Animals and Humans in the Late Iron Age art of England and Wales, with special reference to Kent

Description: The latest in a series of online talks hosted by the KAS with Dr Reb Ellis-Haken, Postdoctoral Research Associate with the University of York Department of Archaeology. The use of figurative depictions in early Celtic art (c.400BC-AD100) in England and Wales has always fascinated researchers. For decades it has been thought that the aggression of boars made them an ideal symbol of warriors, that corvids related to the battlefield and death, and that horses were the sacred symbol of kings. However, a recent doctoral study challenged these old ideas, including revealing the importance of regionality in this subject area. This talk will introduce this topic, and specifically focus on the use of figurative imagery by Late Iron Age communities in Kent.

Transcript: well hello hello happy New Year everybody thank you all for coming back and uh saying hello to us again I hope you had a lovely break and are ready for more archaeological wonders in 2025 thanks for joining us tonight this is the seventh in our series seven months we've been doing this now Jacob um exclusive online talks for the Kent archaeological Society it's a new year so we should be experienced professionals by now um and we hope to avoid any technical issues but please do bear with us if there are any glitches in the system Jacob all fresh and excitable from 2025 is as ever lurking in the background to help us navigate the ocean of technological Terrors should they arise if you're not a member of the society then please do think about joining us it works out about £330 a month and for that you'll receive a copy of our yearly Journal archaeologia cantiana full of the most current historical and archaeological research in the county you'll also receive our biannual magazine regular newsletters exclusive access to our collections conferences and selected events opportunities to get involved in excavations and research projects and you'll allow us to keep putting out content such as these free online talks we do Outreach in school schols Community groups and seminars um all of which we hope brings the benefit of Kent's archaeology and history to everybody check the website for details on how you can become a member um or email us um on any of the contact details that we we have distributed um and Jacob will surely put in the chat somewhere for us okay uh let's start we just check that everyone can hear me okay um is there Echo with more people if anyone can say in the chat if there's a bit more Echo um okay brilliant thank you um all right so housekeeping the talk will last for around an hour after which we will have time for questions if you should have any please could we all uh keep ourselves on mute with our cameras off throughout the talk so that we can hear our speaker clearly during the Q&A you can either use the raiseed hand feature and we will unmute you when it's your turn to ask the question personally or if you'd prefer you can type your question into the chat box and I will read it out for you I hope it goes without saying but please be courteous and polite to our speaker and to each other we will be recording the session and it may be posted to our video channels in the future but no personal data will be shared and if you ask a question but would prefer it not to be published just send us an email and we'll make sure that it's not on there so the boring bits out of the way on to our speaker Dr Rebecca Ellis hkin is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of York and an archaeologist specializing in artifact studies and small finds photography of artistic representation created during the European Iron Age like many of us Rebel was drawn to archaeology after catching episodes of time team and her passion was cemented following involvement in a community archaeology project in leads as a team Reb obtained her first class undergraduate degree in archaeology and Heritage studies from the University of Wester and completed an MA in archaeology at the University of Bradford she pursued her PhD at the University of Hull which focused on the use of genuinely figurative animals in the Laten period art of England and Wales Circa 400 BC to ad 100s Reb has over 15 years experience taking part in and running Community archaeology projects and has been involved in many fieldwork projects including activities with the Roman roads research Association she worked for the portable Antiquity scheme as a fines liaison assistant and continues to advise the scheme on animal and human figurative fines of the period alongside a general interest in art and artifact studies from the ne lithic to the Roman periods Reb's research explores changes and use of both abstract and figurative art and its social role in mid to late Iron Age Britain and the near continent her important work gives a voice back to the populations that have been long overshadowed by the Roman Empire I should admit at this point that I am a huge fan of Reb's work and uh I have watched many of her incredible talks online which you can find um just search YouTube and you see them and I would say they are all definitely worth checking out and she has many in the pipeline so I hear so away from archaeology I also hear re is a Keem Baker an amateur Cricket Ace and a dog lover so we're really pleased and excited that she's here to talk with us tonight Reb over to you oh there we go hello thank you I really have to live up to that now thank you for such a lovely introduction I am just G to oh I'm just waiting to be allowed to share my screen and then I will uh carry on there we go can I just have confirmation everybody can see that nice and clear have I got a thumbs up anywhere can everybody see that okay oh yep all good thank you very much indeed thank you so much for that lovely introduction um yeah I can't really say any more to that I think so I'm here this evening to talk about the animals and humans in the late in age art of England and Wales with specific reference to Kent um and I like to describe this area of material culture studies as the Dark Side of Iron Age material culture studies spefic specifically and what I like to do with these talks is to make sure we start and make sure we're all singing off the same hym sheet in regards to time and space so the Iron Age of Europe is traditionally split into two phases the earlier halat and the lat Laten now in Europe Laten art starts about 450 BC and contines through until Caesar violently gallivant through gold during the gallic wars of the mid 1st Century BC now the dates in Britain are a little bit different here it is traditionally taught that the Iron Age starts a tad later 400 rather than 450 BC and despite being visited by caesa we continue relatively independently but not unaffected by what's going on in Gaul until the first century ad and The claudian Invasion however I want you to remember that plenty of local practices continued after both visit and Invasion uh and just as quite a few aspects of Roman art actually and influence were actually adopted before Claudius came to the sure as well this is really a period of a hugely complex Melting Pot of ideas and hopefully you will get a sense of that by the end of the talk this evening and to clarify early Celtic art and Laten art are two names for exactly the same thing they the art belonging to the second half of the Iron Age there's a reason I don't tend to use the Celtic identity Monica and that will hopefully become clear in a moment this is a genuinely paneuropean artart style you can find Laten art as far west as Ireland and also see it as far east as turkey and basically there's a traditional narrative as to how it came about but it's a little bit tricky so the traditional narrative is that dur that in the fifth century BC there was State collapse in Central Europe around what was called The houseat Zone so yeah okay so Southern Germany Austria Etc and many of you will have probably heard of the houseat salt mines it's it's that kind of area and from large movements of people north and west and archaeologically and this is in the fifth century BC broadly and archaeologically these people become visible through their burials first and foremost with the introduction of the two- wheeled Chariot vehicle just like those that are buried over in East Yorkshire although a little bit earlier a large focus on male dominated Warrior identity ities although some communities did continue to be matrifocal it depends on where you were um lots of weapons and lot lots of feasting equipment much of which was decorated in a new curaline