I.

Introduction

Iron Age, the period in antiquity in which iron replaced bronze for tools and weapons. In Europe the term “Iron Age” denotes the period between the end of the Bronze Age (c. 700 bc) and the spread of the Roman Empire (27 bc-ad 68), that is, the last stage of European prehistory before the Romans brought literacy and imposed a radically new way of life. From that point of view, those areas of Europe which the legions never reached—such as Scandinavia, Central Germany, or remote parts of Britain—remained in the Iron Age throughout the Roman period. In China, the Iron Age began c. 600 bc, in sub-Saharan Africa c. 500-400 bc, and in southern Africa c. ad 200.

II.

Iron-working

The major advantage of iron over bronze was that the ores from which it could be obtained were widely available and hence inexpensive when compared with bronze. It needed no alloying, and was an admirable material for the manufacture of saws, axes, hoes, and nails. However, it was much more difficult to process, and in prehistoric times a temperature high enough to melt it for casting in a mould was never achieved, except in China (see below). Instead, the ore was simply smelted (heated) in a furnace; the pieces of iron were picked out of the slag, reheated into a single lump, and then hammered into the required shape. Razor-sharp cutting edges could be produced. But since the whole process differed so radically from the manufacture of copper or bronze implements, it is no surprise that iron-working did not develop directly from bronze-working. Once iron had been adopted for heavy tools and weapons, bronze was used mostly for decorated personal items, such as pins or mirrors. Gold and silver continued as prestige materials, for example to make torcs, the heavy neck rings worn by Celtic warriors.

III.

Europe

Iron seems to have been first used extensively in western Asia by the Hittites between 2000 and 1500 bc, and spread from there into Europe, central and southern Asia and North Africa. It appears sporadically in the Late Bronze Age Urnfield cultures of Central Europe, but the first true Iron Age culture of Europe is the Hallstatt (c. 750-450 bc), named after a site in the Austrian Alps where about 2,500 graves have been excavated. The second is La Tène (c. 450-58 bc), named after a site on the shore of Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland where an abundance of metalwork has been recovered from the water.

Finds at Hallstatt date from the early part of the Iron Age, between 700 and 500 bc. The burials reflect the extraordinary wealth of the community, since the dead are accompanied by weapons, including swords of iron and bronze, daggers, axes, and helmets; bronze bowls, cauldrons and cups; ceramic vessels; bronze, gold and iron ornaments, and beads of amber and glass. The inhabitants of Hallstatt were part of a trading network that encompassed central Europe and reached beyond to the Baltic and the Mediterranean. Their wealth was based on salt, mined in the adjacent mountains. In recent centuries, salt miners have encountered numerous traces of prehistoric activity, including galleries with timber shoring and a range of organic remains preserved by the salt. These include miners' tools such as picks, shovels, and mallets; torches used for illumination in the dark passages which sometimes reach 330 m (1,000 ft) below the surface of the mountain; packs made from leather stretched over wooden frames which the miners used to haul blocks of salt to the entrance of the mine; and clothing made from hides and fur.

The Hallstatt Culture is characterized not only by long iron swords and horse trappings but also by rich chieftain burials under large barrows. One of the best known is the Vix tomb in eastern France, where a female burial of the 6th century bc was accompanied by a dismantled four-wheeled wagon, and a huge bronze crater (wine-mixing bowl) of Greek manufacture, indicating that direct trading contacts existed between Europe and the recently founded Greek colonies in the western Mediterranean. The Iron Age occupants of Europe can be considered Celts, and the Celtic aristocracy seem to have imported many prestige goods from the Mediterranean such as wine, rich textiles, and Etruscan bronzes.

A.

Ritual and Religion

Fascinating evidence of the ritual and religious framework through which Iron Age people understood their world is provided by bodies recovered from peat bogs, where anaerobic conditions have almost perfectly preserved them. In 1950 peat-cutters at Tollund Fen in Denmark saw a human face protruding from the peat. The body, which became known as the Tollund Man, was naked except for a leather cap and belt, the legs drawn up in the foetal position. The man's eyes were closed; around his neck was the rope by which he was hanged about 2,000 years ago. Hundreds of bog bodies have been discovered in northern Europe, most of them by local peat cutters decades or centuries ago. Most of them seem to have died violent deaths, often from strangulation (hanging or garotting), blows to the head, or stabbing (and sometimes from more than one of these). It is possible that they were being punished for a crime, but there is some evidence to suggest that their deaths were ritual sacrifices. The grain porridge found in the stomach of some of the bodies may represent ritual meals, while their death could have been by special sacrificial methods of execution. In addition it is likely that many of the victims were of high social standing: their hands are well-kept and without calluses, and they were groomed and stripped before being deposited in the bog.

During the Iron Age other ritual deposits, especially of metal objects, were made in bogs and waterways, so it is likely that these places of earth and water had some special meaning to Iron Age people. At La Tène, votive offerings included over 150 swords, some with decorated scabbards, as well as fibulae, spearheads, and other bronze and iron tools and weapons. Similar offerings, notably the Battersea shield (British Museum), have been recovered from the Thames.

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.