about five or six hectares so that's also eight or nine football pitches I guess if you think about it in those sort of terms. And it's got very, very complex boundaries and ramparts that surround it. It's got three concentric ramparts which define it on its northern and southern side.

And then there's enormous ramparts, sort of 10, 12 metre high rampart on its eastern side. And then a series of entrances. So it hasn't just got one entrance, it's actually got at least four entrances. It's leaded people into the site and they point in different directions and they seem to point in different sort of landscape areas it's one of six or seven of sort of similar sized hill forts and they're all spaced about six to eight kilometers apart and then in between them there are a variety of sort of smaller settlements that we know from upstanding archaeology so that's sort of smaller hill forts but also lots of crop marks that have been discovered over the last sort

of 50 or so years suggesting that we've got a relatively densely populated landscape in the Iron Age although we do what we don't know is are they all contemporary so do the hill forts date to the early part and the small enclosures to a different part of the Iron Age. With Cairo, why did you and your team decide to start excavating this hillfort out of all the hillforts in southeast Wales? Well, yeah, I mean, I've been working here. I mean, I should say as well, this is definitely joint research. So I have to give a big bit of the credit to my colleague, Professor Neil Sharples at Cardiff University as well, who is internationally revered for his hillfort knowledge, famously excavated Maiden Castle.

I mean, we saw the opportunity, I think, to make quite a significant contribution to the knowledge of the Iron Age in this region through examining a particular hillfort. And we chose Cairo for a bunch of reasons. One was that it had never been looked at before. It was kind of virgin territory, if you will. No other archaeologists had done any excavations, and it had been avoided. We knew we had something here where the chances of there being really good surviving archaeology was high, and that we could make a significant statement about the Iron Age from its examination. So as much as we wanted to tell a story about this place, we wanted to work with local people to tell that story,

to tell their story and kind of provide educational opportunities for the people to get involved, to work alongside the university and other institutions, museum, for instance, National Museum, but also a range of other partners schools and things so we saw this the opportunity here to make make a really really interesting project that told us something fascinating about the iron age but also provided all of these kind of social benefits as well of of archaeology and before we go into the excavations itself you've kind of shined a light on like the whole layout of this huge hill fort but of course preceding excavations itself you've kind of shined a light on like the whole layout of this huge hill fort

but of course preceding excavations you have the geophysical surveys and i'm guessing those initial surveys they must have revealed some like tantalizing stuff that you couldn't wait to get your get your hands on with the trowels and get in the trenches and start doing the excavating proper yes spot on and the geophysical survey was was really really exciting because it showed us that there was an enormous amount of activity going on within this hill fort it probably been plowed or it had been plowed at some point some of the archaeology has been destroyed and kind of mixed up but we could clearly see the outlines of roundhouses a whole range of roundhouses crowding into the hill fort. And we could also see a range of other enclosures contained within the hill forts as well. So

there were lots and lots of questions that suddenly came up. And the obvious one was, are we dealing with just an Iron Age site? Or are we dealing with a site that's perhaps occupied at multiple points in the past from prehistory right through to the medieval period and to the present day. Did Edison really take credit for things he didn't invent? Were treadmills originally a form of corporal punishment? And would man have ever got to the moon without the bra. You can expect answers to all these questions and more in the brand new podcast from history hit patented History of Inventions. Join me, Dallas Campbell, as I uncover what really sparked history's most impactful ideas.

Each episode, I'll be recruiting the help of experts, scientists, historians, and even a few real-life inventors. Subscribe to Patented History of Inventions wherever you listen to your podcasts. and so eight nine years after time team in the start of your excavations i'd like to talk about a few of the objects some of the artifacts that you've discovered and what it's revealed about the site and we've got to start with the earliest objects I mean the earliest objects you've discovered from Cairo Ollie what sorts of objects are these and how far back do they date? Well I mean this is you know one of the most significant discoveries we found on the hill and that was was actually found by a small, it was a little volunteer, a six-year-old boy, I remember him, from the local community.

