NEIL OLIVER: This is the story of how Britain came to be,
of how our land and its people
were forged over thousands of years of ancient history.
This Britain is a strange and alien world,
a world that contains the hidden story of our distant, prehistoric past.
After more than 1,000 years,
the international world of the Bronze Age had collapsed.
A horde like this is a snapshot of the time
when bronze was no longer working as the glue of society.
A new Britain began to emerge, a whole new era,
the Iron Age.
There's nothing different about it from the tools we use today.
And et it's 2,500 ears old.
A Britain of powerful regional identities,
where land and grain had replaced bronze as a source of prestige.
Now, the journey continues
with the next chapter in our epic story.
He was laid in his grave and, soon thereafter,
three spears were thrust in.
This would've been a moment of huge drama.
A time of Iron Age warriors and Celtic glory,
a tipping point in our history,
when tribal leaders began to believe they were more than chieftains.
They were kings.
Ripped By mstoll
I'm going back 2,500 years
to 500 BC.
This is Britain, right in the heart of the Iron Age,
a time of huge transformation for our land and its people.
Ever since the end of the Bronze Age,
a few hundred years earlier, a new Britain had begun to emerge.
And it was a more insular Britain, with strong regional identities.
This was a world of tall broch towers in the north
and communal hill forts in the south.
Both responses to the importance of controlling the land.
What was common across Britain was that trade was focused locally
and wealth was no longer centred around bronze, as it had been.
It was now centred around grain.
Britain was entering a new era,
in which the people who controlled land would gain wealth and power,
the like of which had never been seen before.
At the top of this hill are the remains of an Iron Age hill fort
that holds evidence of the beginning of this new age.
This isn't just any old hill fort.
This is Danebury. This is a completely different beast.
A mega hill fort. And it's one of the first of its type.
Farmers here were cultivating ever greater tracts of land,
harvesting more and more grain.
This wasn't subsistence farming.
This was about creating a surplus to trade.
But there was a problem with all of that.
And you can see it over there, just on the horizon.
That bump into the sky there is another hill fort.
Woolbury hill fort. And it's not the only one.
On a clear day, from up here, you can see another three hill forts
and they were all equally prosperous.
And, crucially, they were all beginning to want more and more land.
For the first time in our history,
Britain, or parts of it, were actually starting to fill up.
After all those millennia of hunting and then the early farming,
the physical size of our island was actually beginning to tell.
And where the territories of those hill fort communities
were starting to rub against one another,
there was one consequence and one consequence only.
And that was friction.
What's happening is that the land is being used more and more and more.
It's good land, it's rich land. It encourages the population to grow.
But you can only grow to a certain extent
and the population will continue to grow beyond the holding capacity of the land.
And when you get to that point, you get tension.
And how does the instability, the pressure, manifest itself?
Normally, in terms of aggression and warfare.
Resources are rare. You fight for resources.
You can have long, long periods of peace, I think,
and then, perhaps in a confrontation,
some young man would be hurt, everyone would be angry
and it would escalate into outright, really violent warfare.
NARRATOR: Sir Barry has studied the archaeology of Danebury
for over three decades.
SIR BARRY CUNLIFFE: These are iron spear heads.
- Now look at that one. - OLIVER: That's a mean thing.
CUNLIFFE: A long shank. OLIVER: Uh-huh.
- Very sharp point. - Gosh.
And that's been done with the intention to kill.
Everything about it is violent.
CUNLIFFE: Yes, it is absolutely redolent of violence.
And this is all coming from in here?
Everything here is from within Danebury,
- yes. - Okay.
We've also got evidence from the human bones themselves.
This is the real hard evidence.
- Here we are. We've got the skull. - Oh!
- You can see the eye sockets there. - Mmm-hmm.
- And you see that hole there? - And that's got the same section...
CUNLIFFE: It's exactly the same section as that spear.
He would have copped a spear directly through the top of his head there.
But the fascinating thing about this guy
is he also had a pretty hefty bash on the head,
- which has caved a bit of the skull in. - And that's not been enough to kill?
No, no, because if you turn inside, you see the damage
- that it's done inside... - (EXCLAIMS)
But it's all healed over.
- So, he must have had a headache... - That's so graphic.
And possibly brain damage,
but was still fit enough, presumably, to go into battle
some months, perhaps some years later,
to end up with that spear in his head.
