A History of Britain - Bronze and Iron (2200 BC - 800 BC)

2200 BC. In Egypt undying kings lie beneath the greatest monument’s mankind has yet devised. In Mesopotamia the world’s first empire is on its knees, slowly collapsing under the weight of drought and rebellion. And far to the west, on the windy shores of Britain, an age of unprecedented prosperity is dawning. dawning fueled by the arrival of metalworking Britain would find itself once again transformed as fields and villages took the place of the forests of old but this new society was fragile and in the centuries ahead it would be threatened by the changing climate around 1200 BC the long rains would arrive they would intend for centuries to come you the Stone Age in Britain lasted for the better part of a million years from the footsteps of the first hominids to the erection of the great sarsens of Stonehenge almost 900 thousand years have passed for much of that time Britain lay empty ruled by the ice time and time again humans would be driven out then around 8000 BC guys retreated never to return in the more near ahead Britain would be settled first by hunter-gatherers then by farmers seeking to tame its wilderness through it all its people remained illiterate what little pasture history would have been passed down as stories or carved into the land itself in the form of the great Neolithic tombs and monuments bookkeepers the people of Britain may not have been but they were ideally placed to practice another craft one that would revolutionize life in these Isles once again by the time the Romans arrived in the first century BC we can say with confidence that the Britain they would have found or little resemblance to that of two thousand years prior in the place of forests like organized field systems ruled over from vast central fortifications already many centuries old it was a new type of society built first on bronze then iron the arrival of metalworking is often used by historians as a simple boundary for societal development before then the world was ruled by Flint a useful material but one that required many hours of crafting to be practical the appearance of bronze from around the end of the 3rd millennium BC onwards would provide the Britons with a durable new toolset one that would prove far more versatile than Flint thanks to its malleable nature bronze could be cast and shaped into a wide range of items including tools such as axes pigs hoes sickles and plows or weapons such as swords daggers and Spears bronze could also be used to cast shields along with a whole host of useful household items like razors pots and cauldrons indeed with all its versatile function bronze seems Flint's natural successor and it's easy to assume that its take over in Britain would have been rapid but the reality is that the switchover from Flint to bronze was a centuries-long process for much like farming before it metalworking arrived in Britain piecemeal fuelled by a combination of migration and local adoption you one of these migrations would change the very identity of Britain towards the end of the Stone Age Britain was still a land of isolated communities most of its citizens would have lived in villages made up of fetched houses large enough for a family of ten comprised mostly of farmers the people of each region would have been grouped together in loose tribal associations these tribes would in turn have been semi mobile coming together occasionally around centralized ancestral sites in Ireland the population may have been more settled but its people still relied on well-defined ritual landscapes around this time the great communal tombs of the Neolithic begin to give way in favor of more individual burials which in turn began to contain personalized selections of grave goods then around 2500 BC a specific item starts to appear amongst these goods the first of these were found in the southwestern reaches of England and Ireland where burials began to contain bell shaped beakers similar to others found across continental Europe on face value these beakers may not look like much but they are part of a new package of grave goods that made their way into Britain between 2500 and 2200 BC we covered the best known British example of these goods at the end of our last episode when we looked at the items placed alongside the man known as the Amesbury Archer buried near Stonehenge around the 24th century BC the Amesbury Archer was himself an immigrant's of continental Europe as shown by isotope analysis conducted on his teeth but this outsider status doesn't seem to have been a barrier to him in life as he was buried in truly elite fashion the goods in his - are archetypical of the bell beaker culture comprising of the bow arrows knife and beaker found in burials all over Western Europe much like the spread of farming before it the spread of this beaker packaged into Britain has caused debate amongst archaeologists was the appearance of this new culture the result of mass migration from Europe or a case of more gradual diffusion of ideas from across the Atlantic from the 1960s this argument had swung in favor of the diffusion theory whose proponents pointed to high distributions of beakers found the long known Neolithic trade routes this theory remained the most widely accepted until 2018 when a new study was published in a scientific journal Nature the results of this study clearly demonstrate that around