He was up there digging with us. And I remember him just travelling away and then suddenly picking up something off the ground and taking it over to Professor Sharples and saying, what's this? And he had in his hand a leaf-shaped flint arrowhead. These are classically Neolithic. So that is what we call the sort of the latter parts of the Stone Age. So from about 4,000 or so BC. So the first farmers in Britain and Wales

date to the Neolithic. But the leaf-shaped arrowheads are very distinctive to the early part of that period. So 4,000 to about sort of 3,000-ish, I guess. So here we are. This was a fantastic discovery. This was the first Neolithic artefact we had on the hill. The Neolithic artefacts just started to rain down on us. We found huge numbers of flint artefacts, all buried in a series of ditches that seemed to define an enclosure or a series of enclosures, and also other stuff like pottery, some of the earliest pottery anywhere in wales

big kind of round bottom bowl pottery that presumably contained cooked food for feasts which were then consumed on this hilltop and then the bowls kind of broken and placed into ditches we didn't expect this whatsoever but we had here evidence of what we call a Neolithic causewayed enclosure. So this is one of the earliest types of monument that was built by anybody in Britain. And this one was much richer than any of the other sites ever excavated in Wales in terms of material culture. It's just cram-packed full of stuff, presumably the remains of people gathering together. And that's what we think these places are. We think they're gathering areas for relatively disparate groups of early farmers,

single families, extended families who live with their animals, they move with their animals through a sort of a limited area of the landscape, grow a few crops. And then at a certain time of the year, they want to gather together in a single location or meet up or get drunk i imagine but yeah have a good time have a party gossip meet your marriage partner kill animals and eat them and all the kind of things that we probably have been wanting to do during lockdown what about apart from kill animals yeah during lockdown what do we want to do we wanted to get together with other people and meet other people and have a good time and those are the sorts of things that we think that these places are so here we had one of these

early neolithic sites so something that predates stonehenge by a good six or seven hundred or so years so it's much earlier than that than the great monument in wiltshire it's a really really significant and exciting discovery that's incredible forget the iron age thousands of years before that. I mean, Ollie, does this communal significance, community significance of Cairo, does it appear from the archaeology to continue into the Bronze Age? Well, no, that's one of the really surprising things. It doesn't. It seems that this causeway enclosure is relatively short-lived. We have lots of radiocarbon dates from material that we found in the enclosure ditches, and they've been looked at by specialists. And we think that the cause of an enclosure release is probably only used for 100 or so years

before it's abandoned. And from the archaeology, it looks like the ditches are actually deliberately backfilled. They actually destroy the monument, if you will. They destroy it. They kind of fill it in and then avoid the hill. We have very, very little evidence for people up on that hill for the next 2,000 or 3,000 years. There must be particular stories attached to this hill,

particular reasons that people avoid it, or the particular reasons that it isn't chosen as a place of settlement, for instance, in the Bronze Age. And it's only at the beginning of the Iron Age, for about 700, 600 BC, that we suddenly start to see people on this hill again meeting in large numbers and living on the hill as well before we focus in on the interior on the occupation of this site during the iron age i know from your work you mentioned it starts at the early iron age

how there seems to be shall we say various, various layers, various phases of Iron Age Chira. So can you talk us quickly through these layers, these phases in, I believe it's in the ramparts, in the whole layout of the site? Yeah, I mean, that's something to be kind of conscious of at any site you visit. When you visit any archaeological site today, what you're seeing is its kind of final phase, the final sort of shape and morphology that it was left in before that site was abandoned. So for Stonehenge, for instance, you're seeing the kind of, you know, the very final kind of way that that monument looked like,

but you're not seeing necessarily the earlier phases. And likewise with the hill fort, when you come and visit Cairo or you visit Maiden Castle or whatever hill fort you go and visit, you're seeing the final shape and the architecture of that hill. And what we found at Cairo and most other sites is that these hill forts develop piecemeal over time. So at Cairo, you seem to have an original enclosure of the hilltop by the construction of a fence line, a wooden fence line that defines the top of the hill. It's going to be a long fence. I mean, this is a kilometer or so around this hilltop. So there's a very large number of trees you're going to need to cut down to construct this. And we found evidence of that through a

series of post holes that run along beneath the later boundaries. So we can see that the original enclosure of the hill is through this sort of timber fence. That's probably around about 700, 600 or so BC. And it's associated with some settlement as well. We have a number of roundhouses that seemingly date to broadly this period, this sort of transition between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. Then as we move forward in time, the morphology of the site changes as more and more people gather together and start living in the hillfort. The architecture of the boundaries change. The fence is taken down, an earthwork rampart is constructed, so an earthen bank is constructed over the fence and seemingly fronted by a wooden revetment, so a timber revetment. So by that, I mean a series of posts, probably with planking behind them.

