Iron Age Britain

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[Music] hi i'm will flower and when i'm not studying archaeology i'm living archaeology today i'm at cass's antalese iron age village in west wales and i'm going to show you some iron age skills come on cassith hensley's iron age reconstructed fort in pembrokeshire wets wales it's one of the most special places simply because all of the buildings you see are built in situ they're built within the exact post holes of the original buildings so welcome to my house in the iron age now the fire probably was only allowed to go out on holy days so if we don't have a flint striker to create the spark and we don't have matches and we don't have modern zippo lighters and all that kind of stuff what was being used to create the spark well i have the answer these four simple pieces of wood are called a bow drill it's the bow drill using basic physics hard wood against the soft wood rotated with friction that gives you a sawdust in one of the little grooves the sawdust heats up becomes charcoal black and eventually the temperature is sufficient to create an ember let's have a go do you see the smoke tell me you see the smoke can you see the charcoal there okay we have fire so from the fire bow the first ember onto the tinder the tinder onto your pre-planned little kindling and then from the kindling to larger logs now we have flame we can cook now in the iron age of course there were no such things as potato pasta well maybe in rome no such things as rice or quinoa but you did need your carbohydrates for energy that leaves us with one thing and that is bread and here we have a rotary corn two stones two heavy stones one on top of the other the whole idea is that the weight of the stone grinds the corn and gives you flour now there's a hole in the top of the rotary coin and that's where you put the wheat germ okay and then comes real housework now what you can see already is flour still a bit gritty but when we look at iron age bodies and we study their teeth we see a lot of hardware and certainly that comes from the bread that they get with little bits of grit in it now before we make the bread come with me and i'll show you how we made iron age clothing let's check out those iron age sheep so a sheep iron age sheep the zoe sheep they've got a lot of lanolin in their fleece that means it's a lot of natural oil if you're going to make a cloak and you want it to be waterproof you want it to repel water you're going to make it from so a sheep fleece it's going to be lanolin rich when water hits it it runs off it doesn't soak you and that makes it far more comfortable to be as warm as toast in the iron age cute eh so the big question is of course how do we get the wool from the sheep and make it into something i can wear well this part is called sheep to shawl and i'm going to show you how we do it come on so the question is how do we get one of these and make it into something as nice warm and luxurious as this cloak so what we've got here is raw unwashed sheepskin it doesn't look like something to wear yet does it first job you have to do is clean it you do that by placing it inside a cauldron heating it up slowly from cold water to hot on an open fire don't boil it and then once it gets hot you're going to add some soap you're going to stir it and then let it cool down and all of the dirt is going to rise to the top as a scum you're also going to get a lot of lanolin on the top and you can use that for a number of things you can reintroduce it to the wool later or you can use it as a by-product to make some soap yes a kelty convention soap we'll touch on that later so once you've washed the wool in the cauldron you don't want it to turn to felt so it's important to let it go down to cold again you're going to take it out pull any remaining little bits of straw off it and you're left with this this is clean pure wool what you do now is you're going to probably give it to the children of the village or your house you're going to make them turn it into nice little white cotton wool clouds like this see that what you're doing is you're breaking down the fibers by breaking down the fibers you're ready for the next step the next step is turning this into thread and it's the thread that was done on the drop spindle so i have my clean cotton wool cloud i've broken down the fibers i'm going to add it to the end of the fibers using spit spit bonds the fibers brings it together and then by twisting it together we're able to use a drop spindle the drop spindle is gravity fed you spin let go and while it's spinning downwards you use both hands to draw out the thread you see that now this is an occupation that could have been done any time of the year but was most probably done during the winter in my opinion the reason for that is it's more important for you to be able to feel the thread between your fingers rather than see it so in a dark round house during long winter months it's not quite as important as if you're weaving when you're weaving then you need daylight so by drop spinning with the drop spin you're able to produce your first thread now this is the thread that's going to be refined eventually dyed a different color and then woven on a