New Scientist
Image: Matthew Almon Roth
It wasn’t so much bring a bottle to British Iron Age parties, as bring a pig’s leg. At a site in south Wales people apparently feasted almost exclusively on the right forelegs of pigs – a mysterious ritual they kept up for centuries.
The dawn of the Iron Age in Britain, beginning about 2900 years ago, was a time of upheaval. The social order in the preceding centuries was based around trade in bronze artefacts – but bronze suddenly lost its value, leading to cultural and economic collapse across Europe and Asia.
“Without this trade network that has been sustaining social order, things get turbulent,” says Richard Madgwick at the University of Cardiff, UK. New cultural and economic systems emerged, which in the south of Britain seem to have been characterised by large gatherings.
“That is demonstrated in vast feasting events,” says Madgwick. “We see a number of mounds that preserve the remains of feasts.”
An Iron Age site at Llanmaes in the Vale of Glamorgan was a particularly important location – but the feasts that occurred there are unlike any others we know of from that time period. Read more on newscientist.com…