flowing art style that had not really been seen before and that is Laten art now Greeks called these populations many names Kelts which actually derives from the Greek Kel a very useful mon um they did mention specific names of people such as the Galati who may have been up in the man re act change as early as the 6th Century BC a full hundred years earlier than the traditional narrative and therefore this change in art may not be related to political collapse or to the movements of these peoples and therefore it may not have ever had a strong connection to this idea of and that is why I feel it's safer to Laten art I.E art belonging to the second half of the Iron Age rather than Celtic art I.E belonging to a particular people so what is Laten art well Laten art is used to decorate a variety of materials including Stone bronze glass um it's also embellished with uh I enamel later on sh believe enamel technique it also decorates gold bone and pottery and we think it may have been used um as a style sequence to be used as body paint there's the idea of tattooing and also we think some designs may have gone into textiles but unfortunately that kind of effort just doesn't continue to uh survive in the archaeological record particularly in Britain here on the left we have a very nice pedest to learn from France from 4th Century BC is it the 4th Century BC yes it is I got it right and though we do find some Laten Pottery in the UK namely Dragon be and the uh glastenbury Lake Village settlement um it's never as nice as this unfortunately a has a long way to go but you can see that painted curve linear design but it can differ quite markedly although there are some set um symbols and motifs the way they could be executed can differ in the middle here we have the kirkburn sword decorated with both insided patterns along the main Scabbard just here but also decorated with infill red glass um cells this was discovered in East Yorkshire in the kirkburn Warrior burial and it's argued that when you would have held this sword when it would have been brand new and you were in the sunlight with the red enamel and the golden looking brassy finish of the bronze it would have looked like your hand was Dripping in blood this has been written about by a few people including Mal Giles and this is actually the finest decorated sword in the entirety of I AG Europe um and so what this is telling us is that latena is not just about complexity of decoration it's about social effect and that's the hardest evidence we can try and find and uncover but it's something we've always got to be mindful of when it comes to Art um and it was found actually in the burial of a young man um I can't remember the re the the the pathological uh the OST archaological report Regarding why he died but it was interesting because the sword was actually older than him the sword was an heirloom item but yet chosen to be buried with him so some find uses of Laten art later on and in this instance such as the use of glass recent Studies have shown that actually the use of glass beads and the use of the creation rather of glass bangal is a very late ion age um technological innovation it it doesn't just come over with the Romans it's a little bit earlier than that and actually glastenbury is a big or the glastenbury area is a big uh top is a big area for that but some of you as you look at these beads will notice that actually those spiral the book truth is that elements of Laten as to how or why are other subjects of another lecture and quite frankly it needs a lot more re the art style is known as abstract and iconic and mysterious that is what you will read about if you read most big lat 10 art book last 20 years not that there's many in Britain it is predominantly a style of abstract pattern normally curve a linear and overall form and this is seen very much in contrast to the preceding halat art which was mostly geometric in shape these two pieces are perhaps the some of the most famous pieces of Laten art from the UK and if you visit the irona and Roman Gallery in the British museum which you know you guys are not as far away as I am I'm beaming to you all the way from North Yorkshire I don't get to visit as much as I would like to um if you go to the gallery you see these on display and on the right we have the battery Shield which continually covers textbooks on Celtic art and other ion age subjects in this country which is slightly ironic because stylistically it's a complete pain in the backside it doesn't actually fit our typologies particularly well but what it does bring is this notion of the importance of AR in deposition this was a river deposition we do have importance of deposition in watery places from certainly 2000 BC onwards if not earlier um in fact much earlier you know always get to the specifics of that but there is this greater social weight to them it's a shield we have a Weaponry consider there's always been very there's always been this argument that the late iron a there is a definite warrior class and art is an important part of their regalia but we have art of varying scales it's not just about Warrior and display when you look at the snch some great talk particularly here where I've just blown up the terminal end here here you know some of these basket shaped um it's called basket pattern some of these uh little hammered Marks here they're not 3 millimeters long and they're about a millimeter wide and you've got to remember that this is being done with sheet gold and no modern magnifiers like this is going to ruin people's eyes and this makes us ask the question about well there is Art that's public and obviously you it's a gold neck ring it's a big public statement but only really the person who made this or who handled this probably in wearing it was going to see that fine detail um and so art can work on several levels it may not have one role it could have several and that makes our job a little bit more difficult in trying to ascertain what's going on with it and what it's being used for for um talks I can really recommend test matching and R Williams big bookof talks.com Open Access research if you're interested in inh Gold talk go and have a look but the on just because because things are high status the top of their class or in very high stated contexts it doesn't actually mean they're always decorated there's a choice to decorate that we don't fully understand the mechanisms of yet excellent examples here from the Winchester horde bracelet absolutely first century BC bracelet as you'll come to learn later on the first century BC and AD big boom in art production both abstract and figurative this is gold yet it's entirely plain um so we can't just expectoration to occur the same goes for pottery as well both imported and domestic as we see from the Prospect Place burial um from Welling Garden City here uh one of the richest tombs in Britain Potter is very L just remember and the only art that's ongoing at this we're looking at societies that they before the Roman period that there's this notion of prehistoric individuals with their round houses eyes blocking out their and this idea of kind of cultural Enlightenment this very primitivist idea it's just not true the Iron Age just like the bronz age before is an incredibly Cosmopolitan time period but we have decoration style and from uh castlefield which is from the Bronze Age all the way through even if the objects themselves don't necessarily you'll often sometimes see ringing dot Motif some people will claim it as oh it's definitely early medieval oh it's it's not it is not a diagnostic Motif it has a ridiculously long life and then when we look at the coinage and I'm aware so I'm G to explain this very briefly because he is the the expert on this but influence of art can be seen in our coin so the first bronze minted country is minted by the communities in Kent as you will probably already know the can or canani hi re I'm so sorry um we're getting some connection issues could you try turning off your video in fact I'm going to try turning off your video um similar coins are also produced by problems yeah not a problem yeah there you go move that over there okay so thank you and then I'll make you host again time oh yeah there we go thank you can presentation yeah now the county are not the only group that me these there's a few groups in gold from Laten whatsoever derive and are copied by bronze coins minted by the city state of masalia modern day Mar all the way down on the Mediterranean Coast um and that is actually believe it or not the design inspiration for these coins if in a very reduced fashion um whereas ler gold coinage