Gosh! So he went into battle already knowing
what it was like to face these weapons?
He'd probably been into battle many times, this guy.
As indeed had many of them.
- See, we've got many more skulls here. - Goodness! There's no end of it up here.
No, no, no. Again, just close to where we're standing
was a very large pit into which they'd thrown body parts.
Cleaning up after a battle, presumably. A large number of body parts
and some of these skulls came from there.
So, people are dying in significant numbers
that they're not even being accorded burial?
- They are just being cleared away? - Cleared away.
You see here, a whole series of slivers
taken off his skull there, with glancing blows.
OLIVER: Someone coming in, yeah.
He wouldn't have needed a haircut after that.
But the coup de grâce was that. A great sword slash.
OLIVER: Goodness me! That has not been... That's not healed over.
- No, that was the end of him. - Oh!
And, altogether, this shows what an incredibly violent life people lived.
What a world they inhabited with the threat of this hanging over them.
Yes, and I think they would have been aware of it the whole time.
You can imagine, here in Danebury,
these young guys coming back from battle with all their scars
and living in the community with noses cut off, ears cut off.
Horrendous injuries.
They must have been aware every moment of their day
of just how violent life was.
OLIVER: What's unfolding now is something quite new.
The time of the peaceful, local farming collective is over.
By 400 BC, in southern Britain at least,
the area is descending into bloody conflict.
And what's interesting about that conflict
is the kind of personality that it encourages.
As the need to fight and defend became more important,
so the status of those who could do the fighting and defending increased.
You can't know these things for certain,
but it's tempting to imagine that, in peaceful times,
these communities were controlled by councils of elders
or the heads of important families. But not any more.
Now, now that the fighting had started,
was the time of heroes, champions, men who could wield swords.
These were the type who could expand territories,
defend territories, bring upstarts to heel.
Britain was entering a period we call the Middle Iron Age,
a time when local power bases fought it out for power and prestige
and where a man's status had to be earned in battle.
But, out of bloody conflict,
something was about to emerge that was sublime.
This is one of the finest, most astonishing
pieces of early art ever produced in Britain.
It is from 350 years BC and it's called the Battersea Shield.
It's too small to have been used in warfare.
It's completely wrong for combat. It's too elaborate.
This is ceremonial.
Owned by a war lord
and perhaps carried at the head of a victory parade.
This is an object that demonstrates technical perfection
and also artistic genius.
This is the beginning of something utterly new in our history.
A sudden blossoming of art and design.
NARRATOR: The great continental rivers were trade routes,
bringing art from the classical world to the south.
As northern tribes controlling these routes
developed a taste for luxury goods,
they also began to invent a new, decorative style.
OLIVER: This was the birth of Celtic art.
And around 350 BC, when it came to Britain,
local craftsmen took it to completely new heights.
It's said that the innovation and sophistication
of British Celtic art is the single greatest contribution
by these islands to the world of art ever.
And the proof of that statement is here in my hands.
This is the magnificent Kirkburn Sword.
And it was excavated from a grave in east Yorkshire.
Unlike earlier swords, this is a composite item.
It required the meticulous design and fabrication
of 70 separate pieces, which were then assembled.
There's iron here, in the blade.
There's bronze on the scabbard. There's horn.
It's also been a working sword.
Unlike the shield, this actually saw battle.
And we know that because analysis of the metal indicates
that it was repaired on at least one occasion, possibly more.
These red enamel additions
are said to represent freshly spilled blood.
But it's the delicate nature of the perfection of this art
that's new in Britain.
And what's most fascinating of all
is that it's embodied, not in jewellery,
but in the objects that could be afforded by that class of people
that deserved things like this,
warriors, the most powerful warriors.
But finely decorated swords were not the only symbol of elite power,
as the skeleton of a horse buried at Danebury hill fort reveals.
The lifetime activities of a horse
will leave different markers in the skeleton.
And we're looking for clues as to what
that animal was used for during its life.
OLIVER: Throughout prehistory,
horses were uncommon in Britain, even on farms.
And forensic studies of this one found something unprecedented.
If you look here, at the front of the tooth
there's a small, white, parallel-sided band of enamel.
This is evidence that the horse was bitted.
