< Main Page Chapter 11 After 700BCE There were several prehistoric periods in Britain when economic links with the lands south of the English Channel were important, one at the beginning of the Iron Age and the other at the end when we, like the people on the Continent, began to use coins and by the time of Caesar there were `kings' in Britain whom he named and acknowledged. Before saying anything more about the Iron Age, a word about the `Celts'. The word was first used by the Greeks to describe the (to their minds) uncultured people to the north of their borders and used later by the Romans to describe the same (?) people in central Europe and north of the Alps. For a long time British archaeologists thought that the Celts migrated to the British Isles during the Iron Age, one of the series of `invasions' that were used to account for innovations like metallurgy in this country, an idea that leaves no scope for the British themselves to be anything more than dull, passive peasant recipients of technological `goodies' from abroad. Recently however, genetic studies in western Britain amongst those who pride themselves on being descended from these Celts have shown that they have no genetic similarity with people in central Europe today who presumably are the real descendents of the Celts, if there was such an ethnic grouping. Added to that there have been other unsettling indicators in the last few years like the discovery that the `Celtic art'- style Uffington White Horse belongs to the Bronze Age and not the Iron Age. Such evidence suggests strongly that all people in the British Isles today are more or less British including those who live in England who, however, suffered a certain `mongrelisation' from the migration of a few Saxons and a greater number of Danes in the post-Roman period. Despite this, one can use the term `Celtic' to describe the art and the religion of the period since ii has become customary and convenient despite its inaccuracy Hillforts (Hogg) began to proliferate in Britain during the sixth century. We presume they were built by chieftains to establish their authority in a visible fashion. Earlier hillforts may well have been copied from European sites like Mont Lassois and the Heuneberg which were created as much as status symbols as for defence. Their banks are revetted with timber and vertically framed and in effect were timber boxes filled with the material dug out of the ditches. This gave them an architectural appearance so that they looked more like walls than ramparts. Gateways were similarly treated. An early hillfort built in this way is at Ivinghoe in Buckinghamshire. In the west of Britain stone could be used for revetment as at Old Oswestry in Shropshire. Timber framing for revetment and timber beams for interior reinforcement continued to be used for many hundreds of years but seems to have become less elaborate with time and this may be be due to a shortage of suitable timber. In the west, stone for revetment continued in fashion throughout the Iron Age and in many cases the ramparts were built entirely in stone with no ditches because of the difficulty of digging ditches in the stony ground. An example of a hillfort that, unlike the overwhelming majority, has been exhaustively (but not completely) investigated is Danebury in Hampshire (Cunliffe) The sequence of events on the chalk hill-top in Hampshire has been established. It starts in the fifth century BC with the first defences consisting of a rampart of chalk and soil quarried from an external ditch. At the front of the rampart a box construction of timber was used to give the external face the vertical appearance. Along the top was a patrol walk that may have continued across the entrances on timber bridges. Two entrances were simple gaps in the rampart with single gates that gave access to the five-hectare interior from opposite sides. Danebury's interior contained a large number of settings of four postholes arranged in squares that are thought to have been the foundations of granaries with raised floors that held the grain off the ground and allowed air to pass beneath to keep it well-ventilated. This might suggest that one of the functions of the early hillfort in some areas was to provide a secure store for the community's grain. Was there grain-rustling at the time? Similar `four-posters' have been discovered at Ivinghoe Beacon, at Grimthorpe in Yorkshire and close by Danebury at Balksbury hillfort. By the fourth and third centuries BCE significant changes had occurred in the use of the fort. A roadway running between the two gates divided the interior into two parts. On the north side a large area was set aside for the digging of storage pits for grain while to the south were several roadways lined with rows of `fourposter' and `sixposter' granaries. Storage pits were dug between the rows. Beyond the