Earth is then sort of banked up against that to provide a means for people on the interior to get up to a higher level of the rampart. And then at a slightly later date, maybe into the iron age 300 200 or so bc we have the middle and the outer ramparts are then constructed and they look remarkably similar in design and it's probable i think well possible let's say that they are actually set out at the same time they're part of the same scheme of works they've got js. They've got wooden shovels and things like that. So it's going to take you a long time to construct these. So they're going to set it out, and then it's going to take them a long time to bring the people together to actually do this work to construct the boundaries. So it kind of develops over time in a sort of episodic activity of boundary construction.

So that kind of Middle Iron Age is what you see now is that sort of triple rampart that defining this enclosure on the hill an absolutely mighty structure it must have been and ollie if we then go into the interior itself the occupation of the site i mean what sorts of artifacts have we found from within cairo that can tell us more about the people who are living here in this mid to late Iron Age period? Yeah, that's a really interesting question. So yeah, we know that there are actually lots of people living up here because we've found lots of evidence for their houses. And we know they're living up here for a considerable period of time as well, because some of the houses are built over the top of each other. So you build your roundhouse, you live in it for a generation or so,

it falls down or someone important dies, you take it down, and then you build another roundhouse almost exactly on top of it. So you've got people living up here in big numbers, maybe 200 or so people for several hundreds of years. They obviously produce, you can imagine what people produce when they live anywhere, lots of rubbish, They obviously produce, you can imagine what people produce when they live anywhere, lots of rubbish, lots of waste. And we as archaeologists, I find out going through their rubbish. I always describe this to school children as going through your bins. That's what I'm doing. I can tell a lot about you by going through your bins. And that's what we're doing on an

archaeological site. We're going through people's rubbish and finding stuff that they threw away. We found animal bones, and we know these have been analysed by colleagues at the university, like Richard Madrig. And that kind of shows us that they're keeping cattle and sheep and pigs. And also there's evidence there for dogs. So some of the bones actually have got teeth marks in, dog teeth marks. So you can imagine throwing your dog a bone, he's sitting in your roundhouse. And evidence for a small number of kind of wild species that might evidence hunting so we've got

some deer as well so very small proportions they're probably not making a particularly large proportion of their diet but the cattle are quite interesting because the cattle all seem to be relatively old when they're killed and eaten and that probably suggests that they're being kept not for meat production, but for dairy production. So these people are probably dairying. So they're producing milk. And from the milk, you can make butter, you can make cheese. And then when you kill your cow, you can make your beef. So you could probably think about an Iron Age person

eating their cheeseburger. So yeah yeah we can tell a little bit about the kind of the animals that they kept we know the kinds of plants that they were growing and eating so we find evidence for cereals in particular so wheat and barley and oats were being grown in the fields surrounding the site of being brought to the site we know they're probably eating bread because we find these grinding stones that we call quern stones where you get your grain and you pour it onto your onto your quern stone you have a grinder in your other hand you kind of grind it down into its flour so that we know they're eating bread and they're probably doing other things with grain

as well so making porridge and probably making beer i suspect suspect. Well, why wouldn't you? Too right, too right. We could get little glimpses of the colour of their lives too. We know we have evidence for what are called spindle whorls. These are artefacts that are used in the spinning of yarn from sheep's fleece. So you're creating wool and then from your wool, you're going to make textiles. They're probably wearing a variety of wooden garments, I suspect. And we have tiddly tiny fragments, but really important fragments of what must have been beautiful and incredibly enchanting objects that people were wearing, the jewellery of the Iron Age, if you will.

My favourite find from the entire site is a small glass bead. It's about a centimetre or so in size. It's a clear glass, it's translucent glass. It's got a yellow wave pattern that runs all the way around it and a hole through the middle and presumably would have been worn on a necklace, perhaps with a variety of other beads as well. And it would have said an enormous amount about their status because this would have been the diamond ring of the Iron Age. Glass would have been incredibly rare and exotic but really i suppose the thing that is really striking about this site is it's almost what we don't have as to what we do have if you go and excavate a site in southern britain so if you go and do an excavation in wessex or or hampshire

you go like danebury hill fort or Enormous amounts of bone tools, pottery, other material culture. At Cairo, we do have some artefacts, but actually it's a relatively small proportion compared to the longevity of the occupation of the site. So it must mean that instead of pots, they're mainly using wooden vessels. Yeah, and that begs the question, how do you cook things? How do you cook something without a pot? You can boil stews in leather bags, for instance. You can cook in basketry. There are quite remarkable ways of cooking food that don't require us having ceramics.