the time of the beaker culture there is also a radical shift in the genetic structure of the British population in layman's terms around 90 percent of Britain's Neolithic gene pool was replaced with the newcomers bearing a strong resemblance to the beaker people that weld in a lower Rhine area an earlier study confirmed similar arrivals in Ireland and between the two the facts now seem difficult to dispute by the end of the early Bronze Age the majority of Britain's Neolithic population was either replaced or absorbed by newcomers from abroad if these developments alone were all that marked the appearance of the bell beaker culture it would still be one of the most significant changes in British history but it now seems likely that they also brought with them the first known examples of metal tools found in Britain and with their arrival it now seems that the Bronze Age has finally begun except at first the metal in question wasn't bronze it was copper the copper age is one often overlooked by history yet in many places it lasted as long as the bronze age that would follow it much like farming before it the earliest evidence for copper worki appears along the third tale Crescent of Mesopotamia in the fifth millennium BC here it would remain the dominant form of metalworking for another thousand years around the same time that copper working begins to creep into Europe by the mid 14th millennium BC items that had previously been crafted in stone such as axes and knives starts to be replaced by copper replicas throughout Central Europe perhaps the most famous example of these was found in the possession of the Iceman third see whose frozen body was found in the Alps between modern Italy and Austria amongst the courts knife and Flint arrowheads that were found in his possession there was also a finely crafted copper axe the blade of which displaced clear signs of having been used as a cutting implement nearly a millennium later this same type of tool working would arrive in the southern reaches of Britain appearing at roughly the same time as the bell beaker culture and it is here that some of the oldest copper items have been discovered in the form of the knives laid to rest alongside the body of vieja spree Archer these free simple knives represent the most advanced technology of their day if the aims be Archer crafted them himself as the presence of metalworking tools in his to suggests then he would have seemed almost a magician to his fellow man first he would have needed to be able to recognize copper or then acquire it either through mining it himself or by trading for it from an established mining site if the metal worker was starting from scratch he would also needed to know how to concentrate the raw copper by first crushing it then roasting it to remove impurities after that would also have had to know how to smelt the purified copper for which he would have had to build a charcoal furnace of reaching temperatures over 1,000 degrees centigrade finally he would also have had to know how to catch the metal into useable tools a process that would have required mastery in its own right we can only imagine the trial and error the invention of this process would have required along with the leaps of imagination needed along the way in a world where people of shape tools and a large sections of flint or bone this process could only have seemed like magic as men took piles of rock and dust then transform them into the hardest material yet known the Amesbury archers knives would have given their bearer a high-status indeed like their owner a copy used to make them came from continental Europe though it remains possible that they were crafted on British soil but when it comes to the first signs of native copper extraction we must look not to Stonehenge and southern England but to Ireland here around 2400 BC people began to collect the seams of copper that occurred naturally in the rock formations of Ross Island kailani their methods were simple when a rock face containing a seam was discovered the miners would light a fire against it once the temperature had rendered the seam brittle they would break it apart with stone hammers then crushed the ore into a fine powder for smelting the actual casting seems to have taken place elsewhere as no examples of metal items have yet been recovered from Ross Island much as with Flint's before it the early sniffs of Britain seemed to have quickly separated the various tasks involved in metalworking extracting the precious material at fixed sites then exporting it to the wider area where it could be shaped according to need it certainly seemed to have been a successful formula as the copper extracted at Ross Island has been found in a sizable portion of the early metal items unearthed across Ireland and Western Britain the existence of a defined copper age in Britain is still a controversial one for many archaeologists if it did exist then it lasted only briefly by 2200 BC bronze had already made its first appearance on these shores this new metal held major advantages over both copper and Flint firstly it was less brittle making it unlikely to break when used for intense labour and secondly it was capable of holding its edge for longer making a more practical tool for cutting and chopping finally as we detailed earlier bronze carries a level of versatility in its crafting that flint simply couldn't match with these advantages