roadways and also laid out parallel to the rampart were circular houses perhaps built there to gain shelter from the wind. Most of the round houses were some 6.5m in diameter with wattle-and-daub walls and conical roofs probably covered with thatch. Some had porches with stout doors and frames. Inside some houses were hearths and ovens and some had storage pits dug into their floors. On the site, the most common feature was the grain storage pit. It is estimated that there were probably about 8000 dug into the ground but not all, of course, were contemporary. They vary in size, averaging about 1.5 to 2.0m in depth, the larger pits being the later ones. Most were probably initially used for the storage of grain but later became places for ritual deposits and/or rubbish pits. Some time during the third century BCE the defences of the fort were refurbished and greatly strengthened. Its timber box structures had by this time rotted away and the rampart was reshaped so that it sloped down from the top in a single slope to the bottom of the ditch outside which was redug for the purpose. This deep, `V'-shaped ditch was regularly cleaned out and the silt thrown on to the outer lip of the ditch. Part of the material needed for enlarging the northern rampart was dug out of quarry hollows inside the rampart. Along the crest of the rampart a breastwork of flints was built. As part of the regular refurbishing of the defences, the entrances were remodelled. The western entrance was blocked entirely and the eastern entrance made very elaborate. A wider double gate replaced the earlier single gate and an entrance passage created with another gate at its inner end. This entrance passage was eventually some 50m long with outlying ramparts built in front of it and its walls faced with flints. A platform was constructed on a rampart in the middle of this complex from which slingers had a clear field of fire of about 60m in all directions. Many thousands of sling shot were picked up during the excavation, most being rounded pebbles from local stream valleys, but some made of clay. Environmental evidence collected from inside the fort included a very large number of animal bones. About 96% were from domestic animals: sheep, cattle and pigs. Most of the rest were horses and dogs with wild animals such as hare, red deer and roe deer. 70% of the domestic animals were sheep with cattle amounting to some 19%. Many of the bones are the debris from butchery and cooking but a few complete skeletons have been found in the pits. It seems likely that the animals spent most of their time outside the hillfort grazing in the fields but they were brought inside at certain times of the year, for shearing, for example. Evidence for grain production is very strong apart from the presence of the storage pits and granaries. Cereals would have been grown in the small rectangular fields on the nearby downs that are evident in aerial photographs, spreading out over many hectares around the fort. Both spring and winter-sown varieties of wheat and barley were grown and were reaped by hand during the prolonged harvest season. After they were dried, they were ready for storage. Various everyday activities have left traces behind at Danebury. Rotary querns were used for grinding the flour that was baked in the ovens in the houses and perhaps for grinding the malt for making ale. Pottery may have been made inside the hillforts for pits have been found for mixing and settling clay. The earliest pottery falls into two main types: jars and bowls. Their clay contained flint and shell fillers and some pots were burnished with haematite to imitate bronze. This type was usually decorated with scratched patterns and the angles of the vessels were sometimes emphasized with cordons. These scratched `cordoned bowls' were made somewhere in the Salisbury region. Pottery types made from local clay became more varied during the third and second centuries but some wares were imported from Wiltshire and further west. Woollen cloth was made using antler combs for carding the wool, spindle weights for the spinning and loom weights, made of clay and chalk, on upright looms. Carpentry tools included adzes and gouges while pruning saws are evidence for tree husbandry. These may have been made on site as were bronze objects like the safety-pin brooches called fibulae (sing. fibula). Shale came from Kimmeridge in Dorset and was apparently worked up on the site. Large numbers of clay containers for the carriage of salt were found in the hillfort and are evidence for trade as are the iron currency bars discovered in a cache on the site and three excavated coins. In the middle of the fort the remains of at least four rectangular buildings were located, all facing the main entrance. One is very similar to a structure on a site at Heathrow that is doubtfully interpreted as a temple