Etc does follow Laten art styles sorry sorry G um we couldn't see your screen um did you try to share the screen um it might be that you have to have your video on to share the screen sorry yeah your host again and then we'll go through it again okay there you go thank [Music] there we go sorry yes you're okay still can't see it yet okay oh saying have we got it y yeah it's coming through I think you might have to select on the window just that's it we can see it that's great thank you you can see it right perfect thank you folks right there we go so yes so individuals in Kent are clearly trading Network that includes the city state of malalia um and kenish poent have a really unusual distribution because you see them all over the country whereas future inage coins you actually tend to see in a more Regional basis so that's why they're really interesting and that give and the opportunity to get funding um I call um I was kind of reading the textbooks about you know the art style being abstract and an iconic all these different meanings abstract psychological effects but yeah in the textbooks there this on the human form they took the um living subject as that or what people wanted to do and so for my PhD I was very lucky to then discuss this a bit more and I wasn't the only one to think there was something including had also come up with many theories and so there's quite a few species that have or have sort of been talked about more than others and here are just a few we have poor signs wild boes more specifically and whether they're found in France Britain the Czech Republic wherever in the Iron Age there's always this notion that they they are the epitome of the Warrior symbol as though their ferocity is what is the ideal totem the ideal personality trait for um for warriors for their aggression for this warrior class and this comes mainly and is argued mainly through the their use on helmets and also their depictions on swords and their depictions on helmets as well we actually have images such as on The gundestrup Cauldron of individuals with decorated helmets including a bird and also a pora horses are another really key example here now horses are always thought to be the symbols of Kings and the reason this is so prevalent particularly in Britain is because horses decorate 19 BC uh late 1 Century BC early 1 Century ad more directly he's a very early example in the middle that was actually minted in the S Valley over the channel and then imported into Britain some it's some of the earliest gold coinage imported into Britain and you can see a horse is clearly present but does that then mean that if a horse decorates another item such as a bucket or a broo that that item also has does that mean that uh what's actually going on is that horses have one meaning on coinage as one group of material culture and that other items when they're decorated with horses that there is a different meaning because often there is this notion that whatever SYM animals represent on coins is the same in wider art is kind of just given that they symbol um symbol symbolical symbal that representatively what they represent that there's this twin effectively that there's no different and actually I wanted to test that idea out cids are another example where we do have a lot particularly in the early medieval literature written about covid their association with the Morgan in Irish uh Legend but also their Association in other early medieval culture regarding particularly Odin and his corid hugan and mugan thought and memory yet here we have a bucket fitting apologies for the photo not my photo the best I can get at the minute um we have here a human who has uneven eyes definitely a bucket no later than the early 2 Century ad in the Iron Age style and he doesn't actually have horns around the back of his head he actually has corvids they are actually corvids with eyes and and very rounded beaks um and sort of this makes us question well how old are some of these ideas but also how much can we really think about literature and so for me for the PHD for the study for all this work that this is based on all my work in this and what I am not talking about which is actually the idea of identifying the figurative amongst the abstract there's been a lot of talk about very abstract pieces of Art and arguing what they repres mount from the aisle of angal from the uh excavations that took place in our station Valley in the 1940s huge amount of material you can down in Cardiff and this group of shapes over the years has been called several things in 1958 it was described box a pattern to represent particularly anything just for several in in 2000 but both before and after that it's been described understand why given the head shape and that really broad Beach shape sorry we we still having quite bad problems with it um if I every time every time I raise uh my hand uh if it pops up on your screen would you be able to just repeat the last five seconds or so worth of what you were saying is that possible because it's it's becoming quite difficult to follow oh I don't believe it's to bad um yeah that that's absolutely fine I will I'll I can't think of anything else really to suggest apologies the storm that's coming I tell you what I'll do I will will can I try and move it just give me two seconds I'm going to see if I can Okie doie uh right do that right I'm going to move closer to the router in the hope that this is going to work right that right okay are you okay father I try and share again oh excuse me a moment there we go that happens to be the husband's mobile going off oh it's one of those days today isn't it it's no problem um I was just going to say I can't speak when you're the host which is the so I apologize I can't can't respond but if if I make it the host um and if you I'm listening so if you um if you request anything I can uh take control okay that's fine no worries yep sorry about this folks make again thank you there we go share oh right there we go so you should be able to see that so I will just check on chat if somebody can give me a thumbs up or you can see that all good thank you right hopefully this will be be better uh I will close that right so as I was saying puffins in the Iron Age fun one this notion that uh emj came up with and he wasn't the only one and actually it's been written about quite extensively um throughout the period uh thank you for that apologies you're probably seeing the chat as well I'm just checking that we're all okay there we go um so yes so but then also later on in 2018 Manel bratling explained that you know maybe this is the whole thing so not just the highlighted area um but the whole thing could actually also represent a highly abstracted running quadraped but here's the thing this is why I want to go back to data because actually this set of this grammar of ornament is not unique at all um and actually when you look at artifacts you could be seen on over 20 other artifacts from the British Iron Age and what's really important about that is that what it actually shows is that we as archaeologists have been incredibly inconsistent in the way we have identified these um patterns but also in the ways that we have um essentially interpreted them because if this is a puffin as has been suggested in the past on the link back Mount what's a puffin doing on a slight variant of the same pattern on the Lynch pin from kirkburn in East Yorkshire what's it doing on a golden talk from ipswitch what's it doing on a horn C from saxop like what is the significance of this we're not interrogating our own ideas enough and because of that although I discussed this in the um PhD I don't include these items as genuinely figurative um depictions because I genuinely don't believe that they are so my PhD very kindly funded through the Heritage Consortium very simply was about going back to basics it was about understanding how animals are used to decorate objects using a databased approach I was looking for correl a across several data facets looking at factors such as object type material used to decorate the animal I.E were there patterns in enamel color for eyes were the patterns to species did certain areas prefer certain species or was this argument of paneuropean homogenity in art and its meaning genuinely true could we evidence what we were saying and what we've been saying for quite frankly the last 50 years and then what I did as well was compare and contrast patterns of animal use to Art in other areas of Ira Society I.E mainly looking at how animals were used in foral remains and foral remain pattern ritual deposits mainly um but that believe it or not did not