And if you look on this vertebrae, there's a fracture
running through the epiphysis of the vertebrae.
And this is evidence that this horse was ridden.
And this is the first time we have evidence
for riding in prehistoric Britain.
OLIVER: These bones reveal the very beginning of the ridden horse,
a symbol of power.
Use of horses would have revolutionised warfare.
It would have changed raiding.
People could raid further distances and faster.
You could attack a neighbouring settlement,
take control of their cattle.
A man on horseback would have had major advantages over a man on foot.
OLIVER: By 300 BC, Britain was becoming the land
that resonates in ancient myths and folk memory.
A land of warrior heroes, wielding power from horseback,
armed with glinting, decorated Celtic swords.
Incredibly, the remains of a warrior from this time still survive.
The very man who once owned and wielded
the finest Iron Age sword ever found in Britain.
The Kirkburn Warrior.
When he died, he was aged somewhere between 20 and 35 years,
powerfully built, you would have thought in the prime of his life.
And there's nothing on the skeleton to indicate why he died.
There's no great catastrophic injury,
no caved-in skull, no massive sword wounds to the long bones.
It is still possible though that he died in battle.
If he suffered a wound that severed a major artery
or punctured a vital organ,
he could have bled to death and there'd be no sign
on the skeleton to reveal that as the cause of death.
The circumstances of his burial are fascinating.
He was laid in his grave and, soon thereafter,
three spears were thrust in,
possibly penetrating the dead body.
Now, this would have been a moment of huge drama
for those witnessing the funerary ritual.
Here was a man whose martial prowess
was being marked out very blatantly.
Then the grave was completely backfilled,
leaving the shafts sticking out of the ground,
bristling out of the mound.
So, they would have been visible from some distance.
They would have marked out that grave as that of a warrior
and it could have become a place of homage,
so that warriors who remembered him from life could have grown
old and grey, regaling their children and grandchildren
with stories about this man,
remembering what a great and powerful warrior
now lay buried in that special grave.
The world of the Kirkburn Warrior is the beginning
of a new era in the history of our land and its people.
This is the time of Celtic Britain,
a world of magic, mystery and spiritual destiny.
And clues to the birth of this new age
can be found in the northeast of England.
I've come to Yorkshire, because 20 or so miles away in that direction
is where the Kirkburn Warrior was buried,
around 300 years BC, along with his splendid sword.
And what's more, he wasn't the only one.
In the Iron Age, formal burial was rare.
In most cases, when people died, their bodies were simply laid out
and the bones gradually picked clean by animals and birds.
If you were lucky, you might have got a cremation.
But, up here, in the chalk uplands of east Yorkshire,
something a bit different was going on.
Melanie Giles has been studying the Iron Age of east Yorkshire
for more than a decade.
So, what exactly is in this field?
This is an Iron Age cemetery.
And what you're looking at is small barrows.
Each one of those is somebody's grave.
So, all these bumps of different sizes and heights
- contain a person? - Indeed, yes.
Is this the only cemetery of its kind?
No, there are many more like it across east and into north Yorkshire.
And when you say east and north Yorkshire,
is that the limit of cemeteries like these?
Yes, they're really unique in Britain.
But there are cemeteries like this in modern-day France,
in the Marne/Moselle region.
So, what is going on then?
If this is a French cemetery, what is it doing here?
Well, I don't know that it's a French cemetery.
There's lots of different ideas about this, lots of different debates.
Some people thought it was a massive invasion,
a kind of war band coming across.
But, in fact, most of these people look as if they're local,
they were born and brought up here.
So, we might be looking at just a small group
of important or powerful people coming across from the Continent.
And some of the grave goods we find in those barrows
reinforce that sense that there are contacts with the Continent.
OLIVER: The Celtic culture that came to represent an entire era
might have had its genesis right here,
in the continentally connected warrior elites of east Yorkshire.
So, a warrior of the status, say, of the Kirkburn Warrior,
someone of that style and demeanour?
Absolutely, and he was buried just about 10 miles from here.
Okay. So he's part of this fashion?
Yes, and figures like that, who maybe were skilled at fighting
or had achieved something in their life,
or maybe even through the manner of their death,
were treated to special kinds of burials.
OLIVER: But the Yorkshire burials have revealed something else
that was remarkable about this new culture.
Because here, it seems,
it was not only great warriors who were revered.