so it is possible that these were ritual buildings. Ritual behaviour is probably involved in the placing of heads of horses and cattle in some disused storage pits together with pieces of carved chalk. Another practice involved breaking complete pots on pit bottoms and another the dismembering of human bodies. In some pits were complete skeletons, perhaps burials which were disposed of with the little ceremony that was customary during the Iron Age but the use of human heads for ritual purposes is certainly one of the recurring Iron Age practices and a number were discovered at Danebury. The end for Danebury came soon after 100BCE when the gates were burnt down and the population moved away. One can compare the Danebury excavation with another hillfort excavation at Crickley Hill in Gloucestershire (Dixon) where the first hillfort occupation of the site took place in the sixth and seventh centuries BCE. A little less than four hectares was enclosed by a stone rampart reinforced with a timber framework. In places the rampart was some four metres high with a ditch outside it. A patrol path ran along the top behind a palisade that was carried on a bridge across an imposing timber gateway. Slingers apparently operated from timber towers arranged at intervals behind the rampart. Inside, the inhabitants lived in long rectangular houses built of timber, wattle-and-daub and with thatched roofs. Alongside them was a number of `four-posters' grain stores. This first fort seems to have been captured and destroyed by fire so intense that the limestone in the walls was turned to quicklime. Sometime in the sixth century the hill was re-occupied. The old, burnt wall was patched and extended with new stonework to make a structure five or six metres high using stone quarried from hollows immediately behind it and from extensions of the old ditch in front of it. A fresh patrol path ran along the top of the new rampart. New features protected the earlier entrance: a bastion on each side of it and a wrap-round rampart in front. Inside the hillfort the inhabitants now lived in round houses, the largest, just inside the entrance, about 15m in diameter. These houses, too, were accompanied by `four-posters' and the fact that these were present suggests that grain was being grown by the villagers who also raised the same domestic animals as at Danebury. Some time before 400BCE the place suffered a similar fate as its predecessor and was destroyed by fire perhaps at about the same time as the Leckhampton Hillfort just over three kilometres way. Iron Age life in Gloucestershire seems to have been a good deal more turbulent than in Hampshire! So far we have described the classic hillfort: that is, a defensive position built on a hill. When the ramparts run round the hill following the contours, the hillfort is described as a contour fort. But there were other types of enclosures and fortifications in Iron Age Britain that are lumped together under the heading of hillfort. Some were defences built on the end of a hill or a spur where a single rampart could cut off the defended area leaving the steep natural slopes on the other sides to serve as sufficient protection. Carl's Wark to the east of Hathersage in Derbyshire is a good example. Coastal examples on a headland are referred to as cliff castles such as Bolt Tail in south Devon. The generic name for the class is promontory forts. Other forts could be described as lowland forts since they are on terrain where there are no suitable defensive slopes so that they have to rely upon streams, rivers or solely on ramparts. Figsbury Rings in Wiltshire is an example situated on open downland which had to depend on its ramparts while a recent investigation has discovered a fort at Askern in the Humber estuary which had been surrounded by impassable wetlands. One of the largest hillforts has been discovered at Sutton Bank in North Yorkshire, covering an area of sixteen hectares. It was enclosed by a two-metre deep trench and a four-metres high box-shaped rampart fronted by timber. The size of the enclosure poses a problem of interpretation - could it be a town or even a defended cattle or horse paddock? Only a proportion of the early hillforts survived throughout the Iron Age. Most seem to have been abandoned, as Crickley Hill was, around 400BCE leaving stronger hillforts ` to hold the fort' like Danebury but these too were deserted by about 100BCE leaving only a few in Dorset to face the might of the Roman army in AD43. Perhaps the reason for this decline in number was the process of consolidation that was going on throughout the Iron Age as smaller and weaker chieftains were gobbled up by more powerful neighbours and their hillforts abandoned. This process culminates in the creation of tribal kingdoms by about 100BCE with `kings' at their heads who no longer had any need, in several