it seems obvious that bronze usage would replace Flint as the go-to material and it did eventually but for the first centuries of the Bronze Age Flint's remains dominant in much of Britain this transitional period lasting from around 2,500 to 2,000 BC is commonly referred to as the late Stone Age early Bronze Age by archaeologists it wasn't until after 2,000 BC that foot work began to decline with bronze establishing its supremacy the reasons for this long adoption period are simple you see unlike copper bronze is an alloy made of two separate metals and one that occurs rarely in nature alongside the main elements of copper bronze making also requires the addition of small portions of either tin or arsenic in the case of the former most thoroughly bronzes would have contained about 1/10 tin which would have needed to be smelted independently and then added to the molten copper but compared to copper tin is a rare element usually only found as the Orcas iterate prior to bronzes arrival in Britain this all was mined in places like Eastern Germany or on the shores of Spain and northwestern France it is this rarity that may have restricted the initial expansion of homegrown bronze production into Britain luckily for its people this problem would soon be solved by the discovery of vast amounts of alluvial tin along the Cornish coastline after this it simply took time for this new metal to spread and be accepted most early copper and bronze axes scenes have been crafted with this acceptance in mind as they closely resemble the flint axes that people would have seen and used their whole lives so there we have it around 2000 BC bronze becomes the material choice for tool making in Britain but what exactly was it that the people of Britain were using it for so far in this episode we spoken plenty about bronze making but little about how society would have changed in the centuries before its adoption the simple answer is that it didn't at least not to the extent we will see in the millennium ahead many of the changes that begin in the late Stone Age continued in the centuries before full bronze adoption people continued to move away from the communal burials of places like West Kennet Long Barrow in favor of more individual burials the beaker culture appeared and burials started to include precious metals including ornaments and jewelry made from copper gold and polished jet in Ireland gold production took off being used to craft jewelry and elaborate collars known as lenola these collars are often inscribed with elaborate Sun symbols and may have been worn by early priests as part of existing lunar ceremonies much as with bronze these colors were exported around the British Isles appearing mostly in the West and southern parts of England with many being found at former Stone Age ritual centres that's because whilst the communal tombs of the Neolithic and for one out of use as burial grounds many of the ceremonies performed at these sites seemed to continue well into the Bronze Age other existing sites such as the circular hinges and ritual procession routes were only elaborated on in the centuries ahead in fact it's likely the most iconic Neolithic monument Stonehenge only began to resemble its current during this late period with the two great stone rings be hoisted into place somewhere around 2500 BC as grand as these developments sound they were likely limited to the elite elements of society for the average person life would have changed little in the early Bronze Age for them it would have remained short dominated by unceasing labor a lucky man might live to see his thirties whilst many women would have succumbed even earlier killed by complications of childbirth the population also remained low the archaeologist Christopher Smith once estimated that the entire population of the British Isles in the early Neolithic could have been as low as just five thousand people by comparison there are few independently verified estimates of the early Bronze Age population the best I could find was a rough guess from Frances priors book C henge in it he estimates that the entire population of Britain at this time was around a quarter of a million people along with perhaps another 50,000 in Ireland in more habitable areas this may have translated to as many as ten people per kilometer with smaller tribal territories consisting of a few thousand of the most of the people in these territories perhaps only one in a hundred received a full barrel burial with the majority being simply cremated or interred in less elaborate circumstances the whilst these burial patterns would remain relatively fixed in the coming millennium the life of ordinary people was about to change and it was all down to the magic of bronze to illustrate this let's jump forward a little to 1800 BC already we see great differences from only a few centuries prior the popular image of Bronze Age Britain is that of a dark shadowy place dominated by forests and swampland but this image is a false one in reality the arrival of the bronze axe sounded the death knell for much of Britain's ancient woodland large portions were soon to be deforested with trees being cleared out to free up new agriculture all out this deforestation also seems to have coincided with a dry warm period in britain's climate which would have been ideal for the growth of large grasslands for grazing cattle and sheep early pointed stick