Original subtitles

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 path.

After more than a thousand years, the international world of the Bronze Age

collapsed. A hoard like this is a snapshot of the time when bronze was no

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 yet it's two and a half thousand years old.

A Britain of powerful regional identities where land and grain had

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 have 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

more than chieftains.

They were kings.

I'm going back two and a half thousand 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 responsive 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 Dainbury.

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

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,

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 hillfort communities were starting to

against one another, there was one consequence, and one consequence only,

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.

Barry Cunliffe first studied Danbury over 40 years ago.

These are iron spearheads. Now look at that one.

That's a mean thing.

A long shank.

Very sharp point.

That's been done with the intention to kill. Everything about it is violent.

Absolutely redolent of violence.

And this is all coming from in here? Everything here is from within Danbury.

We've also got evidence from the human bones themselves.

This is the real hard evidence.

Here we are. We've got the skull.

You can see the eye socket there.

And you see that hole there? And that's got the same section.

It's exactly the same section as that spear.

He would have cocked 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, because if you turn inside, you see the damage that it's done

but it's all healed over. So he must have had a headache and brain damage,

was still fit enough, presumably, to go into battle some years later to

end up with that spear in his head. So he went into battle already knowing...

for it was like to face these weapons.

He probably had been into battle many times, this guy.

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

thrown body parts, cleaning up after a battle, presumably.

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

burial. They're just being cleared away. Cleared away. You can see here a whole

series of slivers taken off his skull there with glancing blows.

Someone coming in. Yeah. He wouldn't have needed a haircut after that.

But the coup de grace was that. The great sword slash. I shouldn't have

that.

That's not healed over. 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,

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.

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.

And 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 anymore.

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 heal.

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

Britain. It's 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 warlord 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.

The great continental rivers were trade routes to the classical world to the

south.

As northern tribes controlling the routes developed a taste for luxury

they also began to invent a new decorative style.

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

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 jewelry,

but in the objects that could be afforded by that class of people that

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 the 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.

Throughout much of 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 vertebra, there's a fracture running through the

epiphysis of the vertebra.

And this is evidence that this horse was ridden.

And this is the first time we have evidence for riding in prehistoric

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 at further distances and faster.

You could attack a neighbouring settlement, take control of their

A man on a horseback would have major advantages over a man on foot.

By 300 BC, Britain was becoming the land that resonates in ancient myth 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.

He 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 sore wounds

to the long bone.

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 remember

them from life could have grown old and grey regaling their children and

grandchildren with stories about this man remembering what a great and

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

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

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.

Right. 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...

If this is a French cemetery, what's 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 a war band coming

across. But in fact, most of these people look as if they're local. They're

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.

The Celtic culture that came to represent an entire era might have had

genesis right here, in the continentally connected warrior elites of East

Yorkshire.

So a warrior of the status of the Kirkburn warrior, someone of that...

style and demeanor. Absolutely, and he was buried just about 10 miles from

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.

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 martial 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

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

good shape, which suggests she had access to a good, even privileged diet.

But much more revealing and fascinating than her mere bone.

are the circumstances in which she was buried.

This woman was buried lying on, 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 hubcaps.

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

the reins pass, 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 artwork.

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, makes it seem trivial and to

do with vanity.

This, in its heyday, would have been highly polished iron, but even at its

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 are able to communicate

directly with the dead.

So, with these items here, it's 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

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

that my...

homeland belongs to me. But whether or not that's the same as a 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

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

the detailed prehistory of living individuals.

I know it's very complicated science that's involved, but can you tell me in

simple terms, you know, 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.

In theory, you could have matches from all over the world, but let's take a

what they are in fact.

Right. Oh, big red spot on Scotland.

Yeah. Let me zoom in a bit.

And it's the Western Isles of Scotland.

Yes.

We've got no recent historical connection to the islands.

Well, it's not only Western Isles.

Some more matches in mainland Scotland.

But 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

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.

And 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.

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, more than that, in fact, there's nothing in Scandinavia and northern

Europe. So it's 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's correct.

If I tell him.

What did I tell my Scottish dad?

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's 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 weak

in 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 descendant 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, Purch,

and so on.

And to take another example, magloth would be the word for a prince or a

on the basis of Welsh mile and Irish mile.

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, was they wouldn't understand a

of it, because this is a language group that is unrelated, or only differently

related, to English.