Our picture of ancient Britain will always be incomplete
because often the evidence we find is of important men.
The artefacts are often symbols of marital prowess.
What's remarkable, here in Yorkshire, is that around 300 BC,
we start to find evidence of something
that's been missing from the story so far.
And that is important women.
This is the skeleton of a woman who died
at least in her late 40s, possibly even older than that.
But for all that she was an older, mature woman,
her teeth are in remarkably good shape,
which suggests she had access to a good, even privileged diet.
But, much more revealing and fascinating
than her mere bones,
are the circumstances in which she was buried.
This woman was buried lying on
or inside a chariot.
And around her were also placed
all the furniture for horse driving.
Quite hard to describe these. I suppose they're the equivalent of hub caps.
Decoration that would have gone around
the knobbly bit that sticks out from the wheel.
These are parts of the bit that the horse would have in its mouth,
through which the reins passed,
which give the driver control over the horse's head.
But also, in this woman's grave, are items
altogether more mysterious, even magical.
This metal cylinder,
beautifully decorated with Celtic art work.
Now, it's completely sealed.
You can't get into it, you can't open it.
If it ever did contain anything, it must have been organic
and very small so that with the passage of millennia
that has decayed and disappeared.
Maybe it was some beans or seeds,
so that it could be used as a ceremonial rattle.
Perhaps even more powerful is this.
It's been called a mirror.
I suspect because, in terms of its shape,
that's exactly what it looks like.
But, for me, the word mirror downgrades this object.
It makes it seem trivial and to do with vanity.
This, in its heyday, would have been highly-polished iron.
But, even at its best, the reflection that it offered
would always have been blurred.
It's now suggested that items such as these were used
not to reflect back our world,
but to open a portal into a world beyond,
the world of the ancestors.
That, by owning this, and having access to it,
you were able to communicate directly with the dead.
So, with these items here,
it is easy to understand that whoever this woman was,
once upon a time, she really mattered.
She was a woman of substance.
She was revered, she was wise
and, in her community, she was someone of real power.
By 200 BC,
Celtic culture had spread right across our land
and power was increasingly becoming concentrated
in the hands of fewer, bigger, regional leaders.
The chieftains of the emerging Celtic tribes of Britain.
The big question, though, is just who were these Celts?
Here in Britain, especially along the so-called Celtic fringe
of Cornwall, Wales and Scotland,
Celticness is an emotive subject.
There are people who believe that it connects them
to their sense of their own history,
that it underpins their sense of self and of inheritance.
There are even those who believe in an entirely separate Celtic race.
And how do I feel about that?
Well, as a Scot, I feel a sense of belonging to my country.
I feel in a sense that my homeland belongs to me.
But whether or not that's the same
as the sense of a separate ethnic identity,
I'd need help to answer that one.
I'm sending a sample of my DNA for analysis
in an attempt to try and find out where my Scottish ancestors came from.
And, in particular, to find out whether they were living in Britain
during the height of the Celtic Iron Age.
Using statistical genetic dating methods,
Peter Forster believes he can work out the detailed prehistory
of living individuals.
I know it's very complicated science that's involved,
but can you tell me, in simple terms, who I am and where I come from?
I'll give it a try. So, what we've done, in a nutshell,
is to take a look at two stretches of DNA, of your DNA,
which allow us to separately trace
your mother's line back into deep prehistory
and your father's line back into deep prehistory.
Okay.
So, to start with we've looked at your mother's DNA, where her female
- ancestry traces back to. - Mmm-hmm.
In theory, you could have matches from all over the world,
but let's take a look what they are in fact.
- Right. - So, this...
Oh! Big red spot on Scotland.
FORSTER: Yeah, let me zoom in... OLIVER: That's fascinating.
- And it's the Western Isles of Scotland. - Yes.
We've got no recent historical connection to the islands.
- Well, it is not only Western Isles. - Mmm-hmm.
We've some more matches in mainland Scotland.
In simple terms, everything about my mum is pointing in the direction of Scotland
and having been in Scotland for a long, long time.
That's right because, as you can see, it's all over Scotland.
It's not just one particular island or location.
So, that argues for a presence of your mother's line in Scotland
way back into prehistory, thousands of years ago.
So, what about my dad then?
Yes, your father's line was a bit of a surprise.
