Talk:British Iron Age

removed "wetter" statement
I removed this statement with no citation:

Within this context, the climate became considerably wetter, forcing Bronze Age farmsteads that had grown on lowland areas to relocate to upland sites.

It seems likely to me that Iron age civilization would push the previous inhabitants into the hills. this is what happened in the iron age in Crete. I'm not going to spend my time researching climate science, as I don't believe it was a driving factor behind social change. I'm a little tired of seeing these claims everywhere, especially where they've been disproven.

"linguistic differences"
the first section doesn't make any sense. It first says that the lingustic evidence, presumably referring the similarity between British and continental Celtic languages, is what shows a migratory link between Britain and the continent; but then in trying to refute this link it talks about how linguistic differences are accounted for. What are these linguistic differences? And what about the linguistic similarities, how are these explained away? Are not Welsh, Cornish, Gaelic etc obviously Celtic languages related to Gaulish and the like? --86.144.102.226 (talk) 21:13, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
 * The above reason is why I deleted the sentence. It does nothing except confuse the issue by talking about differences, when the issue is not the difference between insular and mainland Celtic languages; but the fact that Celtic languages are even on Britain in the first place. --86.164.119.62 (talk) 20:56, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

British Isles and British Iron Age
Hi, the article name makes it clear that the article is about the "British Iron Age". Trying to widen the scope of the article to address "Iron Age of the British Isles" makes it a different article. If you want to do this, start by changing the article name, and then adding appropriate sections for Ireland. Doing it in reverse is incorrect, and leads to misleading readers into thinking that the British Isles is British. Thank you. --Bardcom (talk) 17:30, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
 * P.S. If that is truly your intention, just click on the "Move" button at the top. I very much doubt if the move would be seen as contentious.  --Bardcom (talk) 17:32, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Will you please stop undoing my edit. I said I'm working on it. I will move the page in due course if that's what you want, but please leave it 'till I've made all the changes. Irisjones (talk) 17:32, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

There is a panel on the right with the title "History of the British Isles". Irisjones (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 17:37, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm not going to move it yet, having just read the introduction on page moves. Thank you.Irisjones (talk)


 * Fine, then please leave the article as it is. Since the article title is "British Iron Age", then referring to the British Isles in this context is not correct.  If you read the article, it only deals with Great Britain anyway - it doesn't deal with Ireland at all.  In fact, the article might be more correctly referred to as "Iron Age in Great Britain", as it also doesn't discuss the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man at all either....  --Bardcom (talk) 17:49, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

ok wow, there seems to be a huge misunderstanding here. I have no issue over the British Isles/Great Britain thing. My problem is with the sentence talking about "linguistic differences" (see top section here for why). That is what I'm editing about. Hopefully we can resolve this confusion :) --86.164.119.62 (talk) 23:23, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Celtic Britain
"This period is also called the era of Celtic Britain" With a reference to a tourist guide! Find a worthy reference or it shall be removed.

"Extensive field systems, now called Celtic fields" Really or did someone make that up?

"The Roman historian Tacitus described the Britons as being descended from people who had arrived from the continent (which at that time was dominated by the Celts)" I thought it was dominated by the Romans? Unreferenced.

"Linguistic evidence inferred from the surviving Celtic languages in northern and western Great Britain appeared to back this idea up" So linguistic evidence from two unrelated languages appear to back up that the British Isles were inhabited by "celts" who came from 3 completely different regions of Europe?

The "Series on celtic mythology" box should be removed, it would perhaps find a better home in an Irish gift shop next to the Clannad CDs.Stutley (talk) 14:10, 6 August 2008 (UTC)
 * The Celtic languages of Britain are demonstrably related to each other, and are in turn related to ancient continental languages such as Gaulish. These Celtic languages, "Celt" being a term borrowed from ancient Greek which was used to describe speakers of these languages on the continent, have been reconstructed as having derived from a common ancestral language known as Proto-Celtic. These kind of reconstructions cannot be traced back further than about 10,000 years at the very most, wheras Britain has been inhabited for far longer than that - therefore at some point the language spoken by people in Britain must have switched from non-Celtic to Celtic. This is the linguistic evidence spoken of. --81.158.147.16 (talk) 06:45, 2 November 2008 (UTC)
 * On the template point, we have next to no clear knowledge of the "mythology" of the period described here, and back-forming an account from medieval or even later sources is highly speculative indeed, so I have removed the template. Johnbod (talk) 01:07, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

"Main article" for "immigration"
Celtic immigration Main article: Celtic immigration to the British Isles
 * 1) We don't have such an exactly article currently.
 * 2) The section to which the link sends, is under a challenge.
 * Should we hide this reference for now?
 * Lincoln Josh (talk) 16:29, 10 September 2012 (UTC)
 * No. The tag has been there for some 16 months, & I'm not sure the text is at all the same - it seems fairly tentative & to cover, or at least touch on, the issues mentioned on the talk page to me. Johnbod (talk) 01:12, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