throw up a huge amount of results and therefore we we're not going to really discuss that going forward um the other thing I will mention very briefly is that I did not look at coins because apparently as a PhD student you can do too much and my poor PhD supervisor um had trouble reigning me in shall we say um and so coins were not done as part of this coins are a separate discussion which actually still need to be looked at so what did my data look like well uh I looked at 817 artifacts and I immediately removed 258 because I couldn't identify them and I couldn't identify them for a number of reasons either because uh they were not diagnostic enough to absolutely be considered part of the Laten art style either because I couldn't identify the animal because they were so stylish IC you know when you're trying to do a databased study there's no point in trying to guess your way through because you're just going to skew your data you need to be confident in what you're saying about it and in some cases unfortunately um the items have just been hit by the tractor too many times um to be able to be identified so we removed those artifacts I then had to remove the 118 humans because of the whole you still can do too much for a PhD thing um but I did keep humans like this like this very old prepas fine from warshire who is now in the state we know exactly where he is um a human combined with animal horns and interestingly he's the only one of that particular style found in Britain and he was probably made in Gall belgica but that's a whole other story and so the final sample for the PHD I looked at was 441 animals that decorated 408 artifacts and here's the really important thing I took this number and then I compared it to the number of abstract and figurative all Laten uh data corpuses that had been published which at that time was mainly the technology of Enchantment uh from 2012 and I'm just making sure that I've got yeah that's fine sorry I was just making sure that there was no issues uh on the chat there um and here's the thing when you compare that number to the roughly couple two and 3/4 thousand items of Laten art that were recorded in 2012 that tells you that percentage wise animal and human depictions could make up up to about 20% of all the 10 art in England and Wales and that in itself tells you that there is some kind of production consistency going on here 20% is a is a number that's significant you can't just ignore that and so instead of animals just being and humans just being random or very much not thought about at all this aniconic idea this idea that iron AG crafts people were obsessed with the abstract rather than the figurative this result really challenged that and what also what and the reason why these numbers are much bigger than what previous uh studies had done was because half of my data 50% of my data actually came from reported finds from the portable Antiquity scheme and I'm forever grateful for those that reported Their fines and for the uh flos the officers of the scheme who got who still even now get in touch with me about fines um because without that data we would not know this we would not have changed the face of this as we have now if we were in a room uh I would normally open this out to the audience and say you know what species do you think after everything I've gone through bearing in mind we're not talking about coins bearing in mind the questions I've asked what species do you think is the most common and the ones I often here are horses is normally the most popular uh followed by poror signs but in Britain specifically admiss I should say Southern Britain England and Wales apology Scotland the data is coming for Scotland uh when the Treasure Trove database comes online and M surprisingly and this was a completely new finding at the time bines so cows we don't do gender specific here because cows of the Iron Age period both male and female had horns so just because it's got horns doesn't mean it's male we can't make those assumptions without other anatomical data um and B Vines are the most popular animal and literally until I did the study and ended up publishing a paper on it in a confence proceedings you could not have found that fact a textbook anywhere it was a complete unknown and this was really surprisingly followed by humans whereas everybody's like where are the horses like where are they well Birds came next some lovely little things um including these little fittings BD 1A fittings which are a brand new um artifact typology I've also done a typology of bucket fittings well poor signs came next and some of the poor signs are possibly not just from Britain either this particular example from Essex so not very far from you guys um the very horizontal nature of the nose and the Very horizontal nature of the back actually tells us this was probably made in France and imported and he's the only example we can say was probably imported in the first century BC then we have others now the other category cover species that are not numerous enough to have their own categories we have dogs we've got caprid so sheep goat you can't necessarily tell the difference in species we believe it or not have felines we have two felines what else have got we've got a couple of snakes um what else we got we've possibly got a miniature bear from St Albans would you believe that's not a Roman bear that is actually a um an Iron Age type bear which could fit in quite nicely actually with the use of bare skins that actually were used to contain cremations in some of the heart forer well in barrial so but that's a whole other lecture um and then right at the bottom were e wines H is only 5% of the national sample and some of you may be thinking well yeah this makes sense actually because you know if they are kingly symbols then yeah they're not going to be commonly used they're going to be really carefully controlled and so you're not going to expect them decorating everything hold that thought and please don't kill me later when we go back to it now when we looked at the National Distribution of All Fins um there's a bit of a problem because 50% of the data came from the portable Antiquity scheme unfortunately what we're seeing here are not genuine archaeological phenomenon what we're actually seeing here is metal detecting survey hence nor Lincoln share and parts of um hartfordshire and further north look a little bit like they're on fire brilliant reporting rates like yay for reporting rates but unfortunately that is the case therefore we have to be a little bit careful about identifying distributions however when you break this data down into individual object types or individual species some really interesting patterns begin to emerge for instance when you look at the National Distribution of poor signs we have three really major hotpots one up here in North Yorkshire which is a very late one first century ad possibly to do around the civitas of alra really nice big um group in Lincolnshire now there is a bit of everything in Lincolnshire but what's really interesting about this is that Lincolnshire or rather the cardiel hoi in Northern Lincolnshire are the only group in Britain that mint a gold coin with another animal on it that isn't a horse and it's actually por signs and there's this high density of por signs it's a nice collaboration something that still needs to be looked at unfortunately no poor signs in Kent but if you look to your neighbors in Sussex look at this huge thing here and what's really interesting about this huge spot of density here is that Sussex iron age groups in Sussex almost exclude all other species except por signs and if you want to learn more about that without meaning to advertise another talk but I'm going to do it shamelessly anyway I'm actually talking about poror signs in the in AG in Sussex next month again via zoom and hopefully there won't be these connections problems that we've had this evening so that was really one of the big finds of the PHD re we had not only Regional preferences for the portrayal of certain species over others we also have regionally specific artifact groups norol is a pain in my backside because there's about four of them in nor we also have some in Lincolnshire we've got a couple in Wales there's the separation and so once again this notion the art is this paneuropean homogeneous thing that's the same whether your in France whether you're in Britain whether you're in Ireland whether you're in Turkey it's just not true there's something very very different going on here but the other really important um finding and what's really important for the second half of this presentation