loom the warp weighted loom is predominant in the iron age and i have an example of it in the house i'll show you now people seem to think that in the iron age they didn't have color and if they did have color it was very dark and foreboding but what i have here is some examples of naturally dyed wool the first one we see is woad this blue is an indigo this is your color of wood look how bright it is this next one is a mixture of indigo and weld weld is yellow but look at this green beautiful isn't it then we have of course the well-known madder root that gives us a nice salmon pink and then weld of course by itself so just look at those colors popping out now we really don't know whether everybody walks around wearing bright colors definitely colors but here's some natural colors as well which are earth tones so you can imagine that a majority of the population would have worn some form of color like this if not the bright colors we don't know whether you have to be rich to have lots and lots of bright colors in your weave because of course you'd have to have a dire specialist job you'd have to have text are made specifically for you and probably cut to fit you so perhaps the more noble you were the richer you were in the iron age life perhaps the more color you could afford to wear perhaps a more complicated the plaid pattern that you would wear perhaps the more fitted your clothes would be we just don't know but it makes sense now this is an iron age warp weighted lume now we know that because along the bottom we see loom weights and we find lots of those on iron age sites now it takes a long long time to string a loom and it takes a long long time to start to weave a set plaid or design that perhaps is identifiable to your tribe we just don't know whether the iron age people were identifiable as a tribe through the weave of their cloth the colour choices of their cloth or whether it was a case of simply the person who hung the loom did the looms in the village and thus all of the looms produced the same style of textile it's one of the great unanswered questions of iron age britain so these earth tones the madder color is probably typical of what the majority of people wore but if you were a nobleman or a noble woman and you could afford the color hypothesis of course then madder root all of the different greens but look at the weave how complicated this weave was even in the solid colours you've got the herringbone now when you've lived in the iron age for any length of time you start to realize just how drab it is lots of dark earth usually a gray sky mud huts gets kind of depressing after a while now all the ancient writers tell us that the celts used to love bright colours and it's only when you've lived on a site like this for any length of time you start to realize that when you see a bright color it actually has a positive effect on your mood so today i'm going to show you how to make iron age paint so we can paint our houses paint our front doors and the warriors can paint their shields so let's go and have a look so one of the main ingredients that you're going to need if you're going to make iron age paint is chalk you're also going to need some linseed oil now the linseed oil is a byproduct of flax production so when you look at a crop of flax you look at the little seeds on the top that's where you get the linseed oil from you also need honey and he's a good binding agent for the paint so what i have here is a sample of four pigments of iron ore the ore that comes from the wall of the cave of the mine that you're mining the stuff in and it's different consistencies so in other words some of it you can go up to the wall of the mine and actually get rub it off with your finger yeah and you're left with the ochre but others you need to go in with a chisel and a hammer and actually hammer it away so i've got four different ochres here so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to break up the chalk and make it into a powder the chalk is going to be the base for the paint it's not long before you realize any form of work in the iron age means that it's usually hard physical work very time consuming work and there's no quick and easy fixes now i've been crushing this for quite a while but as you can see it's still quite coarse we need to break it down until it's a fine powder so after lots of hard work i'm left with a fine powder of chalk it's time for me to mix in the ochre into the chalk so i've just added the ochre and here's the second one now on the chalk you can see the two distinct colors and now it's time to mix them in and now it's time to add the linseed oil so so the last ingredient that we're going to add is honey honey's a bit of a binding agent not too much but just enough to bring it all together so we've made the iron age paint what are we going to paint this is a british iron age shield made from three layers of ash that are glued together in alternate grain to give it strength like modern plywood i've covered it on the front and the back with linen the linen acts like a safety measure it bonds to the wood and should anything penetrate the shield a spear an arrow you're not going to get splinters in your eyes okay it's edged with veg tanned leather