ploughing may also have come into its own around this time allowing for less labour intensive cultivation of cropland the combination of these improved farming techniques would have put an end to the days when every person in a tribe was forced to spend all hours of the day on food production with fewer bodies needed to support the population the people of Britain were suddenly given options they had never had before alongside these developments came a new expansive trade system dominated by items cast in bronze there have been few materials in world history that carried the significance of bronze as with flint before it its crafting would be refined over the centuries an example can be found in that most reliable tools the axe early bronze axes were carefully cast to resemble their flint predecessors but over the centuries they will develop flanges and ridges to help keep them more firmly within their handles eventually many axe heads would also be cast with a socket and loop to aid handle fixing this slow process of refinement continues throughout the Bronze Age with demand for bronze items only intensifying as the centuries go by soon people would go to remarkable ends to satisfy this demand and there's one place in particular where their efforts surpassed all of us we spoke before about early copper extraction at Ross Island and how it marks an important milestone in the development of British metalworking but the actual amount of copper mined in Ireland only comprises a small portion of copper production in Asia Britain in the case of Ross Ireland early mining efforts would have been limited to gathering the precious material from coastal rock formations but if we think of mining in a more modern sense with copper being extracted through a mile after mile of underground tunnel then it is not Ireland we need to look to but Wales located in the modern village of clan dog no the minds of the Great Orme stand as proof to the enterprise of our ancestors here the entrance is still visible as a great rent in the landscape beneath it archaeologists have now excavated over seven miles of Bronze Age tunnels the deepest of which cut down for over 70 metres solid limestone as Neil all of the points out in his book a history of ancient Britain some of these areas are wide enough for a full grown man to stand upright but the deeper tunnels are a warren of cramped costs Ruffo big passageways in places these lower shafts are barely half a meter in width which will only by the slightest of men or perhaps by women and children deep in these depths literally by simple candles and tortures people would have spent their lives digging through rock searching for veins of copper using tools of stone antler or bone merely supplying these tools would have been a significant undertaking in itself as over 30,000 of them have since been found in the parts of the tunnels excavators so far some of these may simply have been discarded due to wear and tear whilst others could have been left as offerings much as they were in earlier Flint mines indeed mill entering these tunnels may have been considered a significant event if only because of the ever-present risk of cave-ins and collapse Great Orme remains the largest ancient copper mine ever discovered compared to other copper mines in Britain it's heydays came late with peat mining occurring between 1600 and 1200 BC by that time mines in places such as Ireland or Western Europe seem to have been abandoned activity at great or continued on from much of the Bronze Age and it is estimated that more than 2,000 tons of copper were harvested from within its depths now this total was spread out over many centuries and signs of work at great on persist as late as the Iron Age even so the scale of this production remains a testament to centuries of claustrophobic labour the copper extracted at great all was exported throughout the rest of Britain and may have been the primary supply of the material throughout the remainder of Europe in Prior episodes of this series we spoken about migrations of both people and technology across the channel into Britain but so far we've said a little of the craft that would have been news to make these crossings the earliest journeys to Britain were likely made using simple rafts and hollowed-out log boats these methods date back to the Neolithic at least an evidence of shipyards potentially dating back to the Mesa lithic have been found both on Alton II and the Isle of Wight these simple approaches for navigating the waterways of Britain remained in use for millennia but from 2000 BC onwards the gradual growth in trade routes along with an increased demand for bronze on both sides of the channel required vessels of a far more substantial nature the first known examples of these larger craft were found on the banks of the River Humber near the village of north therapy here the remains of free stone plank vessels were discovered between the late 30s and the mid-60s each of which date back to the early Bronze Age from the remains of these ships it is estimated that it may have measured around 16 metres in length and contained enough room within 420 people such size was only achieved for a process of meticulous construction lacking the nails of later societies their builders instead would have started by building an outer skin of carefully shaped and layered planks in the case of the Farabee vessels these were then