is the art production boom between 100 BC and 100 AD we have a massive figurative art boom alongside a general abstract one but the figurative one is particularly noticeable and this has absolutely nothing to do with Rome I think there's always this assumption something new like they're so close to that Conquest period must be something oh they they're imitating Rome and the use of classical art they are not actually the influences of this seem to come from Gallow belgica so modern day Belgium it's quite interesting but a whole other lecture but what's massively important is that within this figurative art boom art seems to become a new political tool and that is something we actually don't have evidence for in Britain until this point and it's incredibly important for our Spotlight onto Kent so that was all the national kind of context what's going on in Kent I always like to start with numbers and the numbers already tell me something not normal slash unusual I mean there isn't a normal really in this is there something slightly unusual is going on in Kemp and the reason something slightly unusual is going on is that humans actually there are more human depictions in Kent than there are bines and it's the only reasion to to do that is the only region in BR in England and Wales where humans are more popular than any other species depicted and that is weird the lack of por signs is not so weird uh the fact that bow Vines are up there and are nearly as popular helps yes we're dealing with very small sample sizes and that's always going to be an issue but yeah it is slightly unusual here is the spread of fines that is richborough that is maidon just to give sorry maidon yes maon just to give you a bit of reference and you can see the general spread is down here but I have it and then we've got something up in richro just under there as well but unfortunately I've not had the time yet to really look at the landscape connotations but then there's so few finds we're unlikely to get statistically significant results to help us understand this a little bit better let's have a look at some other regions both near and far and it really is that human result that really once again shows how strange it is compared to everything else um you can see how strange Sussex is and I would like to say the additional numbers here on new fines which are still going through the treasure processes I understand at the minute and poor signs though you'll see that the lack of poor signs Is Not Unusual when you look at other Mass producing counties such as suffk and Norther um so yeah and you'll also notice eoin K slightly unusual because you've actually got two examples of horses whereas actually most places don't at all yes on coins but not on this wider art and that brings us to the objects that horses decorate exclusive almost exclusively in Kent um and that is buckets and the reason buckets are really important for this talk and for Kent is because actually it's what the buckets are used for their contexts uh their patterns that actually tell you what's going on artistically in Kent and where the artistic influences are coming from but to help with this I'm just going to give you a little background to buckets in general buckets which in this instance are wooden Stave vessels coopered together traditionally with iron coopering bands and occasionally decorated with interappointment and in the first century BC in Britain when they are within a burial context they are exclusively within some kind of cremation burial sometimes they are The Cremation container more often than not they are sometimes they are slightly separate now on average in size these tend to average about 12 liters except for the malra bucket over in Wiltshire which is a bit of an outlier in several respects because that is 120 lers quite frankly calling it a bucket might be insulting it's more of a vat and you do have quite a lot of these bucket burials in Kent the two main ones that you're more going to be familiar with are sford you're also going to be possibly familiar with those down at Malone Farm or those down in Alem but we also still get them as I said in gal belg and also in gal more widely this example here with uh I presume it's cowe heads we're not entirely sure the artistic descript the artistic drawing here isn't great we think they're coow hats but the decoration from sford and from malman Farm tells you and shows you that the decoration can vary quite widely we can get really big narrative art with big animal and human characters but also they can be decorated completely just in a geometric non-figurative style uh and we haven't got a pattern as to how or why yet how we get Buckets in the archaeological record can vary quite enormously from wonderfully complete things like this to bits quite frankly such as the other Bucket from Hartford Heath we've just got bits of the coopering bands left but on the Pas they mainly are represented through their often very characterful swing bucket handle fittings Bine ones are the most common of the period now these because of their quite realistic nature were always assumed to be Roman and somehow associated with mithran context actually they're a very late Iron Age Innovation um starting about well mid 1 Century BC effectively uh the actual handle swing bucket handle generally where the animal human or plane is something that comes over about 120 to 75 BC there are definitely Iron Age invention uh well I say invention L Iron Age cultural item um and actually it's really interesting because bucket handles like this we know thanks to one that was found in a well in lerer continue all the way through to the 3 Century ad just because the Romans AR does not mean that aspects of cultural imagery just disappear overnight some of them and actually have an incredibly long life and this is why bow Vines end up being the most popular because of that really long life and it's bucket fittings where we start with really important finds in Kent hence it was important to give you that background and the two bucket fittings I want to start with are those of human imagery I apologize I don't have better photos of these I would love to photograph both of these if anybody could support that um in terms of of just giving me the space and the time and the artif effects to do that uh on a trip down to Kent that would be brilliant so here on the left we have the bucket fitting which I believe now has pride of place in midstone Museum from forgive this joke I know Burton a is not technically the correct location point I apologize it's the location that's given in jop's um Millennial postumus volumes this is a bucket fitting swing handle he probably did have Bine horns there's always been this discussion with this individual whether he had deer horns like stag horns like canosos but actually although we have depictions of that of of canosos type figures in France excuse me in Denmark Etc we don't actually have any in Britain that are definitively Iron Age all ATT 10 culturally so he was probably Bine horned what's really interesting about this individual is not actually the head which is actually incredibly well modeled possibly take some classical inspiration which is a totally acceptable thing we have classical inspiration from our coinage from 25 BC so it's not unusual what's interesting is actually there's a second head that I don't feel a lot of people have paid attention to and he's actually down here these are eyebrow Ides and a nasal Ridge and there are the very classic lentoid eyes I would also like to make the point yes in the Iron Age you get lentoid eyes as part of the repertoire of motifs in the depictions of humans they are not however diagnostic completely you do get a whole series of eye shapes in the Laten period lentoid eyes are one of many okay and also some lentoid ey materials like this can happen in the first century ad and can be mixed culturally between Roman and local art styles so they are not a hugely diagnostic Factor on their own despite what the literature will tell you and so he's really interesting in that respect because we almost have a clash here of two art styles we've got this oh well we've got this acceptance of the slightly more classical coming in yet it's a boine horned human but yet we've got this very local bit dropping in as well and then we have something very similar here though this was found in richro Roman fort in a first late first century ad context this is is definitely ion age in style and in bucket fitting type and this is a horned human and you will notice these spherical knobs on the top of his head and a lot of people have wondered what