The mass of data recovered from the soil of Britain, which reflects upon the life of Iron Age communities, is very considerable but it is at best a partial statement of the reality of Iron Age being. Everything that has been recovered comes to us through a series of filters. Objects have had to be discarded or selected for deposition rather than being destroyed or recycled. The burial conditions have had to be suitable to encourage preservation and the object has had to be discovered, by accident or design, and been considered worthy of retention. Only a minute percentage of Iron Age material culture has come down to us, and what survives is by no means a random sample of what once existed.
Much the same can be said of the settlement or burial context in which the material remains are found. The majority of the settlements are little more than negative traces – pits and post- holes – interspersed with rubbish. Except in waterlogged conditions the organic component seldom survives. Only in areas where stone is plentiful do the superstructure and internal fittings of settlements sometimes remain. The ravages of time and, more recently, accelerated destruction by ploughing and reafforestation are fast destroying what little structural evidence has survived.
Given this partial and fragmentary database it is understandably difficult to know where to begin to reconstruct the life of the Iron Age communities who inhabited Britain.
The best-preserved body of data is undoubtedly the physical evidence of Iron Age settlements. Many thousands are known and, of these, hundreds have been examined by excavation, some of them on a comparatively large scale. The settlement evidence from Britain is fuller than that from any other country in Europe. In the section to follow, though four chapters are devoted to settlement, the treatment barely does justice to the richness and variety of the record. Considerable regional variation is apparent and hints of social differentiation can be seen. The emergence of hillforts in the centre south is indicative of a more complex level of social organization while the oppida of the first century BC and early first century AD, though still ill-known, must imply a degree of socio-economic complexity never before seen in the country. Through the settlement evidence therefore glimpses of social order and social change can be had.
Evidence for food-producing strategies is fast growing as the systematic retrieval of animal bones and flotation techniques to gather grain and other seeds become normal practice on excavations. Integrated environmental studies are now well under way and in combination with regional sampling strategies are beginning to reveal the rich complexity of the potential data. The chapter dealing with food-producing strategies (chapter 16) is at best a very summary statement of one of the fastest growing fields in Iron Age studies.
The artefacts themselves allow several themes to be developed. The productive capacity of the communities is considered in chapter 18 focusing on craft, industry and art. Here again current work on characterizing materials and examining waste products such as slag is opening up new fields, reflecting both the technological capacity of the population and the networks of exchange which supplied them with raw materials.
The recognition of imported goods and their local copies touches upon the complex question of interactions with the Continent (chapter 17). To what extent these exchanges were the result of normal social intercourse or were driven by external forces such as folk movement and the aggressive marketing practices of Mediterranean states are difficult, but not uninteresting, questions to approach. The dataset is not yet susceptible to the statistical treatment necessary if the study is to advance from the purely descriptive. But for the last century or so before the Roman invasion classical sources throw some light on the question.
Finally we come to altogether more difficult questions of behaviour. Warfare, death and religion are three convenient headings under which to begin to consider these matters. But here the archaeological data are poor and the subject obscure, not least because of the difficulty which modern observers face in attempting to explain prehistoric behaviour patterns. The dangers inherent in overinterpretation are many.
In the section to follow, therefore, the different strands of evidence are teased out and displayed as simply as possible to expose their quality. What we are doing is to identify the elements of social reconstruction and arrange some of them into simple systems. The interrelationships of those systems and their complex feedback mechanisms we will consider in the final section.