lashed into place using flexible new branches this outer skin would then have been fortified with the addition of internal frame when completed it seems these ships would have been piloted my oars alone there's no sewn plank vessel has yet been found equipped for a mass due to the primitive state of archaeology at the time the ferry boats had to be cut into smaller sections to allow their removal perhaps due to this these vessels have been overshadowed in modern times by another find dating from around the middle of the sixteenth century BC the Dover boat as it has come to be known was discovered in 1992 along the banks of the river dawa archaeological advances allowed more of the vessel to be preserved and a 10 meter section of the boat perhaps 2/3 of its total length can now be found on display at Dover Museum in its construction the Dover boat closely resembles the sewn plank style of the therapy vessels though it is wider perhaps telefon more room for precious cargo but were these vessels capable of crossing the channel simply put yes modern reconstruction have now confirmed that some point vessels of this type would indeed have been capable of channel hopping though every journey would have been perilous and thanks to holes of metalwork found in the seas along the coast of dover and devon we are also certain that ships of this kind recurring bronze into an ounce of britain on a mass scale by 1500 BC Britain was firmly in the middle Bronze Age a millennium had now passed since the beaker people first set foot on these shores and society had changed greatly in the time between there were now roughly half a million people living in Britain unlike their ancestors who would have been used to moving regularly between sites these people had now become accustomed to being tied to specific tracts of land and whilst there is plenty of evidence for settlements in Britain before now it is around the middle Bronze Age they start to appear more regularly across the countryside these new villages or Hamlet's would have been comprised of a rough grouping of field systems and dwellings with the most common buildings being communal round houses built from simple wooden frames and with walls made from wattle and daub their interiors would in turn have been partitioned with specific areas set aside for chores and privacy the families at twelve within may have spent their entire adult lives within just one or two sets of walls only leaving their childhood homes to start families of their own from the layout of field systems around these villages there neatly defined boundaries we can also see that society was becoming more competitive with an emphasis on personal rather than communal ownership and as precious as they were bronze items would have been far from an unusual sight in these villages whilst there is some evidence of a tribal elite who may have controlled stockpiles of the precious material the average tribesman may still have been in possession at least one bronze item perhaps a sword or a spear point this settled lifestyle also seems to have sparked major changes in the boys systems of the time we discussed before how the early Bronze Age saw a level continuity pre-existing spiritual centers but after 1700 BC people start to move away from these forms of worship towards new rituals associated with lakes rivers and other sources of running water what exactly sparked this change in fort remains debated amongst archaeologists one theory is that water came to hold much of the symbolism of the prior Stone Age science with the surface of lakes and rivers acting as a portal between the worlds of the living and the dead an alternative hypothesis is that the Weber in Britain was becoming wetter as the Bronze Age progressed and that people began to associate certain places with gods or spirits of rainfall that might be appease yet another theory focuses more on the role of these rivers and streams as trade highways with offerings being made to bestow good luck upon potentially dangerous voyages whatever the cause the appearance of these new belief systems spelled the end for the monuments of old slowly hinges across Britain began to be abandoned and in time even the greatest of our number would be forgotten by 1600 BC work at Stonehenge begins to fizzle out its final renovations never to be completed by the late bronze age the site lies silent surrounded by neat and orderly filled systems water offerings would remain common in Britain a centuries there is evidence that offerings were still being given to sites as late as anglo-saxon times indeed in modern Britain offerings are still given to the waters today in the form of coins thrown into wells and fountains in order to bring good luck back around 1500 BC the offerings people were making would have been far more precious in the various hordes that have been dredged out of rivers across Britain we find tools weaponry and jewelry much of it made from bronze on first glance these offerings could be mistaken as a form of storage with accumulated hordes acting as a tribes hidden store of precious items but there are big problems with this theory often these hordes were discarded in places that would have made their retrieval extremely difficult such as on the edges of bog land or fens moreover many of these items seem to have been broken beforehand it is not unusual to find a bronze rapier snapped into or a spearhead with signs