these are over the years um and this is actually horn capping here we go horn capping is something that's introduced during that figurative art boom of the first century BC 1 Century ad although horn capping in itself as a practice is shared by many prehistoric cultures in terms of Laten art it seems to start its booming galab belgica again in that midc Century BC period and then starts coming over to Britain the earliest example of which we have here from balock uh balock from hartfordshire uh has the most fantastic burial chromation burial yes it has a bucket it probably had two um but also it has a cauldron the size of which you can take a bath in it's brilliant go have a look at the display at North Harford Museum if you're ever that way it it's a lovely lovely display and thank you so much to the team there who allowed us to go and get these new images of the material um it hadn't been photographed for a rather long time and as you can see on the left here here is one of the iron fire dogs so a piece of Heth Furniture really nice big mushroom like horn caps here is the bucket this is a human formed bucket and I know he looks like a sad G as hat with bells on but I promise you this is actually horns stylistically we know this uh and again he has horn caps as well here we have another iron Fire Dog another potentially early one this one's from Cambridge share uh Lord Barton and again uh horn caps there were two theories about horn caps before I did this research one of them was that they were a bit like a Christian Halo akin to a symbol of sort of ritual status and the other was that they were the reflection of a genuine farming practice and actually you can still see horn caps today um they were probably wood turned in the 18th and 19th century but we know they were definitely used um and today you actually can buy Modern um what's the word after like uh resin ones uh but you also get metal ones as well if you have a look at uh bull fighting ring photos practice bull fightings from Southern France Northern Spain you'll seeing these tiny silver spherical knobs on the ends of the uh Bulls horns they're horn caps it's a several thousand year old practice and when I looked to see where horn caps were used in the art in Britain something really interesting pitched up they were only on the nicest items of the highest status uh items or on regionally specific High status items uh in the nicest context and actually where people have often been looking for horses as your status marker actually cap horn bines appear to be your economic status marker for this period which was a big shock and a big surprise but it does make sense and when you again look to um the galab Belgian material it all again it's all very consistent so that is what's going on here and what's really interesting is that we can date it really really well we can actually now use this as a dating marker when new finds appear so thanks to the Bal up burial we know that this dates from about 10075 BC and thanks to the find from rbra here uh but also a hoorde with a trumpet roach from great or up in Wales We Know It Ends about the time of the Budan Rebellion which is a kind of interesting point um and something that needs to be discussed but can only ever really be theorized upon but it is interesting that it it does appear to die out pretty quickly this horn capping even though Bine symbolism itself doesn't um about the time buddika goes on her rebellious Rampage it's one of those interesting coincidences and you don't know whether to really Stitch it together or to move it on but Kent is part of this now why is Kent part of this well the reason Kent is probably part of this is to do where these bucket burials start and where they're also shared and that is in hartfordshire the heartland of the cat ofal B tribe traditionally so the kingdom of later you know bellus and what we know is that um what we know is that Kent in the first century late 1 Century BC early 1 Century ad is unfortunately politically really instable and from the coinage alone it looks like it gets invaded something like between four and eight times by neighboring regions but one of the key neighboring regions and the one that seems to have had the most hold on the region in most consistently is the Caston of hartfordshire so the fact that horn capping is appearing in Kent given the connections to Hartford sheer and given the comparable dating and the fact it's going in with these Fashions is actually really not the biggest surprise and it's not the only link we have with harer here's another one so the bucket fittings from Alem and Kent are really still nationally unique and really interesting uh they've often been thought to be some like weird headdress but I suspect that these fittings are actually not Bine horns but actually caprid horns um and the only other bucket fitting we have that's a caprid is actually again from hartfordshire it's harpenden it's Unique and you may be thinking well those horns don't look particularly similar do they and you'd be right but be with me a a horde from Angley was reported to the portable Antiquity scheme last year uh another of several that that have come up over the years and what's fantastic and it ranges in date from about the first century ad to the Third third Century ad but this item here which I'm about to blow up is one of the new caprid finds we have and actually when you look apologies for that there I'll just minimize that when you look at the horn shape yes okay they're not absolutely identical but that twisting in on itself is actually comparable and so this really helps me suggest that yes considering these objects could be hundred years apart and they obviously several hundred miles apart um this alchem individual is possibly it's some that's important with cprit horns what could possibly important with cprit horns well that's a Sticky Wicket of a question and the reason it's a sticky Wick of a question is because it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation we know from Caesar's writings in the G Wars that the Roman or what they recognized as the Roman equivalent of mercury was the most worshipped deity in Celtic sorry apologies in GAC and British um communities of the period what we don't know is how much Merc meruan traditional mercurian um imagery I.E Rams caprids corvids was adopted or already in use by those ion societies so it could be that this is something to do with Mercury or a mercurian equivalent deity uh but we can't be 100% sure so we just have to be a little bit cautious on our interpretation then but again it's another one of those um links between Harford Shire and Kent which we don't see linking anywhere else in that kind of way other bow Vines from Kent are really specific because we only see them on cosmetic mortars despite the fact everywhere else we've got bucket fittings we've got Triple Loop broaches we've got fittings that have God knows what purpose we don't actually know what they're for because they're never found with their Master object yet Centric cosmetic mortars are the only other bow Vines from Kent and the range of them in date um basically covers the whole of the well basically it's more of a Roman period so Centric cosmetic mortars starting development in the first century BC probably British and then exported out you do find a few in France decorated with a whole host of animals and humans and sometimes just plain and in Kent um you only get a few I've only got five on record uh for you at the moment unless some have appeared on the Pas more recently they're all a little bit knackered and contextually they're all from about ad43 but one of them could be as late as 450 ad they're again one of these examples a bit like buckets uh Bine bucket fittings they have an incredibly long life but they are culturally a very local item um so yeah you don't get the big other spread of Bovi material in Kent at all apart from in those very few uh bucket cases and still sticking with what you see on buckets but coming in it from a slightly different angle you have two horses in Kent this is one of them believe it or not and you may be thinking my God how can you tell that how can you tell anything about that it's such a little past Okay so this believe it or not is a triple looped fitting what is one of those I hear you cry this is what it should look like triple looped fittings have often been um thought to be horse gear and this is unfortunately one of those awful little habits that we have um actually to be honest as small finds people in the Iron Age if it's a fitting and it doesn't have any clear contextual uh pattern I.E it's not found in Graves