Can you compare and contrast the Bronze and Iron Ages. How are they alike? Kiyla Hill (12)

Oh this sounds like one of the questions I had to answer a long time ago when I last took exams – ‘compare and contrast’…! 

In some ways they are similar and one is the logical follow on from the other, but the really important difference is what happens at the end of the Neolithic (the Stone Age) when the first metals, not bronze to start with but copper and gold, started to be used. Because this marked a change in how people were buried, those ‘Beaker’ burials with nice pots, metal and lovely flint arrowheads (like the Amesbury Archer from near Stonehenge) and the end of people building huge monuments together, like henges and Silbury Hill. It was the beginning of individuals having real wealth and showing it.

In some ways the next big change happens in the middle of the Bronze Age when we can see start to evidence of farming landscapes appearing in many areas, with fields and boundaries and recognisable settlements (‘villages’), making patterns in the landscape which carry on right through the Bronze Age and Iron Age and are still there through the Roman period. 

If there are differences then I suppose that you could say that by the end of the Iron Age there is a more ’tribal’ society with groups of people who see themselves as being different from others. In Dorset I live in the tribal territory of the Durotriges. And there is clearly a hierarchy – the equivalent of our old class divisions, in other words a society with a few people at the top who have wealth and power and who show it by living in hillforts and having luxurious possessions, some imported from the Roman Empire. 

One really important thing to remember is that change didn’t happen overnight. People didn’t wake up one morning and go “we’d better get rid of those old fashioned Bronze tools – we’re living in the Iron Age now”. Changes took place gradually and in some ways the effects of new materials like iron were not as important as changes in society. These had more to do with the ways people organised themselves, created identities for themselves and the groups they lived in and even with their beliefs. 

I hope that this hasn’t confused you but it’s a big and complicated question!