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Last broadcast on Thu, 24 Mar 2011, 21:30 on BBC Radio 4 (see all broadcasts).
Synopsis
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the dawn of the European Iron Age.
In around 3000 BC European metalworkers started to make tools and weapons out of bronze. A complex trading network evolved to convey this valuable metal and other goods around the continent. But two millennia later, a new skill arrived from the Middle East: iron smelting. This harder, more versatile metal represented a huge technological breakthrough.
The arrival of the European Iron Age, in around 1000 BC, was a time of huge social as well as technological change. New civilisations arose, the landscape was transformed, and societies developed new cultures and lifestyles. Whether this was the direct result of the arrival of iron is one of the most intriguing questions in archaeology.
With:
Sir Barry Cunliffe
Emeritus Professor of European Archaeology at the University of Oxford
Sue Hamilton
Professor of Prehistory at University College London
Timothy Champion
Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton
Producer: Thomas Morris.
FURTHER READING
Rowley-Conwy, P, ‘From Genesis to Prehistory: The Archaeological Three Age System and its Contested Reception in Denmark, Britain and Ireland’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
Harding, A F, ‘European Societies in the Bronze Age’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
Kristiansen, K and Larsson, T B, ‘The Rise of Bronze Age Society: Travels, Transmissions and Transformations’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
Sørensen, M L and Thomas, R (eds), ‘The Bronze Age-Iron Age Transition in Europe’ (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1989)
Pleiner, R, ‘Iron in Archaeology: The European Bloomery Smelters’ (Prague: Archeologicky ústav AV CR, 2000)
Collis, J, ‘The European Iron Age’ (London: Batsford, 1984)
Cunliffe, B W, ‘Europe Between the Oceans: Themes and Variations 9000 BC - AD 1000’ (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008)
Hamilton, S, “Cultural choices in the ‘British Eastern Channel Area’ in the Late Pre-Roman Iron Age” in Haselgrove, C and Moore, T, (eds.), ‘The Later Iron Age in Britain and Beyond’ (81 - 106) (Oxford: Oxbow, 2007)
Herbert, Eugenia W, ‘Iron, Gender, and Power: Rituals of Transformation in African Societies’ (Bloomington, IN, 1993)
Broadcasts
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Thu 24 Mar 201109:00
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Thu 24 Mar 201121:30
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