parts of Britain at least, of hillforts. There has been a good deal of debate about the function of the hillfort. Professor Cunliffe, the excavator of Danebury, sees it as a `central place', a centre for refuge, for industrial production, for redistribution of goods and as the residence of a social elite. Other researchers reject these ideas, pointing out that there is minimal evidence for industrial production at Danebury, no evidence that that its inhabitants had a higher status than those living on undefended sites and no reason why it should have been a centre of exchange. Rather, they say that it seems to have had a communal role, as a storage centre for emergency agricultural supplies and surplus (perhaps collected together for trade?) and as a status symbol for the whole local community. Iron makes its appearance in quantities in eastern Europe around 1000BCE and this follows evidence of its use earlier in eastern Turkey (Anatolia). Simplest and easiest furnaces for smelting iron were bowl furnaces - hollows in the ground lined with clay, but they do not turn up very often in excavations in Britain. Ore and the fuel (charcoal) were placed inside and covered with a lid of clay through which tuyères (nozzles) were inserted and the temperature brought up to around 1100ºC by the use of bellows. Iron sank to the bottom of the furnace as a bloom while the unwanted metals in the ore, the slag or gangue, remained above. After this, the next stage is the hotworking of the iron bloom is forging which is the job of the blacksmith and involves alternately heating and hammering the iron to remove the remaining slag and shaping it into the finished artifact. The earliest shaft furnace so far found in Britain has been excavated at Priors Hall in Northamptonshire (Hall). It was one of three dating to between 100BCE and AD50 and a surprising find since it had been thought that shaft furnaces were introduced by the Romans. Iron objects on excavation often come up in the form of a featureless lump of rust. But corrosion products `grow' out of an iron object leaving a void in the centre of the lump that is the exact shape of the original object. X-rays can reveal this hidden shape and a cast can be made and extracted. Tools and weapons made with iron are not an improvement on those made with bronze. It was not until the discovery of carbon steel in the nineteenth century that bronze was bettered but iron is the commonest mineral on earth and can be found in a large number of forms that may be described as oxides, carbonates and sulphides. One of the oxides, haematite, is an earth pigment, much used as a colouring for painting. The ores that were likely to have smelted for iron manufacture in the past are the oxides and the carbonates. Instead of having to obtain two metals, tin and copper and have the trouble of alloying them to make bronze, the iron metalworker now needed only one that was easily obtainable. This is the reason why iron became the favoured metal for common metal objects. But bronze continued to be used widely for decorative and better-class metalworking. In fact, during the Iron Age, we have more bronze than iron objects surviving in our museums because the bronze objects were prized and handed down as heirlooms. Iron was more easily reforged so that broken or outdated objects were fashioned anew. Also iron does not survive very well in the ground unless the context is an anerobic one, that is, wet and airless, which also preserves organic materials. So we cannot make a proper estimate of the proportion of iron in use in the past. It is probably safe to say that it was a great deal more than we have evidence for. In this country iron objects in the shape of an iron version of the bronze leaf-shaped sword appear during the seventh century. We do have one of the earliest iron objects, a sickle, that was actually made in Britain, thus marking the beginning of British iron metallurgy. This artefact comes from a hoard of metal objects found at Llyn Fawr in South Wales deposited in a lake round about 600BCE. The hoard contained twenty-four objects, most of bronze, including two cauldrons and two sickles. A third sickle had been copied in iron by the smith and the hoard is dated by a spearhead and a portion of a Hallstatt C sword. It is possible that this collection is an example of a votive hoard that was deposited in a sacred spot as an offering to the gods. Most of our metal finds from the Iron Age, whether of iron or bronze, but mostly of bronze, for the reasons outlined above, are found in votive hoards or ritual deposits in rivers or bogs. There is little in settlement sites of the period and we do not have many Iron Age burials accompanied by metal objects so votive hoards or deposits contain by far the finest metal goods from the Iron Age and it is a measure of the piety of the age that this should