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
