At first it is possible to see the separate results of these folk movements, but the developing cultures soon fused with each other and with earlier British elements. Presently there were also strains of other northern and western European pottery and traces of Urnfield practices themselves which appeared in the finished British product. I hope you will sense that I am vastly over-simplifying the details. The result seems to have been--among other things--a new kind of agricultural system. The land was marked off by ditched divisions. Rectangular fields imply the plow rather than hoe cultivation. We seem to get a picture of estate or tribal boundaries which included village communities; we find a variety of tools in bronze, and even whetstones which show that iron has been honed on them (although the scarce iron has not been found). Let me give you the picture in Professor S. Piggott’s words: “The ... Late Bronze Age of southern England was but the forerunner of the earliest Iron Age in the same region, not only in the techniques of agriculture, but almost certainly in terms of ethnic kinship ... we can with some assurance talk of the Celts ... the great early Celtic expansion of the Continent is recognized to be that of the Urnfield people.” Thus, certainly by 500 B.C., there were people in Britain, some of whose descendants we may recognize today in name or language in remote parts of Wales, Scotland, and the Hebrides. THE COMING OF IRON Iron--once the know-how of reducing it from its ore in a very hot, closed fire has been achieved--produces a far cheaper and much more efficient set of tools than does bronze. Iron tools seem first to have been made in quantity in Hittite Anatolia about 1500 B.C. In continental Europe, the earliest, so-called Hallstatt, iron-using cultures appeared in Germany soon after 750 B.C. Somewhat later, Greek and especially Etruscan exports of _objets d’art_--which moved with a flourishing trans-Alpine wine trade--influenced the Hallstatt iron-working tradition. Still later new classical motifs, together with older Hallstatt, oriental, and northern nomad motifs, gave rise to a new style in metal decoration which characterizes the so-called La Tène phase. A few iron users reached Britain a little before 400 B.C. Not long after that, a number of allied groups appeared in southern and southeastern England. They came over the Channel from France and must have been Celts with dialects related to those already in England. A second wave of Celts arrived from the Marne district in France about 250 B.C. Finally, in the second quarter of the first century B.C., there were several groups of newcomers, some of whom were Belgae of a mixed Teutonic-Celtic confederacy of tribes in northern France and Belgium. The Belgae preceded the Romans by only a few years. HILL-FORTS AND FARMS