of partial melting with this in mind it might seem that these offerings are little more than a form of early waste disposal but this theory also has problems it now seems that many of the items in whores found places such as flag fen in Peterborough all along the banks of the Thames River were deliberately broken before being placed into the water this behavior is particularly puzzling as bronze is recyclable with broken items simply needing to be melted down and cast a new clearly something else was at work here the scale of these offerings increases as we reach the later Bronze Age and around the same time settlement in Britain starts to intensify from around 1500 BC onwards people start to lay out neatly portion filled systems across Britain these activities were most developed in the southeastern portions of England around the Thames Valley but there are still plenty of other areas where similar enclosure methods can be observed in flat fen extensive field systems begin to appear designed to Rio vast amounts of cattle the Wessex downs were similarly covered in these field systems as were parts of Devon ship it is now thought that similar field systems would have covered much of Britain or even hills and moorland being neatly portioned up using earthworks and ditches sadly many of these fields have long since been swept away by modern agricultural work however there are still a few places where they can be seen today perhaps the best preserved examples are the Reeves of Dartmoor in modern Devon here the abandoned moorland is criss crossed by what looked like natural rock formations in reality these are the remains of Bronze Age walls set down over free millenia ago the sheer scale these earthworks is impressive in itself but what is also interesting is just how developed these field systems had already become let's take the fields at flack fen for example here people laid out portions of Farmer stretching away at right-angles from the fan each portion was separated by a combination of ditches and earth and banks upon which form bushes would have been planted to serve as natural barriers gates would have also been placed at the corners of each field allowing their owners to follow animals into and out of the fields using a series of drove ways at first people would have driven their herds of cattle and sheep along these channels on foot then around 1300 BC a new form of transportation seems to emerge the earliest known example of this was also found at flag fen here in the 1990s the partial remains of a wooden wheel were unearthed to the surprise of many archaeologists it was attached to an axle which had once in turn been mounted on a simple wooden cans this cart would have been alight ox-drawn affair designed to cross the moist finland without getting bogged down a more complete example of these wheels has also been found at nearby must farm quarry dating from around 1000 BC you might think that these early wheels would have been little more than crude circles of wood but in reality they were made from a sophisticated combination of alder oak and ash and by the time of the must farm wheel harnesses designed for horses are also showing up in the archaeological record these horse-drawn carts are ones like them remain in news from millennia still occasionally being seen on the roads of modern Britain they would also evolve along the way becoming the famous carriages and chariots of iron age britain these complex enclosures and the methods used to tend them are a snapshot of the land that Britain would soon become but in many places they simply wouldn't last as we reach the end of the second millennium BC something is amiss in Britain the climate once dry and warm is beginning to deteriorate in the centuries ahead Britain will gradually become a colder place where a combination of increased rainfall and decreased evaporation have left much of the soil waterlog these changes would have in turn led to the growth of peat and blanket bog in low-lying areas along with increased soil runoff in the deforested uplands this loss of fertile soil was spelled the doom of many of these complex field systems gradually the population of Britain would have been forced down into the valleys and inland as a rise in sea levels also claimed large portions of land around the coast of Britain from 1200 BC onwards these new weather conditions would persist throughout the remainder of the Bronze Age only abating well into the iron age this changing climate had major implications for societal life in Britain press together in the productive lowlands individuals and tribal groups alike may suddenly have had to define new boundaries within which to operate this added pressure on remaining farmland would also change the priorities of Bronze Age societies food production would suddenly have become paramount as with the preservation a fertile land in the centuries have to arrive all these climatic changes these priorities increase in the began to influence the belief systems around which these societies would have revolved for perhaps the best example of this let's return to flag FEM where a remarkable wooden structure was discovered in the early 1980s by archaeologist Francis Pryor the causeway at Flag fen stretches across a kilometer of Finland connecting the island of Navi to the dryland shore built in several phases between the 14th and a ninth centuries BC this structure consists of