be so. Their gods so bountifully addressed were the ancient deities that were still thought to be responsible for natural phenomena and other things that have influence on human beings like good health. During the Iron Age we see the appearance of the priests of this religion which is conventionally called the Celtic religion and which was observed all over Europe. The priests are our old friends the Druids who came to embody not just the wisdom of religion but also the traditions and lore of the people. If there was such a thing as patriotism and that is not absolutely certain at that time, then the Druids along with the Iron Age warrior were quintessentially the living symbols of it. This reputation they owe to the Romans who came violently into contact with them and recorded their jaundiced views in their writings. Perhaps the main problem in the study of the Celtic religion is finding the sites of the shrines. Only a few have been located and these are almost always discovered underneath Romano-Celtic temples built in the Romano-British period when the new fashion was to erect temples to house the gods. One doubtful example was discovered in an Iron Age village uncovered during war-time excavations on the site of what was to become Runway One at Heathrow. Like all Iron Age villages it was built inside a ditched and palisaded enclosure and consisted of a number of circular huts of wattle-and-daub and thatch supported on timber frameworks. One of the buildings in the village was unusual in that it was rectangular and associated with animal skulls that were thought to have been of ritual significance. This was identified as a temple, a rather dubious suggestion, since we have no other built temples in Britain until Romano-British times and even then none like this. But a rectangular shrine, not a temple structure, has been discovered in the hillfort of South Cadbury in Somerset. Some circular shrines have been stumbled upon. They seem to be ditched enclosures with settings of postholes inside. Examples are at Frilford in Berkshire, Maiden Castle in Dorset, Duxford near Cambridge and Thistleton Dyer in Rutland. Sacred locations unmarked by shrines must have abounded in Britain as in the rest of the Iron Age world. Springs (like the hot spring at Bath), bogs and rivers would have been the obvious foci for ritual practices together with other striking natural features like large rocks, great trees and groves of particular species like the oak. In these places the gods were thought to hold court and there they could be approached. Archaeological evidence for the practice is often lacking but finds from the Thames, the Witham and the Tyne probably originated as offerings in this way and so did the lake deposits like Llyn Cerrig Bach on Anglesey and bog deposits like Llyn Fawr, deposits of two ritual spoons from Crosby Ravensworth in Westmoreland and the pony cap and bronze horns from Kirkcudbrightshire in south-western Scotland. These are only a few of the long list of fine metalware found abandoned in what are assumed to have been sacred places. While the discovery of metalwork tends to pinpoint sacred spots beside or in bogs, lakes and rivers, the sacred groves mentioned by classical writers are more difficult to locate. Some help is given, however, by the distribution of the Gallo-Britannic word nemeton, which means a sanctuary in a woodland setting. It occurs in several Romano-British place-names in different parts of Britain such as Vernemeton near Lincoln, Medionemeton in southern Scotland and Nemetostatio near North Tawton in Devon. The Latin name for the thermal spring at Aquae Arnemetiae (Buxton) also includes the element, suggesting that the spring was in use as a religious centre long before the Roman invasion. That nemeton elements are incorporated in Latin place-names in Britain is some indication of the numbers of sacred woodland clearings of pre-Conquest date, the use of which continued into the Romano-British period for the Romans had no axe to grind as far as religion was concerned and were content that people should continue to practice their ancestral beliefs. Romans were fascinated by barbarian religions, the bloodier the better, and they took a deep interest in the Celtic belief. Caesar, in his memoirs, is no different from other writers and he tells us `Even today, anyone who wants to make a study of it, goes to Britain.' He goes on to say that the one idea the druids wanted to emphasize above all others was that souls do not die but pass from one body to another at death and he also has something to say about the gods, equating most of them with their equivalent Roman deities. `Their main god is Mercury; they have many images of him. They consider him the inventor of all arts, the god of travellers and of journeys and the greatest when it comes to obtaining money and goods.' Caesar