They must have been incredible carpenters producing beautiful objects that just don't survive in the archaeological record they just rot away and unfortunately people like me when we come and dig these sites 2 000 years later don't find them talking about something that's that that might be missing and i'm only going to ask it because i did a few podcasts recently which have focused also on on human bones and isotope analysis and from that being able to figure out where these people came from their diet etc etc i'm guessing from cairo we haven't yet found any human bones any cemeteries that might be able to tell us a bit more about the people themselves at this time yeah we don't have a

cemetery but we do have some human remains from the site ah that's interesting we don't have any bodies and it seems that in the iron age, in parts of Wales and other parts of Southern Britain, people are doing weird things with the dead. They don't necessarily bury them as complete skeletons. Or if they do, they dig them up again, and they start taking bones out and using them in different activities ritual activities i presume was quasi religious activities and then those bones those individual bones seem to then find themselves deposited in all sorts of strange places so at cairo we actually have the forearm of probably an adult we don't know male or female it was found underneath the inner rampart when it was constructed now clearly it wasn't part of a burial of an individual but there's a little story there no doubt you know is this a particularly important person maybe that was so important they're kind of their bones retain some significance were taken out and used in some kind of ritual or religious activity and

then the construction of the rampart might have been a really, really significant event. And you can imagine people placing this important ancestral object, this bone of this ancestor underneath the rampart as it was being built by the inhabitants of this site. So there's some fascinating stories that are kind of coming out of that. And you're right, we can start to look at the isotopes that make up these bones. So we look at the different minerals and things like that, that make up a bone, and we can look at isotopes of strontium and oxygen, they can tell us where individuals have actually grown up, because they vary depending upon your diet and the underlying bedrock. So if you grow up in a limestone area, it'll be different to if you grow up in an area on granite or something like that. And the person at Cairo

seems to be a local person. So this is someone who probably grew up in and around Cairo and had a kind of diet that we would expect a terrestrial based diet. So a diet that's based on that kind of meat and two veg, you will you know the animals that i described that we found and the and the plants the sort of the cereals and things like that so this is probably someone who's quite local love those stories as you say the stories figure out who these people were i hesitate to ask the next question as we near the end of Kyra and the podcast, but the late Iron Age, the early Roman period in Britain. Oli, what happens to Kyra? I mean, this is a really big question that we wanted to try and answer through our work, because we had this fantastic story. Let's bring it back to Caraticus

and the Silurians. I mean, we've got this fantastic story of this individual coming to this part of the world and dealing with this tribal entity, the Siluris. And people have suggested that Chiron might be a capital of the Siluris. It might be a central location, a kind of proto-Opidum, if you will. So it's not a big sprawling Opidum that you get in southern England, but it could be a place where people could gather and meet and it might be a place then that the keratikas might have visited the problem the big problem that we found is that the archaeological evidence suggests that rather than cairo kind of getting bigger and bigger and more and more people living in it and it kind of growing and growing and growing by the time of the late iron Age, the site actually appears to be

abandoned and people actually move out of the hillfort. And we can see that through the quantities and the proportions of material culture seems to drop off really starkly. The area where we've got lots of roundhouses seems to be the landscaping, if you will, over the top of those, there's a sort of a metal surface laid down over the top top of these houses suggesting that the population that lived in the hill fort has moved out of the hill fort and through our broader landscape work we've actually identified that there's lots of what we think are late iron age settlements surrounding the hill fort and so the idea now that we're kind of coming to is that rather than a sort of a linear development of nuclear political nucleation we've actually got political fragmentation at this time a kind of a fission

of this community if you will so the community that lives in the hill fork breaks down for some reason and the people move out into individual family farms family-sized farmsteads and live in the landscapes of surrounding. I mean, I don't think any single family farmstead is really viable in the long term. You know, you need to ally yourself with other people in order to survive. I'm sure that there are relationships between these little groups,

but for whatever reason, they decide that they don't want to live together anymore. They don't want to follow some kind of centralized authority. They want to do their own thing. This provides us with a sort of an enigma here. We haven't got a linear development to a tribal entity. We were almost getting there at Cairo, weren't we?

