The Iron Age in Northern Britain examines the impact of the Roman expansion northwards, and the native response to the Roman occupation on both sides of the frontiers. It traces the emergence of historically-recorded communities in the post-Roman period and looks at the clash of cultures between Celts and Romans, Picts and Scots. Northern Britain has too often been seen as peripheral to a 'core' located in south-eastern England. Unlike the Iron Age in southern Britain, the story of which can be conveniently terminated with the Roman conquest, the Iron Age in northern Britain has no such horizon to mark its end. The Roman presence in southern and eastern Scotland was militarily intermittent and left untouched large tracts of Atlantic Scotland for which there is a rich legacy of Iron Age settlement, continuing from the mid-first millennium BC to the period of Norse settlement in the late first millennium AD. Here D.W. Harding shows that northern Britain was not peripheral in the Iron Age: it simply belonged to an Atlantic European mainstream different from southern England and its immediate continental neighbours.

Map in pocket at end.

The Iron Age in Northern Britain examines the archaeological evidence for earlier Iron Age communities from the southern Pennines to the Northern and Western Isles and the impact of Roman expansion on local populations, through to the emergence of historically-recorded communities in the post-Roman period. The text has been comprehensively revised and expanded to include new discoveries and to take account of advanced techniques, with many new and updated illustrations. The volume presents a comprehensive picture of the ‘long Iron Age’, allowing readers to appreciate how perceptions of Iron Age societies have changed significantly in recent years. New material in this second edition also addresses the key issues of social reconstruction, gender, and identity, as well as assessing the impact of developer-funded archaeology on the discipline. Drawing on recent excavation and research and interpreting evidence from key studies across Scotland and northern England, The Iron Age in Northern Britain continues to be an accessible and authoritative study of later prehistory in the region.

The Iron Age in Northern Britain examines the archaeological evidence for earlier Iron Age communities from the southern Pennines to the Northern and Western Isles and the impact of Roman expansion on local populations, through to the emergence of historically recorded communities in the post-Roman period. The text has been comprehensively revised and expanded to include new discoveries and to take account of advanced techniques, with many new and updated illustrations. The volume presents a comprehensive picture of the 'long Iron Age', allowing readers to appreciate how perceptions of Iron Age societies have changed significantly in recent years. New material in this second edition also addresses the key issues of social reconstruction, gender, and identity, as well as assessing the impact of developer-funded archaeology on the discipline. Drawing on recent excavation and research and interpreting evidence from key studies across Scotland and northern England, The Iron Age in Northern Britain continues to be an accessible and authoritative study of later prehistory in the region.

Since its first publication in 1971, Barry Cunliffe's monumental survey has established itself as a classic of British archaeology. This fully revised fourth edition maintains the qualities of the earlier editions, whilst taking into account the significant developments that have moulded the discipline in recent years. Barry Cunliffe here incorporates new theoretical approaches, technological advances and a range of new sites and finds, ensuring that Iron Age Communities in Britain remains the definitive guide to the subject.

This book was written at a time when the older conventional diffusionist view of prehistory, largely associated with the work of V. Gordon Childe, was under rigorous scrutiny from British prehistorians, who still nevertheless regarded the ‘Arras’ culture of eastern Yorkshire and the ‘Belgic’ cemeteries of south-eastern Britain as the product of immigrants from continental Europe. Sympathetic to the idea of population mobility as one mechanism for cultural innovation, as widely recognized historically, it nevertheless attempted a critical re-appraisal of the southern British Iron Age in its continental context. Subsequent fashion in later prehistoric studies has favoured economic, social and cognitive approaches, and the cultural-historical framework has largely been superseded. Routine use of radiocarbon dating and other science-based applications, and new field data resulting from developer-led archaeology have revolutionized understanding of the British Iron Age, and once again raised issues of its relationship to continental Europe.