Iron Age

B

Burial

Burial in the Iron Age was generally by inhumation. Perhaps the best-known Iron Age burials are those of Pazyryk, in the Altai mountains of Siberia, dating to about 400 bc, and containing not only the superbly preserved bodies of people and horses, but also lavish textiles and leather objects. The Pazyryk tombs appear on the surface as low earth mounds, or barrows, covered with stones, and each concealing a central tomb shaft 4-5 m (13-16 ft) deep. These shafts must have been dug during the Arctic summer, when the ground was not frozen hard. Within the shafts were timber chambers, and over these were layers of more logs and stones which filled the shaft up to the base of the mound. Shortly after the tombs were constructed, the residual warm air in the chambers rose, and the water vapour it contained condensed on the stones of the fill and the mound, and trickled back down. This moisture seeped into the corpses and the accompanying grave goods and then froze solid during the Siberian winter. The mound above insulated the frozen tomb and kept it from thawing, and so the Pazyryk burials were encased in ice for over two millennia.

Within one burial chamber, which was lined with felt wall-hangings, the embalmed bodies of a man and a woman had been placed in a coffin made from a hollowed-out larch trunk, on which were cut-out leather silhouettes of deer. Fantastic tattoos covered the man's arms and part of one leg. These tattoos depicted real and imaginary animals, including griffins, rams, birds, snakes, and deer. The coffin also contained a woollen rug which had been wrapped around the bodies and items of clothing made from linen. Elsewhere in the burial chamber were more clothing and textiles, leather objects, wooden furniture, gold and silver ornaments, and mirrors. Each of the tombs contained between seven and 14 horse burials, set to one side of the main burial chambers. Some of the horses were preserved, along with extraordinary furnishings: bridles, saddles, and cloth horse-coats. Among the horses was a large four-wheeled wagon, with a felt canopy ornamented with appliqued figures of swans.

The people who interred their dead in tombs like Pazyryk were nomadic horse-riding, sheep-raising folk, sharing many traits with the central Asian nomads of today. In many respects, they had much in common with the Scythians, who lived far to the west in the steppes north of the Black Sea, and who also buried their elite in rich tombs and featured animals prominently in their art. More importantly, the finds in the frozen tombs, particularly the textiles, show that contact had been made with Persia and China at this time, indicated by similarities in patterns and the use of materials such as silk.

C

Settlements

In Iron Age Europe, settlements tended to develop into fortified nuclei. These took the form of hillforts, of which Maiden Castle, in southern England, and Heuneburg, in southern Germany, are notable examples, or of oppida, the fortified tribal capitals on the scale of small towns, with houses, workshops, warehouses, and residences for the elite, that Julius Caesar mentioned in his account of his campaigns.

One of the most fascinating Iron Age settlements in Europe, dating to about 700 bc, is at Biskupin, a peninsula in north-central Poland, where excavations have revealed the waterlogged remains of a fortified settlement of over 100 houses in 13 rows, with walls preserved to a height of more than 1 m (over 3 ft). Between them were streets paved with logs, while surrounding the entire settlement was a rampart made from timber cribbing filled with earth and stone. The inhabitants of Biskupin (estimated at between 1,000 and 1,200) were farmers and herders, who used fields and pastures on the firmer ground south of the peninsula. Millet, wheat, barley, rye, and beans were the main crops. The animal bones found in the settlement indicated that pigs were important food animals, but cattle were kept for milk and as draught animals as well as for meat. The waterlogged deposits permitted the recovery of an extraordinary range of objects made of wood, bone, and cloth, in addition to grinding stones and metal ornaments and tools.

IV

Asia

As with bronze, iron-working seems to have developed independently in eastern Asia. Iron was first smelted around 600 bc in China, being cast in much the same way as bronze in this part of the world. (The very high temperatures needed for this were not achieved elsewhere for another 1,000 years: casting of iron only began in Europe in the Middle Ages.)

The Chinese produced huge quantities of cast-iron tools and weapons. New agricultural implements and wooden tools with iron tips greatly increased the productivity of the land. As in Europe, coinage also arose in China at this time, around 500 bc, and city defences together with weaponry indicate that warfare was endemic, as reflected most spectacularly in the completion of the Great Wall and in the terracotta army of lifesize pottery figures of soldiers with full armour and weapons, buried with China's first emperor, Shi Huangdi, after his death in 210 bc.

V

Africa

There was virtually no use of metals in sub-Saharan Africa before about 500 bc, when both iron and copper came into use in the savannah and forest regions of the west; large amounts of iron were smelted in the Nile Valley. Iron had reached eastern Africa by 200 bc, and by ad 200 had been carried to the south by ancestors of the modern Bantu, together with farming. They lived in settled village communities, using pottery, cultivating plants, and keeping domesticated animals.

It is only in the Nile Valley and parts of West Africa that there is any evidence of copper having been worked before the introduction of iron. It is probable that ironworking reached sub-Saharan Africa from the Phoenician colonies of the north coast, or via the Nile Valley, but the local craftsmen soon displayed tremendous skill and inventiveness: for example, in Tanzania and Rwanda, brick-built furnaces were widely used by at least the 5th century bc to produce what was technically a high-carbon steel; yet farther east, around the Rift Valley, pastoral peoples were still using only stone tools a thousand years later.

The southern African Iron Age is divided into the Early Iron Age (c. ad 200-1000) and the Late Iron Age (ad 1000 to the 19th century), when wealthy states with stratified societies, such as that of the Shona, developed. The Late Iron Age stone-walled town of Great Zimbabwe, built in the 13th century, was the capital of the Shona empire, which stretched from the Zambezi River to the northern Transvaal and derived its wealth from controlling trade with the east coast.