So, let's see. That's the result for the father's line.
OLIVER: Right.
Your particular paternal lineage
is more common in southern Europe and eastern Europe.
There's nothing from my dad's DNA in Britain at all.
Well, it's more than that in fact.
There is nothing in Scandinavia, in northern Europe.
So, it is a southern and eastern European profile.
So, the individuals or individual in my father's line
only came to Britain, in DNA terms, relatively recently?
Yes, that is correct.
Wait until I tell him.
Wait until I tell my Scottish dad that he's not from Scotland.
Experts have tried again and again to identify a Celtic bloodline,
but the most they can really agree on,
is that, just as in my case, ancestry is complicated.
Many people today believe that, "Celtic,"
is no more than a collective term to describe a whole host of peoples
who lived in Europe around 2,000 years ago
and shared common cultural values.
It's possible, it's even likely, that there never was
a separate ethnic Celtic identity.
There is certainly no absolute evidence for a separate Celtic race,
however disappointing some people might find that fact.
But what we do have and what we do have evidence for
is a common Celtic heritage.
The Celts appreciated similar art and design
and they held shared values of status and hierarchy.
And linguists also believe they shared a common language,
a language we can decipher,
even after 2,000 years.
Paul, how much do we know about what the Iron Age would have sounded like
in terms of the spoken word?
Well, we know something about it in the sense
that the descendent languages from this period in Britain
do survive in the form of Welsh and Cornish and Breton,
and, slightly more distantly, with Irish and Scots Gaelic.
So that, if we were to take a particular word,
we would know that the ancient British word for a boar
would be turcos, because we have Welsh turc, and so on.
And, to take another example,
maglos would be the word for a prince or a lord
on the basis of Welsh mael and Irish morl.
And these forms one can reconstruct to produce those forms.
If you were to take a modern-day English speaker
and plunk them down in an Iron Age marketplace,
what would be most striking about the voices around them?
I think the most striking thing probably
is that they wouldn't understand a word of it,
because this is a language group that is unrelated,
or only distantly related, to English.
So, you'd be in the market and you'd say,
"Mai tarme turcon,"sell me a boar.
And there's nothing there, apart, perhaps, from the "me"
which an English speaker would understand.
If a traveller was to go from the southwest of England
to the northeast of Scotland, would they hear the language
changing as though with dialects?
Yes, almost certainly.
That's probably definitely the case, by virtue of the fact
that these are languages that develop into different languages.
So, Welsh as separate from Cornish, and so on and so forth.
So, there probably was that kind of variation,
but the kind of variation where, from mile on mile, neighbour to neighbour,
they perfectly well would understand each other.
But, if you moved them all the way from the southwest to the northeast,
they would probably struggle, I would have thought.
Can you construct a sentence for me, so that I can get a sense
of the rhythm and the cadence of that ancient British language?
Well, okay. Um...
Think of a lord, a prince, like you, for example,
coming into the feasting hall.
And people would rise and would say to you...
I certainly hope so.
"Arut regami magleh mutakeh,"
which would mean basically something like, "I honour you, long-haired lord."
Did you just call me a hippy in Celtic?
- Possibly. - (CHUCKLING)
OLIVER: I'm used to seeing and handling artefacts.
Things made of metal, stone and pottery.
So, it's quite a strange feeling to get the sounds of the Iron Age as well.
It almost sounds crass to say it,
but it brings that time back to life.
If you take the language,
if you had a Gaelic speaker from the Western Isles or a Welsh speaker,
while they perhaps couldn't have a conversation with an Iron Age warrior,
there's every possibility that they could make themselves understood.
So the world of the past and the modern world would collide at that point.
The past is very close, if you approach it in the right way.
Less than 200 years after the Kirkburn Warrior,
the tribes of Britain might still have been rivals,
but they were also bound by a common Celtic culture.
In the Southern Highlands of Scotland, using experimental archaeology,
it's even possible to get close to the reality of life
at the time of the Celtic Iron Age.
Look at that. It's a modern reconstruction
of a building called a crannog,
which is a large house built on a platform
that sits above the waters of the loch.
This would have been the home, 2,000 ears ago, of a local chieftain.
A building like that is about status and prestige.
It's visible for miles around.
You're essentially saying to people,
"Here I am. And if you think you can take this from me, do your best."
