The Iron Age in Northern Britain

Celts and Romans, Natives and Invaders

By D.W. Harding

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About the Book

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.

Reviews

'A well-written book that presents a critical view of existing data and publications on the topic and a relevant theoretical debate.It is illustrated with outstanding arial photographs of sites.' - www.PalArch.nl

'Clearly the work of a man at the peak of his profession ... It is the work of an archeologist and should be commended as such ... the book has an impressive bibliography [and] is lavishly illustrated ... This is an incredibly important book, and I would urge those that teach this subject to buy it.' - S.A.T.H History Teaching Review Yearbook

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Preface 1. Legacy of the Past 2. The Earlier Iron Age 3. The Roman Iron Age and its Impact 4. The Later Iron Age 5. Review and Conclusion Bibliography Index

About the Author(s)

D. W. Harding is Abercromby Professor and a former Vice-Principal at the University of Edinburgh. He has been involved in fieldwork in Northern Britain, including excavation and air-photography (for which he has held a private pilot's licence), for more than thirty years, most recently directing a long-term programme of excavation and research in the Western Isles of Scotland. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.