naturally tanned leather and it has a wooden hard spine on the front to give the shield the strength that it needs when you look at the deal grave warrior shield or the edging of it that's been found and you can now see in the british museum so he's looking at five millimeters thickness on the shield lots of people think that the iron age shields were big thick doors to hide behind but actually it's a weapon in itself i can hold it like this so if anyone throws anything at me i can deflect okay i can push someone over with it i can push away with it i can punch with it i can use the edge in the face in the feet in the stomach it's a weapon in itself if you give this to a 18 19 year old modern infantryman and let him play with it for half an hour i'm sure he'll figure out how to use it in ways that we can't imagine but the young iron age warriors would have known so we've got an iron age shield let's paint it with iron age paint [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you know until recently the vision of the iron age by archaeologists has always been based on tribes fighting tribes the king of the hill fort in competition with the other king of the other hill fort but in my opinion commerce seems to be the one vehicle that is shot through the whole of society commerce eventually brings rome to britain for our wheat grain our hunting dogs our tin our gold but before the romans the commerce is still there stretching back arguably as far as the copper age maybe as far as desire itself and i can't help feeling that perhaps the idea of warfare is only a ritualistic vehicle a mechanism for society that is a needed part of the society but it's not the whole story it's commerce it's one chieftain in one roundhouse one village like this being able to show he's not just king of his own hill but he's able to trade with the mediterranean countries he's able to import red wine he's able to import coral and turquoise as many many other things when you look at the welling garden city grave that is now on show in the british museum you'll find very high status goods of no doubt a chieftain himself perhaps even casavalonis king of the cat of alona but interestingly enough if you look at those grave goods very carefully there's no weaponry it's a bit odd isn't it for an iron age society an iron age chieftain with no weapons whoever's buried in that grave is living the high life and he enjoys it and he can only do that in a stable society in a stable landscape a stable heartland and tribe land and using commerce now it's not until you wear the clothes and eat the food and live in the houses for an extended amount of time that things that you can't learn in the classroom or on the site come to you now i've learned two things about iron age and iron age houses since i've been doing this today we know that the celts like to wear lots of jewelry lots of bling bronze silver gold jewelry while i've been doing something as simple as lighting the fire today it's just got in the way i just want to take it off it's not helpful it slides down your arm it slides around your neck it's uncomfortable so what does that tell us perhaps that tells us that the people who did the hard labor and the menial tasks like lining the fire didn't wear jewelry right the other thing that it's told me is that we have a lot of smoke here now people seem to think that there's a hole in the middle of the roof now in the 1960s when these houses were being built again for the first time it was tried with a hole in the roof but unfortunately what happened was we had a through draft from the open doors taking sparks up into the roof through the through draft houses burnt down so by putting a top cone on the roof in other words enclosing the roof what we're doing is we're making pretty much a dead end for the smoke but having built them with the top cone having lit fires in them having lived in them for a while you suddenly start to realize that actually it's a very clever design the smoke will go up into the top cone and it's going to fill the top cone eventually once the fire gets going and two things are going to happen it's going to fill with smoke so there's no oxygen which means any sparks going up into the roof space will not live they'll be put out because there's no oxygen so it's safe the other thing you can do of course is you can put meat fish cheese anything like that up into the rafters and you can smoke them so we don't know if they had smoke houses specifically or whether you smoked your own stuff at home it keeps the house free from bug infestations it constantly percolates out through the thatch and keeps it dry preserves the thatch it's a very clever design may interest you to know that a lot of uh modern thoughts about the celts show us with big iron cauldrons in the roundhouses ready to cook large suppers for many champions and warriors however archaeologically it's not a regular occurrence what we think is happening to the majority of people in the iron age is they're simply cooking with earthenware pottery because pottery is the one thing that we do find on archaeological sites lots of it especially in iron age fields you can see that this iron age pot is blackened from the fire you can do so much with these filling