Introduction
What has survived from Iron Age Britain provides the essential evidence that archaeologists use to reconstruct all aspects of life during the period. The small amount of historical (ie written) evidence for the period was from a foreign viewpoint and only refers to some aspects of life in the last 150 years of the period.
Thus Iron Age Britain can only be directly understood from the archaeological evidence: the material remains of buildings and settlements, and the things Iron Age people ate, made and used. But why has anything survived from the Iron Age at all?
The buildings
'Most houses and other buildings were made out of timber and thatch.'
There are few surviving spectacular ruins or buildings from Iron Age Britain. Unlike Mesoamerica, India, Classical Greece or ancient Egypt, in Iron Age Britain there was no construction of major cities, palaces, temples or pyramids. Rather, it was an essentially rural world of farms and villages, one that had no economic, political or religious need to build palaces, cities, major tombs or ceremonial sites such as stone circles. Most houses and other buildings were made out of timber and thatch.
Technologically, Iron Age Britons could certainly construct large stone buildings with many rooms, built to last several generations - as is shown by the brochs of northern Scotland. And where there was a reason to construct such buildings for defensive purposes, their ruins still stand many metres high to this day. However, in most parts of Britain the houses were round, single-roomed buildings of varying sizes, with a timber or stone wall.
Published: 01-04-2001
Bookmark with:
What are these?