approximately 60,000 wooden stakes driven deep into the fan in places the causeway is up to 7 meters in width more than enough to allow our large amount of foot traffic both to and from the island about two-thirds the way along the causeway system man-made island built through a slow accumulation of wooden pilings much as with Stonehenge before it building materials seem to have been brought to this site from far away including vast amounts of non-native wood so why was this structure built in truth wooden cosway's were nothing new in Britain having been found in Iowa since the dawn of the Bronze Age at first glance there is something of a practical element to the causeway at flack FEM the surrounding Fenland would have been rich in natural resources such as water fowl fish eels and reeds to make vanch however actual foot travel would only have been possible on one side the causeway which consisted of a long foundation made by placing over 200,000 separate pieces of wood into the Fen then pegging them into place the other side the one consisting of the driven stakes is more mysterious here the stakes almost seem to resemble a defensive structure pointing northwards across the fens in a porcupine like fashion vast accumulations of offerings were also found in the waters around the wooden island including perhaps free thousand carefully placed bronze items interestingly these items are almost always found on the south side of the posts and it is here that the skeletons of dogs have also been unearthed the fines even include a full adult human skeleton though one too badly damaged to determine its gender many archeologists including Francis Pryor himself now interpret this causeway along with others in Britain as a reaction to the increasingly damp conditions of the later Bronze Age by building this defensive causeway the people of flack fen may have been attempting to prevent further encroachment of the marshlands upon their precious field systems to the south this physical barrier would have acted in a symbolic sense pushing against the wilderness to the north or this effects being enhanced by offerings of precious items and sacrifices to the gods in addition to the religious elements of flag fen the offerings themselves may have been used to signify prestige with individuals competing to discard the most ostentatious items it's important to emphasize that whilst bronze was still important to these societies by now this grip was beginning to weaken around this time native bronze production already seems to have slowed in favour of recycling older materials along with foreign imports over the next couple of centuries the rate at which these items were discarded would increase then after 800 BC something dramatic seems to happen all over Britain and in some areas of continental Europe large hordes of untouched bronze items start to appear known as the Flynn Valor period after a cache found in Wales many of these holds contain high prestige items such as elegant razors and princely cauldrons carefully hammered out of layered bronze plates 600 BC many of these whores also begin to include bronze items containing an excessive proportion of tin which would have rendered the metal too brittle for practical work indeed many of these carefully made items seem to have been buried on as soon as they were finished the reasons behind this activity are still something of a mystery we do know that around the same time these items were buried the total amount of bronze in Britain seems to have been falling this was likely due to the emergence of new states in the Mediterranean where the demand for bronze would have caused it to slowly drain out of northwestern Europe combined with the poor climate this may have caused the collapse of the former bronze trade networks and ice low drift away from its use as an everyday material moreover around this time a new metal makes his first arrival on the shores of Britain first known examples were found alongside the bronze items at Flint our consisting of a sword spearhead and sickle in their crafting they still resembled their bronze precursors but the material they were made of was radically different iron had arrived compared to its precursor iron is stronger more elastic and easier to repair and unlike bronze which relied on access to precious copper and tin iron was easy to find in many areas merely plowing a new field would have been enough to generate workable quantities of hematite or however when it came to smelting they saw there was a problem the melting point of iron at around 1500 degrees centigrade is much higher than that of copper and far beyond the temperatures that a simple clay furnace would have been able to achieve instead of using the casting process that bronze Smith's would have been familiar with early iron Smith's would have relied on heating the ore to the point where it would have clumped together in a rough solid this solid would have then been hammered in an effort to remove impurities then reheated and hammered again this arduous process would have had to be repeated many many times until a relatively pure metal could be produced even then casting would have been impossible with the technology of the time and Smith's would have instead spent many hours carefully beating the white-hot metal into useable objects as we've bronzed before it the transition to iron took many centuries to complete despite the