In this world of Celtic tribes,
leaders needed to be more than powerful warriors.
They needed diplomatic skills and political nous, too.
And artefacts found here, in Loch Tay,
bear testament to how Iron Age politics were conducted.
This is a small, circular, wooden plate
recovered from the loch.
In Iron Age Britain, status wasn't just about
items of jewellery and personal adornment.
It was about your ability to draw people to you.
Men, fighting men, who were loyal to you, who would do your bidding.
And a key way of getting to them
was, as they say, through their stomachs.
The way to a man's heart.
And so you have to picture a chieftain, perhaps the chieftain of the area
gathering men to him,
and they would be fed by him to show that he was a big man.
The story here, from this little wooden plate,
is that feasting was a key part
of power broking in late Iron Age Britain.
Barrie Andrian, who helped create the crannog,
is an expert in feasting.
And many of the same wild plants
that would have been eaten 2,000 years ago
still grow around the area today.
ANDRIAN: They didn't have access
to the kinds of vegetables that we have today.
Nothing like onions and potatoes, and our kind of staples.
So, foraging would have been a very, very important source of food for them.
There are lots of edible greens here.
Things like chickweed and sorrel, which has a lemony taste.
See what you think.
It has got a very... It's got a very... definite flavour.
- This is sorrel. - Mmm-hmm.
I'm going to put that in the stew. Just to give it a kick.
Yeah, there's a real acidy, citrusy... That's a strong flavour.
The scale and variety of food offered by a chieftain
would have been a mark of his status and, by extension, his power.
We have a fantastic amount of organic material
that we've uncovered and discovered underwater here in Loch Tay
at one of the crannog sites. More than 160 different types
of edible plants. So this is a mere representative sample.
Just a handful, literally, of some of those.
- Let me just try that one. - Wild mushroom and barley.
Oh, that is delicious. The barley is very strong there.
- There is an echo of Scotch broth. - Yeah, I think it would be.
OLIVER: Over the hearth, a masterpiece of decorative wrought ironwork
would have supported a spit-roast
and proclaimed the standing of its owner.
ANDRIAN: This is an example or representation of a firedog.
The firedog would have been a high status,
really classy piece of art.
And ou can see the curve of the back of the head.
It's maybe a horse or a bull
with the horns sticking out, or maybe even a wild boar.
But, obviously something important, something symbolic.
And if you look at the craftsmanship,
these are meant to represent wealth and power.
So, it's another symbol of status.
It's food for show, isn't it? It's food as a performance.
Absolutely. They definitely weren't hiding.
A feast was a hugely important social exercise.
It was almost a ritual in its own right.
Everyone attending the event would have understood the etiquette.
They would have been able to read every nuance, every sign, every gesture.
The leader had to be a skilled politician to pull it off,
to read people correctly and make accurate assessments
of his followers, or his would-be followers.
Who would be served first?
Who would get the choicest cuts of meat?
Who would be left with the cold shoulder?
And because it was happening publicly,
it was open to dispute.
Because, after all, it is a room full of fiery hot-blooded Celts.
And if one of them felt that he was being slighted
when he should have been praised, then, if he felt strong enough,
he would have the opportunity to make his feelings clear.
But, by the end of the night, everyone would have understood
where they were, how they related to one another,
who was top dog and who was at the bottom.
Over just a few hundred years,
the structure of power had reshaped Iron Age Britain,
from an age of elite local warriors
to increasingly powerful Celtic chieftains.
By around 100 BC, power had become concentrated in the hands
of a narrow, social elite.
People who controlled such an extent of trade and territory
that they became something new.
The first of the mega rich.
And some of the evidence for that
can be seen back here at the British Museum.
This is a late Iron Age gold torc,
an elaborate, lavish piece of jewellery worn around the neck.
It is absolutely breathtaking.
The weight of gold, just the lustre of it.
It's been compared, in terms of its significance,
as being right up there with the British crown jewels.
And ou can surely see why.
It's been made
by twisting individual strands of gold
to create these corkscrewing spirals.
And then the ends have been fitted into these round terminals.
The goldsmith, the artist has really gone to town
on adding decoration to give it texture and depth.
It dates to around 75 years BC.
And it's quite different in form
from the earlier military art,
like the Battersea Shield, the Kirkburn Sword.