then goes on to describe the lesser gods: Jupiter, the ruler of the heavens, Apollo who wards off diseases and Mars the god of war. `When they have decided to go to battle, they generally promise the captured booty to Mars. When they are victorious, they sacrifice the captured animals and make a pile of everything else.' Perhaps some of the votive deposits from rivers and bogs were dedications made to this god in thanks for victory. Despite what Caesar says about many images of Mercury, the British Iron Age archaeological record has few statues of gods. Perhaps the statues Caesar saw were made of wood. We have some triple-faced stone heads; the Turoe stone in Co. Galway - a phallic symbol; and not a great deal more apart from some small carved boars which may be cult objects and some engraved horses on metalwork. From other sources we know that the gods included tribal deities like Brigantia, patron goddess of the Brigantians, a powerful tribe who lived in north-eastern Britain, and Camulos, a powerful war god, who lent his name to the Trinovantian stronghold of Camulodunum. Sulis was god of the sacred spring at Bath, later to be paired during the Romano-British period with Minerva. Taranis was a thunder god, Nodens, a cloud maker, Nemetona and Mars Nemetona respectively the goddess and god of the sacred grove, Silvanus, a hunting god, Cernannos, a war god, and Leucetius was simply `the shining one'. This list of gods was very long: each tribe must have had its own pantheon of favourite deities and every one of the thousands of sacred locations would have been the special preserve of a local god whose name and presence was part of the natural awareness of the local community. It would have been difficult to travel far in Iron Age Britain before coming into contact with some sign of the gods for religion pervaded all aspects of life in pre-Roman Britain. Caesar was not the first classical writer to refer to Britain. One of the idiosyncracies of the Mediterranean Iron Age is the growing interest in the barbarian world of western Europe shown by the inhabitants of the Mediterranean and by the writers whose works have survived: Hecataeus was a Greek writer during the sixth century BCE who refers to the Land of the Hyperboreans (the people beyond the north wind) while Herodotus was a Greek historian during the fifth century BC who, unusually, confesses ignorance. `I do not know the islands called the Cassiterides from which our tin comes.' Kassiteros is the Greek word for tin that originate sfrom ancient Sanskrit, an early Indian language, and tin is found in the islands on the coast of India. It is assumed that the Phoenicians first brought the name from the East together with the metal and that in the course of trading cruises they took the name with them to Britain where tin was also to be found. There is a Cassiter Street in Bodmin in the county of Cornwall where tin is to be found. Pytheas, a merchant from the Greek colony at Marseilles (Massilia) sailed round the `Northern Seas' and put Britain firmly on the map roughly a hundred years later. His own words have not all survived but other classical writers like Strabo often quote him. Pytheas sailed from Cadiz in Spain through the Straits of Gibraltar, north by Ushant to Cornwall, Devon and Ictis, the tin port. He then voyaged right round Britain, describing the inhabitants and the weather. Fragments of his books are extant. In them he says that the British tribes were independent, ruled by kings and preserved their ancient customs. They used chariots in war. Their dwellings were humble, made of timber and thatch; they stored grain in covered pits and granaries and brewed a drink made from corn and honey. As a merchant, Pytheas knew much about the tin trade. `The inhabitants of Britain who live in the south-west are especially friendly to strangers and from meeting foreign traders have adopted civilized habits. It is these people who produce the tin, cleverly working the land that bears it. They dig out the ore, melt it and purify it. They then hammer the metal into ingots like knuckle-bones and transport them to an island off the coast called Ictis, for the channel dries out at low tide and they can take the tin over in large quantities on their carts. Merchants purchase the tin from the natives there and ship it back to Gaul.' Strabo was a contemporary of Caesar and a Roman writer and tells us that Pytheas travelled along the whole of the coast of Britain he could reach and reported that the total coastline was about 5000 miles long. Didorus Siculus, another Roman writer and another contemporary of Caesar, describes Ictis as an international British port for the tin trade. It is possible that, like Strabo, a good deal of what he says about Britain is copied from Pytheas. Julius Caesar, our main documentary source for Britain in the Iron Age, came to