More on the British and Irish
Sorry, you can't lump the prehistoric British in with the prehistoric Irish. Not the same at all. The Irish are customarily described under the term Irish Iron Age. The dates and the cultures are not the same. Sure, they are both generally Celtic, but there the similarity ends. Ireland in ancient times was not part of the British Isles, which is a Roman term. It had its own name, Ierne, which was opposed to Albion. The British did not live in Ierne. They were not the Picts and the Irish always refered to the Picts as people living on the other island. The British were more closely connected with Gaul. The Irish never were. The tribal names are not the same. There is a tradition that they came from Celtic Spain, which makes them somewhat earlier than classical Gaul. So, we can't regard the Irish as unRomanized British. If you look on the Internet in previewable books you are not going to find them lumped together. So without straining the article too much I am going to make these points gradually, with refs.

There is a second implication almost as bad, that the Scots and Scotland had anything to do with the British. Everybody knows that the Scots came from Ireland AFTER the fall of the Roman province of Britain. They colonized the Picts and took over what was left of the British there. So, Iron Age Britain has nothing all to do with the Scots and if Scotland existed it certainly was not in the north of Britain. I am going to work in these implications with references also. We need to keep our ancient cultures straight. By the way, personal web sites are not references.Dave (talk) 16:33, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

Iron age great Britain anachronistic
Great Britain and Britain are political phenomena of the early middle ages when some of the Celts escaped from Cornwall to Brittany then named after them. So today we have Bretagne and Grand Bretagne (excuse my definite articles). Earlier populations made no such distinctions. There was Britain and the British isles, which certainly did not refer to the same islands as the name does today. Scandinavia was a British Isle (by mistake). The British lived in Britain; they did not live in Ireland. The Scots also lived in Ireland and the English were over there in Denmark. Who was in Britain? Why, the British, of course. They did not live on the coast of Gaul. We seem to have trouble getting beyond this British empire thing, and then there is the British occupation of Ireland thing, and then there is Scotland the Brave, and oh yes, Braveheart (great movie). We need to go back, way back - watch the gold watch - when I count to ten you will be back before you and your ancestors were born, way back - you will be in the British Iron Age - see any Irish? No. See any Scots? No. See any English? No. See any Frenchmen? No. What is the name of your country - why, it is - Britain! No, you can't get a tattoo, and you better not collect any heads. Sorry.Dave (talk) 05:45, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

Lack of refs
I note that parts of the article I have not worked on have no refs and the material is not covered in the links. I check the discussion above and sure enough the opinion wars have started: I think this. Yeah? Well I think that. Yeah? Well what I think is right and what you think is wrong. Yeah? And so on. In a nutshell, who cares what you think? What do the authors think? Whoever did the article, thank you for your work and your presentation. It brought the topic up in a meaningful way. I am going through now looking up what you said and looking at the sources. If you said rightly and it was the best thing to say then I will only be adding refs. I cannot guarantee however that will be the case (as usual). Once again thanks. They who do not write will not understand the labors and satisfactions involved. Better to have written and been edited than never to have written. Later.Dave (talk) 00:31, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

3 or 4 million people?
Such figures are sometimes advanced for Roman Britain, which only covers part of the island group, and for late medieval Britain, but I've never seen such high figures, outside Wikipedia, for pre-Roman or for that matter post-Roman Britain. 173.66.211.53 (talk) 19:03, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Where is the Iron?
I visited this page hoping to learn about the material culture (if that is the correct term) of Iron-Age Britain. Where did the iron come from? How was it processed? What was it used for? How was it distributed among the population? Did it have symbolic or cultural importance? What other goods/materials were people producing/using/selling? If this is not the correct page for such information, links to the pages where it does go would be appreciated. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.25.75.75 (talk) 21:53, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

Formatting Issue
There seems to be an issue with the layout of this page when using the default styling (i.e. when not logged in, maybe try in-private or something). It looks to do with some sort of conflict between the Iron Age box and the content of this page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Unfalln (talk • contribs) 01:05, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

External links modified
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No mention of the Late pre-Roman Iron Age (LPRIA)
Despite the fact that another article, Prehistoric Britain, does discuss it very briefly. This is very unfortunate. I don't have the time but there are a lot of good sources. Doug Weller talk 13:46, 16 February 2018 (UTC)

Archaeological evidence
This paragraph talks about the convergence of British archaeology with that of the Continent as it enters the Iron Age. Could we insert a glimpse of the difference between them before it, to help give insight in the significance of this change, please? I would do so myself, but I am not clear on it- the relevant Pages of Wikipedia, for example have a page for Atlantic period covering Britain and a page covering Urnfield in Continental Europe at the same time, which do not make it clear what the differences are. IceDragon64 (talk) 23:12, 27 February 2023 (UTC)