This is the advent of something quite new in Britain.
This is extreme wealth, extreme showing off.
And what you have here,
in the owner of this,
is a man who is seeing himself
and, perhaps more importantly, being seen by his followers,
as nothing less than a king.
Some of the tribal territories of Britain were now ruled
by men so powerful,
they even began to issue their own coins.
Look at these.
These are some of the earliest coins ever found in England.
The Celtic coin makers are making coins in their own image, if you like.
They're using Celtic art.
Rather than straightforward representations of heads,
they're going for something abstract.
Just like today, coins have always been
representations of the state, often the head of state.
And the same thing is happening here.
This torc, which dates from the same period as these three gold coins,
is a... It's obviously a symbol of authority.
But this is where you start to get the authority of the state
becoming something that's transferable.
Coins are in circulation, they're distributed.
This is about society being permeated by the portable,
transferable symbols of the state and of the king.
But if there were people at the top with almost unimaginable wealth,
there were also people at the bottom.
And evidence for that can be found at the National Museum of Wales.
As well as gold, every important Celtic leader wanted
prestige goods from mainland Europe,
olive oil, wine, exotic tableware, all the accoutrements of civilisation.
To pay for it, they exported wool, animal hides, hunting dogs.
But there was also a darker price to be paid for all that luxury.
In European markets, one commodity above all else was in great demand.
Tall, strong, British manpower.
Look at this.
It's an iron slave chain.
It's over 2,000 years old.
Now, this obviously was the part made to go round the slave's neck.
(RING CLICKS SHUT)
It would fit tightly. Might even make it hard to breathe.
And just half a metre, a foot and a half, say, of iron chain
separates each slave in the line as they shuffle along
to wherever they're going.
It's fantastically heavy
and so well preserved, you get a real sense
of what it would have felt like to be burdened with this
and to feel the way that these would have chafed at the neck.
For every king or queen in the Iron Age,
there would have to have been countless, countless slaves.
Gold jewellery, works of art,
they give a glimpse of life for people at the top end of society.
But it's items like this
that brings you face to face with what Iron Age reality
must have been like for those thousands and thousands of people
who inhabited the bottom of society.
Just a few hundred years earlier, many people in Britain
had lived in egalitarian farming communities.
But now, in the late Celtic Iron Age, all that had changed.
By 75 BC, Britain was a land of hard, social divides.
Kings at the top, slaves at the bottom.
The rest of us, presumably the vast majority, somewhere in between.
But there was another class of people.
They were the spiritual leaders, the wise men of Celtic society.
The Druids.
Miranda Green is an Iron Age archaeologist and Druid specialist.
Within the whole mix of society, you know, you've got kings and aristocrats,
you've got ordinary people, you've got slaves at the bottom.
- Where are the Druids in that picture? - Right up at the top.
I would think more important than the kings or the tribal leaders.
We know that the kings listened to their advice.
They were like the Old Testament prophets.
And one of the things that make them important is that they overarch society.
So that you might have kings of tribes,
but the Druids would connect with each other through huge areas of Europe,
so they acted like a kind of Celtic glue.
So, really crucial to the working of society?
Crucial and they even intervened in cases of warfare.
They could actually walk into the middle of a battlefield and stop the war.
- Right. Okay. - So, they were that important.
Even though they didn't actually fight themselves.
So, they were absolutely to be taken seriously?
They were. And, indeed, to go against a Druid would be
almost be as bad as being dead, because you would be exiled.
Nobody would speak to you and you were then beyond society,
because of the word of a Druid.
OLIVER: Little evidence remains of these powerful priests of Celtic society,
beyond legends of oaks, mistletoe and golden sickles.
But discoveries of unusual and mysterious spoons
are thought to be connected to the indispensable art of divination.
What is this collection of weirdness?
Well, we have got here, a pair of replica spoons.
And they are called divination spoons. Divination means telling the future.
And they were used by Druids in the Iron Age.
One of the spoons has got a hole drilled into it.
The other spoon is divided in its inner surface
- into four quadrants. - All right.
GREEN: And I think they were used together, placed like that,
and then something blown or dripped through the hole.
And then, the spoons will be opened to see where on the quartered surface
- it would fall. - Okay.
If you want your ancestors to speak to you about,
perhaps, where you should go next or where your herds should go,
to do that you'd use their bones.