it's not found on the person there's no evidence of proper wear unfortunately it to get thrown into the oh it must be to do with horse fitting equipment pile and unfortunately this is one of those victims we don't know what Triple Loop fittings are for uh we know that in date they're very late Iron Age but also found in the first and second century ad context but they are again a local culturally ironed item the decoration is quite peculiar yes they can be plain but they are normally decorated with um when they are decorated it's with humans and it's with horses which is interesting because whenever you see humans and horses on a single item it's an exclusive relationship you don't see anywhere else but with Triple Loop fittings you do also occasionally get bow Vines but they're rarer we don't know what these are for and you may be thinking well because of this association with humans with horses they're a bit special we don't know what they're for does that mean they're a high status item well does that look like high status craftsmanship to you guys it's one of those awkward moments and actually this example in Kent is a real outlier um when you look at the map here green are those decorated with humans gray they're TLS decorated with horses here's our one in Kent it's really out there and basically I think somebody in Kent in the iron late Iron Age early Roman period has seen one of these and goes going to have one of those and has tried to make one themselves and it hasn't gone brilliantly uh there is actually at least another one if not two actually that's come from the northern region um recorded by the Durham office which I need to add to this map but you can see that their General cluster is very much Central Southern Britain and uh unfortunately we just don't know what they form most of them are metal detect defines so we don't have that contextual information to understand what their purpose or status or role may have been and this keeps us very much with the horse theme because when you see things like that on the right recorded by Liverpool you see that you suddenly realize that objects decorated with horses are not controlled in their quality and this really starts to make us question whether all horses whether they're used to decorate coins or whether they used to decorate other items of art are imbued with this idea of kingly status and personally I believe symbolism on coinage and symbolism on Art our cousins they share a stylistic palette but I believe their symbolism is specific to the material culture that they decorate and just to make the point about horses if we genuinely had paneuropean homogenity in not we would have horses everywhere right and we just don't horses have the weirdest distribution map in this country remember this is not coinage this is objects and it's this band from the syores to sort of the catalone is area but mainly at traran and then you got a couple in Camp but that's buckets so it makes sense buckets andp Triple Loop fitting it's strange it doesn't make sense and don't even get me started about the one in the stanic hord that's a whole other rant uh which if you see my animals and humans in Yorkshire talk you will be very familiar with now then we're coming back to horses but we're coming at it again to buckets because buckets are so important for the for the art of this period in Kent it is literally that confined and that specialized but it's actually really in-depth in detail in a way other areas with not very many finds just they just don't do it in the same way we're going to be focusing on two buckets and the story that the horses or horse like uh creatures tell us to finish off this evening we're first of all going to look at the bucket that we've known about since the 1880s the alsford bucket which is in Pride of place at the British Museum and has one single decorated band and we're going to look at the decorated band not the human heads the human heads very nice Fantastical slightly italic like headdress connections with Goal not going to talk about that not particularly important to the rest of the British Corpus and then we're going to talk about the absolute fun that is led him there's a big change that happens with buckets actually I'm just going to go back there's a big change that happens with buckets and it's typified by the changes we particularly see on three vessels only two of which are in Kent the Alford and lenen buckets the other example that sort of typifies a big change that happens is the but not as well is the marra bucket from Wiltshire which is the most figuratively decorated vessel uh in the country and it's a change from instead of just depicting a passive symbol I.E just like a cow head or a human head something that has no emotion no energy instead what happens is we get the depiction of active agents in art action in static art and the elord bucket is the first one now I've highlighted these creatures in different colors a so it's easier for you to see them with the contrast but B for a very other important reason this book has been known about for a long time but it wasn't until uh em jope wrote about it in uh 1983 that something slightly more unusual was sort of realized and when you look at these horses is you could be completely forgiven for understanding or for thinking that this was uh a pair of horses possibly two stallions being depicted fighting over as if they were fighting over a herd of broodmares very typical Behavior right except those of you that know horses and maybe those of you that don't work with them could look at those legs and go anatomically they don't look great they don't look particularly good um and you'd be absolutely right anatomically they are all wrong in all sorts of ways and then you've got this hole in the shoulder here and then you look at the very non hoof like feet and EM job as I said in 83 was the first to point this out and I think he was absolutely spot on what we're not what we're seeing here are not two horses in the field as if are still alive these are individuals prancing about in horse costumes these are human leges with very bendy human knees with human feet the whole here is because they're not a one man horse costume they're a two-man horse costume yes the pantomime horse is potentially 2,000 years old as a concept in a way we never really thought we would ever know bit of a surprise and it would also explain why aspects of the horses here look very abstract yet there's this attempt at Anatomy are these costumes made from different materials like are these feathers for instance that are being used as kind of um embellishments on these costumes so what we have on this bucket is not the recording of horses not the recording of stalling Behavior we potentially have the recording of a theatrical scene from something to do with this person's life potentially because booket are a very personal object um and it was chosen to go in the ground to to contain the created individual uals of the person it was buried with and it's just such an unbelievable change and we don't know what the Catalyst for that change is again we can't just rush and think oh it has to be to do with the Romans these are definitely first century BC absolutely 100% very local things closest ideological connections are other Laten communities in Belgium this is very unlikely to have anything to do with Rome this is something very different going on and it's absolutely wonderful and yeah all Hil em job for that one and finally this evening I apologize I don't know if I've ever wrong because I can't see a timer um finally this evening we're going to talk about the most recently discovered bucket in Britain that is decorated in this manner uh and that I was very very lucky to see when it went to the FL office uh in London where it went to go be processed uh at the time however I'd only just started my PhD so quite frankly I was a fat lot of use because as much as I could look at it and go oh and ah and wonder it like everybody else I couldn't do a lot of interpretation at the time because I hadn't done a lot of the work but now I've done the work so now we can explore the mentalness that is the lenon bucket and just to help you see what's going on here uh I'm just going to highlight the figures the crazy colors help what we have here are two hippoc campai so hippocampus half horse half fish also in early uh Irish uh and other wel medieval literature kelp is a sort of equivalent pulling apart a hair I know it's a hair so a lepid a rabbit hair family individual rather than a deer a because of the ear but B on the other surviving band a little bunny tail is there that just helps