Iron Age Communities in Britain by Barry Cunliffe

Using mortuary data from sixty sites in southern Britain, it demonstrates how, at the beginning of the Late Iron Age, there was an increased emphasis on individual identity. This paper examines the archaeological evidence which exists for the increased visibility of the individual in Late Iron Age (c.150 B.C.E-43 C.E.) southern Britain, in contrast to the preceding Middle Iron Age (c.500/450-150 B.C.E).

Britain was firmly embedded in the wider European Iron Age.

When we consider a broader range of Iron Age practices, connections between the communities either side of the Channel and North Sea become more evident. This skews our perspective towards particular kinds of interactions. The impression of limited cross-Channel contact through most of the Iron Age comes from a narrow focus on the evidence of portable material culture, and certain kinds of ‘high-status’ artefacts in particular. I will argue here that this narrative is misleading. This presaged the Roman conquest which brought (southern) Britain into a new European system. Contacts are thought to have remained fairly limited up until the last two centuries of the pre-Roman Iron Age, when there was a resurgence of cross-Channel ‘trade’. The dominant narrative holds that the beginning of the Iron Age was marked by a sharp decline in contacts between Britain and the near Continent, with the breakdown of the long-distance networks of metal exchange that had been so important during the Bronze Age. Britain has long had a marginal status in the study of the European Iron Age.

Iron Age Communities in Britain by Barry Cunliffe