(SUCKING THROUGH STRAW)
Rather you than me.
(BLOWING)
So, we can see that the powder that I blew through this hole
has not landed, as you might think, exactly opposite the hole,
but down in this left hand corner here.
So, we could try a little liquid now, couldn't we? This is where you come in.
OLIVER: I am guessing that's not ketchup.
GREEN: Er, no, it's not tomato juice, it's blood.
Okay.
GREEN: You've got actually quite a nice patterning there.
But it is like telling the tea leaves.
You're getting this definite shape.
So, you would come to the Druids
or the Druids would be consulted by someone
- in a position of power - Mmm.
- Who would ask specific questions. - Yes.
"Why are the flocks afflicted
- "with this disease?" - That's right.
"Should we go to war
- "with the neighbours?" - That's right.
And it would be in the gift of the Druid to interpret this
- any way he wanted? - Of course.
So, if the Druid wants to go to war, the Druid can make that happen?
Absolutely. And the Druids would know perfectly well
both the questions and the answers that they were after.
So, I think what you've got here is a means of manipulating the future
and manipulating power.
OLIVER: The Druids were men so powerful
that even the Celtic kings danced to their tune.
But, despite their huge influence, apart from divination spoons,
definite evidence of Druids has never been found.
But there is one possibility.
This is the skull of a man who died
around 200 years BC, aged between 30 and 35 years old.
He was buried in an Iron Age cemetery in Deal, in Kent.
He has been known as the Deal Warrior
because with him, in his grave, there was a sword.
But there's something more interesting
and more mysterious about this character.
When the skeleton was being excavated, back in the 80s,
the people working on it noticed that, while he was definitely male,
the bones were slight, slender.
In fact, somebody said of him that the bones
were of a slightly feminine nature.
So, something definitely un-warriorlike.
So, what is going on? What else do we know?
He was buried wearing this elaborate, enigmatic headgear.
It wasn't padded or lined in leather.
It was worn directly on the head.
And we know that because traces
of this individual's hair were found trapped in the rim.
For that reason, and because it is so slight,
it is highly unlikely that it was ever worn as a military helmet
to give protection to a man's head in combat.
The only other artefacts like it
are the headgear worn by religious leaders
in Roman Britain 200 years later.
So, was he something like that?
The fascinating possibility, and it's only a possibility,
is that this individual, in life,
was of that most mysterious caste of people, a Druid,
who walked this land 200 years before the birth of Christ.
And, if so, what events did he witness
and what power did he wield?
By the time of the Celtic kings,
the age of the hill forts was coming to an end.
Even the greatest of them, the mega hill forts like Danebury, were in decline.
Trade with mainland Europe had brought wealth and power,
at least to the few.
But those contacts were bringing Britain to the brink
of another new age.
Look at this. It's a fragment of a storage vessel.
It was found 40 odd miles from here, on the coast,
and it was made, maybe, 75 years BC.
This vessel didn't contain local produce.
Rather, it held something
from many hundreds of miles away to the south on mainland Europe.
This contained wine, possibly from the vineyards of Rome itself.
Now, this speaks of a remarkable transformation.
From a land 400, maybe 300, years BC,
with tribal chieftains fighting over booty,
to a land of proto-kingdoms,
whose leaders had acquired a taste for and had access to
the finest luxuries that the classical world could offer.
It was the height of the Celtic Iron Age, with all its feasting,
and Druids, and the full glory of Celtic art.
But this represents something much more powerful as well
because, by now, the Roman Empire was fully on the move,
had already placed the shadow of its hand over Gaul.
Soon the leaders here would be tasting more than Roman wine.
They'd be tasting Roman swords, as well,
and that would mark the beginning of a whole new era in our history.
Next time, my journey continues.
The lesson there is don't stand still
if a man on a horse is coming at you with a sword.
As I encounter a whole new age
of invasion.
These beaches were lined with thousands of British warriors.
And out there, two legions of Roman infantry
and, at their head, Julius Caesar, Roman general and budding emperor.
A time of bloody conflict.
These men were executed, their heads were cut off their bodies
and their heads were stuck on spikes.
This is what would happen to you if you got in the way of Rome.
A moment in our history that would change the face of Britain forever.
Ripped By mstoll