We were kind of moving through the Middle Iron Age. The site was getting bigger, more heavily defended, if you will, through the ramparts. But it breaks down. People fragment out into the landscape. There's a lot of questions around why that might happen and the implications about that as well for us calling these people the Siluris. Because if we think back to our definition at the start of what an ethnic group is, it's people who see themselves as culturally distinct. That doesn't quite make sense with the archaeological evidence at this

time. You seem to have really messy relationships between lots and lots of disparate small groups, small groups that might gang together at certain times, but really, you know, they're not working together as a collective regional entity in any sort of sense. And it's made me begin to wonder about the validity of those Roman texts, and about how much faith do we place in the writings of those classical authors, especially when they're talking about areas like Southeast wales which to a roman in rome must have been a far away barbarian land where they weren't really that concerned about the minutiae on the ground what they wanted was a nice story and these roman author you know these roman

historians they're not writing ethnographies they're not writing accurate accounts they're writing narratives for an audience. They want to come up with a story where you've got goodies and baddies. The goodies are the Romans and the baddies are the barbarians, the Sulu, whatever. That's the kind of political rhetoric you've got here. If we didn't have the historical sources, would we call these late Iron Age communities in southeast Wales a unified entity? Would we give them a unified political ethnic identity? And the answer is no, we wouldn't. You've got to decide how much

weight you place in the historical sources themselves. They're just grouping lots of disparate peoples and communities together into an appropriate term that would be understood in Rome and would also allow them a unit to negotiate with on the ground. And unit to tax is what they want. That's why they're conquering this part of Wales. They want to tax it, tax the people who live here. Always about money. And it's surreal to think the name Salores. Salores, it might not be a name, as you say, that these Britons of that area of Iron Age Britain of South East Wales today gave to themselves but in fact was a name that the Romans created

to give to them instead it's it's mind-blowing to think actually when you really do think about it that's spot on yeah you know to what extent is this a term that people who lived in late Iron Age South East Wales would have understood and to what extent is it just a term that the Romans decide right that's that's what you're going to be called like it or leave it like well you don't you can't leave it you're going to like it because that's what we're calling you history is written by the winners in this case very much so okay so to wrap it all up overarching thoughts about Cairo itself what does it really seem to suggest your excavation work there eight years nine years of excavation work there what does it really seem to suggest about the function the nature of hill forts

in Wales in prehistory well what we need to do is excavate more of them let's let's make no bones about that we we need to excavate more of them and on a big scale because we need to do is excavate more of them. There's no bones about that. We need to excavate more of them and on a big scale because we need to confirm whether what we've seen at Cairo is repeated again and again in different places, particularly in the southeast. In other parts of Wales, there has been a relatively large amount of excavation, but particularly in the southeast.

From our work at Cairo, it seems to suggest the big hill forts, the big ones like Cairo, it seems to suggest the big hill forts. The big ones like Cairo are big settlements. They're nucleated settlements of a couple of hundred people who live together for a long period of time, for several centuries. They're probably served by a hinterland as well. So they probably draw on a hinterland of settlements that sort of surround the site. And those people who live in those smaller farmsteads or whatever probably gather together on the hill at certain times of the year it's a place of gathering and getting together and gossiping and partying and so yeah i can imagine being like a music festival almost you know glastonbury the iron age before and and that's quite significant because you know people have suggested that these places might be semi-permanently occupied they might not be occupied at all they might might be just for refuges. We can show that this is a settlement of a lot of people

and settle for a long period. And it seems to be an early site as well. So it starts right at the start of the Iron Age. It's enclosed. So it's not something that develops later on. It's not something that develops at 200 BC or something. It's something that's constructed right at the beginning of the iron age and lasts almost right through to the first century bc there are a few sites equivalent to cairo in the in the immediate sort of vicinity of south glamorgan and wouldn't it be great to go and have a look at some of those and see if you've got the got the same kinds of stuff going on if we haven't then it would kind of completely change my idea of what hillfort's are but at the moment, I think we probably would. I think we'd probably find that the sites that are similarly sized like Cairo are probably similarly occupied with the same kinds of activity

over long periods. These are really significant places. The first time in prehistory, that people gather together and live in big numbers like this in Britain. They're not towns, they're not urban sites in the sense of what we would think of as urban sites, but to some extent, they kind of are. They're settlements of lots of people and a truly remarkable set of monuments that change our thinking about how people live in prehistory. Well, there you go. There was Dr. Oliver Davis explaining all about various topics associated with Iron Age Wales, from Cairo to the Silures to so much more. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Now, if you'd like more Ancients content in the meantime, you know what you can do. You can subscribe to our weekly Ancients newsletter

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