it with water and putting it on the edge of the hot embers later on when the fire's died down you can actually get it to a temperature to boil the water that means you can boil your vegetables you can boil meat joints of meat anything that you can boil you can cook in here the trick is to use a damp rag and keep turning it every 20 minutes every 10 minutes every five minutes just keep an eye on it you soon get an idea some pottery is better than others some pottery you can put directly onto the fire and it's made from such a good clay with good grit in it that it actually glows the bottom will glow uh red hot like a blacksmith's iron out of the forge you can cook in these pots so a lot of people don't realize that the cauldron is certainly in my opinion anyway the tool of uh or perhaps a status symbol of somebody who's well to do we don't need pottery dear because we've got some iron wear now do you remember me mentioning the soap earlier with the sheepskin lanolin it's a by-product well here i have some soap it's made from goat's milk honey and lanolin perfectly capable use for washing your hands the romans thought we were us brits quite barbaric for having soap you can also make it with lye ash from the fire and landline and lard but i really didn't fancy that so i'm just gonna wash my hands before i make some bread and what i'm using here is chamoy leather really soft leather it's perfect for use in an iron age village so you remember when we used the rotary coin earlier and we made the flour now it's time to make the iron age bread they didn't have yeast in the iron age it was naturally occurring if at all so they tend to be quite flat breads unrisen we don't have unfortunately an iron age oven in here so i can't show you how to bake in the oven but what i can do is show you how to make the bread and then i have some that i prepared earlier to show you the finished article so i have a mixing bowl i have my flour it's about two and a half cups i have a very rare commodity and expensive commodity in the iron age salt wars were fought for this roman soldiers were paid as part of their salary in this give it a mix this is great to do at home about 220 on your oven for about 15 minutes middle of the oven so now we're going to add the water [Music] okay what i'm going to do now is i'm going to press them out put some air into it so we need it in the hands it's great to do and when you've needed enough you're going to very quickly before your hands get too hot make it into just a little bite-sized piece of bread like that so we've made our little iron age loaf we've made lots and lots of them and i like to think that this was one of the last jobs that you did just before you sat down to eat so that you had nice warm bread here's some i made earlier whole wheat flour salt water lukewarm put it in your oven middle of the shelf 220 about 15 minutes iron age bread you can see it's quite flat can't you but it works so good i'm gonna sit by the fire now and eat some yakida good health now inside this building this is the granary building the granaries we find lots of evidence for on iron age sites we suppose the granaries we really have no other explanation for them but they do make sense you do need somewhere to store your corn your wheat any of your dry thatch just to keep it dry away from rodents there were no rats of course in the iron age we believe they came over with the romans but certainly mice certainly squirrels and all that kind of stuff you don't want it to be eating any of your food any of your seed stock and so this is where you'd have stored things the building itself and the floor there's lots of gaps you can see the daylight through and that's actually typical and meant to be simply because we want the airflow to go through but we want to keep animals out thanks for joining me today on my iron age journey i hope that some of the information has been interesting for you and if you've enjoyed this today please subscribe click the like button and hit that notification bell in the future i'm going to be developing this site and i'd like to take you with me so that was the iron age not dissimilar to our age certainly the people were the same hard days of labor toil hard work hard physical effort just to do things like make bread to live but i'm certain that in these central hearths in these great houses at the end of each day our ancestors would have met together talked together sung together made each other laugh and told jokes together and no doubt probably drank together so in honor of the ancestors and in honour of the iron age [Music] cheers [Music] you
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Channel: Will Llawerch
Views: 9,487
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Keywords: #IronAgeGuru, #Iron Age Britain, #The Celts, #British Prehistory, #WillLlawerch, Boudicca, Roundhouse, Soay Sheep, iron Ore, Stone Age, Bronze Age, Rome, Roman Empire, Hallstatt, La Tene, #Time Team, #KS2 History, #KS3 History, #Celtic Warriors, #Pinterest, Danebury, #Ancient Technology, #Ancient Skills
Id: rVzHqn4Xiog
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Length: 33min 7sec (1987 seconds)
Published: Wed Aug 05 2020
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