And so, you know, you'd be in the market and you'd say, 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 south -west of England to the north -east of

Scotland, would they hear the language changing as though with dialects?

Yes, almost certainly.

I mean, that's probably definitely the case by virtue of the fact that these

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, neighbor to neighbor, they

perfectly well would understand each other. But if you move them from all the

way from the southwest all the way 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, OK.

Think of a lord, the prince, like you, for example, coming into the

feasting hall and people would rise and would say to you... I certainly hope so.

which would mean basically something like, I honour you, long -haired lord.

Did you just call me a hippie in Celtic?

Possibly.

I'm used to seeing and handling artefacts, things made of metal, stone,

It's quite a strange feeling to get the sound 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, well, they perhaps couldn't have a conversation with an

Age warrior.

There's every possibility that they could make themselves understood.

And so the world of the past and the modern world would collide at that

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 rivaled, but they were also bound by a common Celtic culture.

In the southern highlands of Scotland, using experimental archaeology, it's

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

house built on a platform that sits above the waters of the Loch.

This would have been the home, 2 ,000 years ago, of a local chieftain.

A building like that is about status and prestige.

It's visible from 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 now 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.

So the story here, from this little wooden plate, is that feasting was a key

part of power -broking in late Iron Age Britain.

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.

They didn't have access to the kind 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.

Lots of edible greens here.

Things like chickweed and sorrel, which is a lemony taste.

Let's see what you think.

It's got a very definite flavour.

This is sorrel.

And 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 Lochte at one of the Cranog 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.

It's kind of an echo of Scotch broth.

Yeah, I think it would be.

Over the hearth, a masterpiece of decorative wrought ironwork would have

supported a bit roast and proclaimed the standing of its owner.

This is an example or a representation of a fire dog.

And the fire dog would have been a high -status, really classy piece of art.

And you can see the curve of the back of the head.

It's maybe a horse or a bull with the horns sticking out, or even maybe 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? Food is 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

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's a room full of fiery, hot -blooded Celts.

And if one of them felt he was being slighted when he should have been being

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,

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

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 torque.

An elaborate, lavish piece of jewellery worn around the neck.

It's absolutely breathtaking.

The weight of gold, just the luster of it. It's been compared in terms of its

significance as being right up there with the British crown jewels.

And you 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 year 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

even began to issue their own coins.

Look at these.

These are some of the earliest coins ever found in England.

And 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 talk, which dates from the same period as these three gold coins, is

obviously a symbol of authority.

But this is where you start to get the authority of the state becoming

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

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 hide, 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, is the part made to go round the slave's neck.

It would fit tightly. It might even make it hard to breathe.

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

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 leaves.

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'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 probably 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

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 case of warfare. They could actually

into the middle of a battlefield and stop the war.

Right. So they were that important.

OK. 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 to 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.

Little evidence remains of these powerful priests of Celtic society

legends of oaks, mistletoe.

and golden sickles.

But discoveries of unusual and mysterious spoons are thought to be

the indispensable art of divination.

What is this collection of weirdness?

Well, we have got here a pair of replica spoons, and they're called divination

spoons. That means divination means telling the future, and they were used

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.

And I think they were used together, placed like that, and then something

or dripped through the hole, and then the spoons would be opened to see where

the quartered surface it would fall.

OK. If you want your ancestors to speak to you about perhaps where you should go

next, where your herds should go, to do that you would use their bones.

I'd rather you than me.

So we can see that the powder that I blew through this hole has not landed,

you might think, exactly opposite the hole, but down in this left -hand corner

here.

So we could actually try a little liquid now, couldn't we? This is where you

come in.

I'm guessing that's not ketchup.

No, it's not, and it's not tomato juice.

It's blood.

OK.

You've got actually quite a nice patterning there. Yeah.

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 and 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.

The Druids were men so powerful that even the Celtic kings danced to their

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

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

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

So something definitely un -warrior -like.

So what's going on? What else do we know? Well, he was buried wearing... the

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's so slight, it's highly unlikely that it was

ever worn as a military helmet to give protection to a man's head.

in combat the only other artifacts 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 cast 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 Danbury, 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

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 spike.

This was what would happen to you if you got in the way of Rome.

A moment in our history that would change the faith of Britain forever.

If you want to follow in the footsteps of our ancestors, then go to the website

bbc .co .uk slash history to find out how to connect with ancient Britain in

your area.