This is what I’m going to call basic, probably-be-useful-to-know context. Am I writing a historical epic in the British iron age? No. Am I taking some cues from what we know about the British iron age and going from there? Absolutely.
The iron age supplanted the bronze age when people figured out how to work iron, because iron is stronger and generally more useful than bronze. This isn’t to say that they stopped working with bronze or its alloys, but there is a definite technological shift in the various archaeological sites.
Iron age people lived in roundhouses with thatched roofs. Sites in the north of Scotland are distinguished by their brochs, or tall, strong stone towers, which stood over the rest of the village. Whether you lived in a village or with just your extended family on your farmstead, everybody was into putting earthwork barriers around the house(s) and storage facilities.
The bigger the earthwork, the better! The hill forts often have the largest and most elaborate earthworks, though it seems that archaeologists can’t agree on why that might be. Is it to keep out aggressive neighbors, or just to show that you’re the richest clan on the block? Nobody can agree. (Both? Can’t it be both? That seems reasonable to me.) In any case, though hill forts are criminally understudied, it seems likely that most of them had villages contained within the large earthworks, and that the villages were occupied for at least some of the year.
Nobody knows a whole lot about religious beliefs in the iron age, largely because the Roman legions up and stabbed all the Druids to death, and nobody in the iron age knew how to write, so there goes all that knowledge. The only reason some of it survives at all is because the iron age culture kept on in Ireland and Northern Scotland, mostly undisturbed, right up until Christian monks arrived, who then copied down some of the folklore. But mostly, we don’t have a clue what they believed in back then, except that it may have involved them pitching some of their most valuable crafted items into rivers, burying bits of dead animals at the bottom of grain storage pits, and sometimes substituting humans for all of the above. Also, one thing I discovered is that they apparently had something against artistic representations of animals or people, though obviously there were exceptions (see: the Uffington white horse).
Archaeologists have had a really tough time finding iron age burials. It seems that sometimes they buried their dead in the fetal position, and sometimes they cremated them and buried the ashes, but most of the time they did something entirely different that left no trace on the archaeological record. The consensus seems to be that they may have practiced excarnation, where they would place the body on a platform out in the open (or just out in the open someplace) and let exposure take care of it. And/or they then did something with the bones after the body had been excarnated so that the bones don’t turn up.
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For your edification (and just in case I lose them), I have collected the most useful/informative links I’ve found below, just in case you’re curious about this relatively understudied time period.
Actual Books
Iron Age Britain by Barry W. Cunliffe. ISBN: 0713488395. A relatively short but extremely detailed book by one of Britain’s most highly regarded iron age scholars, this one is pretty handy. … Especially if you’ve looked at some of the other links first and don’t come into it a total n00b.
A Museum In Your Pocket
Celtic Life in Iron Age Britain, put together by Google Arts & Culture. Google has collected pictures of dozens of iron age artifacts in Britain and arranged them into “exhibits,” complete with detailed commentary.
Bite-Sized Scholarly Articles
Overview: Iron Age, 800 BC – AD 43 by Julian Richards. A quick but fascinating run-down of British iron age growth and development, hill forts, farmsteads and crannogs, burial practices, and the growing Roman influence.
Life in an Iron Age Village by Sophia Jundi. This little article covers agriculture, lifestyle, leisure time, appearance, and religion and ritual.
As a bonus, each article includes an additional list of resources at the end for further research.
YouTube Videos
I watched several Time Team episodes on YouTube to see more iron age sites as they were being unearthed by archaeologists.
Time Team Digs the Iron Age. This video summarizes several of their biggest iron age finds in Britain, so it is a good overview episode to start with.
The Mystery of Mine Howe. If you were curious and slightly creeped out by Mine Howe in the previous episode, like I was, here is the full video on it.
Swords, Skulls, and Strongholds. Click here to watch an entire special on the enigmatic hill fort.
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Photo Credit: VeRoNiK@ GR Flickr via Compfight cc