presence of these early iron items at Flynn Bower it wasn't until around the 5th and 4th centuries BC the iron items became commonplace in Britain even then iron never seems to have attained the ritual importance of bronze many archaeologists including Barry Cunliffe Francis Pryor and former English heritage director David miles have theorized that the material was simply too common for it to be considered precious in the way that bronze had once been moreover the dwindling amounts of bronze in Britain between the 10th and the 5th centuries BC may have forced ritual behaviour to evolve in the absence of metal the results of all this was a change in the way that the prestige of a particular tribe or person was measured instead of Matt's offerings of precious bronze items power seems have become tied to a different type of display one that revolved around the staging of fats communal feasts the presence of large middens dating from the early first millennium BC like the one found at East choosin dairy in Wiltshire are often cited as evidence of these displays here a mound is still visible measuring up to 8 feet high in places comprising of layers of cattle and sheep bones along with pottery tools and copious amounts of animal dung the four mound stretches over an area of a hundred and forty meters this size is certainly remarkable given that it was accumulated with it only a few years of the early iron age similar middens and mounds have been found all over Britain including at flag fan and across the sea in Ireland in addition to their prestige boosting nature these feasts may also have represented new ways to honor the gods and the ancestors on a more practical note they may also have served to mark out tribal boundaries in an increasingly crowded world throughout the Iron Age society would undergo a great deal of change at first life remained similar to that of the Late Bronze Age then after 600 BC the climate in Britain would start to improve this enhanced environment combined with the emergence of effective iron farm tools would boost the agricultural capabilities of the people of Britain around 500 BC the population starts to expand rapidly and soon Britain would be home to millions in the centuries after this we start to see regional differences appear as the country's divided up into realms ruled over by petty chieftains and kings in many parts of the country fortified settlements start to appear including a new type of structure that would soon dominate much of southern England and Wales around 600 BC the first of these Hill faults would be erected and from them petty kings would dominate the land until the arrival of the Romans in the first century AD we'll look at these developments and more next time but before we end today let's jump forwards one last time to the late 4th century BC don't worry we'll check back in on Celtic Britain next time today however I want to tell you a story one that is rarely mentioned in modern histories this is the story of how Britain got its name for this we have one person to thank well a few the first was perhaps the first literate visitor to the British Isles his name was buffet Asst he was born around 350 BC in a Greek colony on the southern coast of France around 325 BC he took a voyage to Britain journeying iver around Spain and at the coast of gore or taking a more direct overland route he first landed in Colma known then to the residence as balerion there he learned that the island's name was Albion and that its locals were referred to as the prett Annie or the prett any after completing his navigations which he claimed included a circumnavigation of the entirety of Britain he returned home here he did the same as any enterprising Greek of the time he wrote a book sadly no copy of the faces book on the ocean has survived to modern times what remains of his work can only be glimpsed at in excerpts contained in later authors writings amongst whom his findings were controversial the most famous of these sources are the works of two other Greek writers the earlier of the two Diodorus of Sicily refers to Britain in his bibliotheca historica under the name of Prytania this piece spelling may well have remain the same if it wasn't for the second writer his name was Strabo author of the geography a' in the first book of his work he briefly discusses buffets his reports of Britannia however in his work the P is replaced this simple change like with the result of an error violator scribe gave our Island the name it is has held ever since Britannia Britain next time on a history of Britain the iron age rolls on leaving an increasingly prosperous nation behind it by the first century BC Britain is separated into petty kingdoms United only by a shared family of cultures and languages but all of this is about to change far to the south a foreign army arrives in Britain for the first time at its head stands Julius Caesar the Conqueror of God you

Channel: The Histocrat

Views: 337,724

Rating: 4.8512673 out of 5

Keywords: Humans, britain, ancient, england, history of, history, scotland, stone age, neolithic, mesolithic, bronze age, iron age, celts, stonehenge, farming, history series, amesbury archer, newgrange, barrow, histocrat, the histocrat, Ice Age, Burial, Tribal, Primitive, Horse, wheel, plough, handaxe, tool making

Id: iVqjKpTvpM8

Length: 54min 47sec (3287 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 30 2019