The earliest iron-users seem to have entrenched themselves temporarily
within hill-top forts, mainly in the south. Gradually, they moved
inland, establishing _individual_ farm sites with extensive systems
of rectangular fields. We recognize these fields by the “lynchets” or
lines of soil-creep which plowing left on the slopes of hills. New
crops appeared; there were now bread wheat, oats, and rye, as well as
barley.
At Little Woodbury, near the town of Salisbury, a farmstead has been
rather completely excavated. The rustic buildings were within a
palisade, the round house itself was built of wood, and there were
various outbuildings and pits for the storage of grain. Weaving was
done on the farm, but not blacksmithing, which must have been a
specialized trade. Save for the lack of firearms, the place might
almost be taken for a farmstead on the American frontier in the early
1800’s.
Toward 250 B.C. there seems to have been a hasty attempt to repair the
hill-forts and to build new ones, evidently in response to signs of
restlessness being shown by remote relatives in France.
THE SECOND PHASE
Perhaps the hill-forts were not entirely effective or perhaps a
compromise was reached. In any case, the newcomers from the Marne
district did establish themselves, first in the southeast and then to
the north and west. They brought iron with decoration of the La Tène
type and also the two-wheeled chariot. Like the Wessex warriors of
over a thousand years earlier, they made “heroes’” graves, with their
warriors buried in the war-chariots and dressed in full trappings.
[Illustration: CELTIC BUCKLE]
The metal work of these Marnian newcomers is excellent. The peculiar
Celtic art style, based originally on the classic tendril motif,
is colorful and virile, and fits with Greek and Roman descriptions
of Celtic love of color in dress. There is a strong trace of these
newcomers northward in Yorkshire, linked by Ptolemy’s description to
the Parisii, doubtless part of the Celtic tribe which originally gave
its name to Paris on the Seine. Near Glastonbury, in Somerset, two
villages in swamps have been excavated. They seem to date toward the
middle of the first century B.C., which was a troubled time in Britain.
The circular houses were built on timber platforms surrounded with
palisades. The preservation of antiquities by the water-logged peat of
the swamp has yielded us a long catalogue of the materials of these
villagers.
In Scotland, which yields its first iron tools at a date of about 100
B.C., and in northern Ireland even slightly earlier, the effects of the
two phases of newcomers tend especially to blend. Hill-forts, “brochs”
(stone-built round towers) and a variety of other strange structures
seem to appear as the new ideas develop in the comparative isolation of
northern Britain.
THE THIRD PHASE
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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