Britain in successive years in 55 and 54BCE on military campaigns and later wrote his memoirs `On Britain and Gaul' published in paperback by Penguin Classics. In the last chapter Hallstatt was described as the chronological scheme for dating the late Bronze Age and the early Iron Age in Europe. Following on from Hallstatt around 450BCE is the scheme called La Tène that carries the sequence up to the arrival of Caesar in Gaul. This scheme is based very largely on brooches known as fibulae (sing. fibula) of the safety pin type. The type sequence was found at a cemetery at Münsingen-Rain just south of Berne in Switzerland, one of the most famous Iron Age cemeteries in Europe. The graves date from c450 through to 100BCE and contain a wide range of goods apart from the brooches. In recent years computer analysis has enabled a more sophisticated division of the brooch sequence into some twenty sub-phases. This method compares individual brooches with one another in terms of their characteristics (attributes) including their shapes and decoration. Once individual types had been defined, it was possible to use the computer to work out the approximate order of the graves on the basis of the different types associated with one another in each grave. In Britain the commonest fibulae belong to the earliest period of the Münsingen sequence. Because brooches were popular and cheap and produced in such enormous numbers, they were subject to swiftly changing fashion so neither forms or designs remained the same for very long. This makes them ideal material for this sort of analysis and also ideal chronological pegs on which to hang the dating of a particular context. Most Iron Age brooches were made of bronze but a few are in gold as in a recent find at Winchester. Another good sequence that can be used for seriation is provided by Roman brooches and in the Post-Roman period, the penannular brooch. (D Mackreth) Although the brooches are important artifacts for dating the La Tène period of the Iron Age in Europe there are other metal types involved, many of them discovered at the site which gives us the name of La Tène at the eastern end of Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland where a very large number of bronze and iron objects were found alongside the remains of a wooden bridge and causeway. La Tène influences in Britain relate mainly to metalwork and to the curvilinear designs that appear on the better-class objects. This art style, referred to as La Tène art was developed in Europe during the fifth century BCE from a variety of motifs that had emanated from the Middle East. They included palmettes, lyre patterns, lotus flowers, mythical creatures and human masks. They were transformed into an elegant abstract art that must rank as one of the great art-styles of the world. In the Mediterranean area this same set of motifs was used in a much more realistic, formalized art in Greece and Rome. With the coming of the Romans, Celtic art, the conventional name for the pan-European art styles of the Iron Age, seemed to wither and in Britain, certainly, dies away almost completely, giving place to execrable attempts by British craftsmen to ape the classical styles. However, in Ireland which was not affected to any great extent by the classical influences that the Romans brought to Britain, Celtic art continued to flourish and develop right through the early first millenium AD so that in the post-Roman period Irish religious artists were able to re-introduce the developed style into Britain on illuminated Christian manuscripts which are some of the glories of the age. In Ireland during the Iron Age, perhaps the finest masonry example of Celtic design is the Turoe stone, a decorated boulder in Co. Galway. In Britain the craftsmen/artists were as talented as any in Europe and produced masterpieces like the Battersea shield and the engraved bronze mirrors whose backs are decorated with extremely sophisticated examples of the style. All these objects were produced in bronze, iron was not suitable for this sort of work, and it was often further enhanced with the use of coral brought from the Bay of Naples in the Mediterranean or with red enamel which was the British alternative when the pink coral could not be obtained. The other ground which has survived until today where the art style was employed is some pottery, particularly that known as Glastonbury Ware, examples of which are decorated with a rudimentary version of the style. What is almost totally lacking in the surviving repertoire of La Tène art in Britain is stone sculpture which is such a feature of the material on the Continent. No doubt the British preference for working in wood is the reason and we may well have lost a large slice of a possible artistic heritage for that reason. The First Industrial Revolution [LINK] main page [LINK] Kingdoms [LINK]