with that identification and at the back of it having a bad hair day is a kind of long Leed crane-like bird what on Earth is going on here I might hear you cry is this really Iron Age like what is going on and this and and it's an active scene and you know these hippocampi are are mythical creatures so I'm going to presume that this scene is symbolic rather than literal so what on Earth could this this symbolism mean what on Earth could it represent well let's explore this let's look at hippocampi first hippocampus are seen in Greek and Roman mythology borrowed from the Romans sorry borrowed from the Greeks by the Romans and they actually have a really nice uh history because they are best known as the creatures that pull the sea god Poseidon Neptune that pull his Chariot through the Seas and when you think of how long chariotry continued in Britain all the way through to certainly the first century ad we now know thanks to recent finds in Wales um you know and it has a history going back to about the 34th Century BC in Britain specifically slightly earlier on the continent we therefore can understand perhaps how this idea of a horse pulling a chariot through the sea could work within the Iron Age mindset particularly when we know that there is huge um connections between communities on either side of the channel not just because of boat fines and excuse me um burials like that of the mhill de Warrior and others that have imported goods and and well uh the Welling Garden City burials with imported belgic Pottery um but we also know it because Caesar complains about it that's why he visits Britain in the first place it's because it's annoying him to hell that the Britain keep coming over and helping out their mates and so the idea of potentially a hippoc campire representing some sort of traveling through the sea or a sea based aggressive force is not a completely alien one but here's the really interesting thing hippocampi are seen on insula coinage Now by insula coinage I mean here that insula in art style even though the the symbol itself is borrowed from from Roman art in this instance um there's only one example of a classical hippocampi and what's really interesting to point out is that latena yes it has a big insula history but actually from its history in Europe from the fifth and fourth centuries BC it always borrowed from other art styles as did halat Art preceding it so this idea of borrowing motifs and adding it into the Corpus is a totally natural thing and when you look actually at the coins and where they come from and where who uses um the the symbol you do see it on kenish coinage later on although potentially up to 50 to 100 years later than this bucket is the use of these symbols on these coins relating to this particular event this bucket may be representing let's have a look a bit further the crane like bird is a bit more difficult we do have birds in Britain uh they're the third most common animal we see depicted but most of what we see depicted are ducks in fact post 50 BC everybody goes a little duck mad it's a bit like having one of those rubber duck shops that you see in certain cities it's kind of that situation almost except that bronze and so we can't parallel this bird in fact it's the only bird in Britain also decorated sorry depicted with its feet of all things which is just nuts um there's otherwise quite a foot phobia when it comes to birds in the iron Ag and I'm not entirely sure why anyway crane on a bad hair day we do have parallels uh and the parallels actually come from all over the place in Europe Eastern Europe as well as Western Europe here particularly is an excellent example of a crane-like bird from an Iron Age helmet of the first century BC from Slovenia but we also notably have these crane-like birds on uh a couple of swords and I think on a sh on a a plate I think it's another helmet decorative plate I can't quite remember from France as well slightly closer to home and we do also have Birds on Weaponry from Britain here is an example of a long beaked water bird I mean there've been these particular birds from this sword that was dredged up in the 1800s they've been called mananas they've been tried to be interpreted as a specific species and sometimes you just have to give up on that one You Can't Always Get the detail but what's important is that it's once again clearly a long beaked possibly wading species bird once again on a weapon and here's the really cool thing or really heart destroying thing depending on where your loyalties LIE there's this big notion about poor signs being the epitome of warrior symbolism in Britain we have more birds decorating weapons and martial equipment then there are poor signs now we are talking about small sample numbers whatever we look at but the fact is there that actually there's a really important association between words and weaponry and it's hardly explored or discussed whatsoever because unfortunately we have this preoccupation and this old idea stuck in our heads uh but the data is telling us something different so we can once again suggest from this uh analysis that this crane likee bird is also possibly another symbolism of a Warrior or aggressive unit identity agent and then we come to the poor hair yeah the poor who is basically being ripped apart I mean I didn't even know that hippocampi was technically carnivorous but then I suppose when you look at how many victims Kelpies had in early medieval literature it kind of makes a bit more sense um we do get hairs and rabbits early uh some sort of first century BC ad more likely ad um particularly this one from northamptonshire I call them a bunny for those of you that like those particular snacks at Easter you'll know why they're very uncommon we don't understand they use very well we've got a few examples out in Europe and again they're much rarer but the thing that I can't help but think about on this is that you've got essentially an animal that is a prey item a prey animal that is haunted both by other animals and is quite low in the food chain but also hunted by humans uh potentially for me and for the fur and it's this pray animal that is typically seen as sort of landlocked although that is not strictly true um hairs will actually swim when required occasionally it has been known it's well recorded and so I can't help but think that this crazy scene that's going on here is potentially two water-based aggressive forces possibly having a Victorious um aggressive confrontation against a poor against a third Force which is depicted quite harshly as a prey item perhaps the victory was so great perhaps they were so unprepared perhaps they were so victimized we just don't know um it is entirely possible that this is what that bucket is representing I can only ever hypothesize because we don't have a tardis as much as I wish we sometimes had a tardis it would also kind of take the fun out of it um but yeah the the storytelling of this Bucket from Kent is just phenomenal and really challenged what we thought we knew about artists of this period particular Ally in that figurative boom period of the first century BC very quickly the heads of this bucket you'll notice they're very different actually although in style they're similar the fittings themselves are different now we know buckets we know from Baldock we know from Essex we know from a few examples both decorated and nonone buckets have hard lives they're used they're not just items that are stuck on a pedestal and oud and ARD at um they get broken they get damaged they get repaired this is the only bucket we so far have in Britain that has two similar style but completely different swing bucket handle fittings because the damage to one must have been so severe but what's also really interesting is that although the style is very similar and I absolutely believe this was made by the same craft person just like the style is just too good um and unfortunately I can't trace any other work of this person but I'm sure this is the same person it's the only item in fact in the whole of Britain except for the malur bucket which is weird so that's okay that's decorated with two different humans one is a non- mustachioed male with slicked back hair the most common depiction of a Laten male you'll find in Britain but on the right he's got a little beaded mustache with the slickback hair and that is bizarre um and what it makes me wonder is how long potentially we suspect with these buckets that these heads are roughly portrait like we don't believe they're just dayi is um that's a whole other debate about what humans are portraying I'm happy to go into just not right this minute I'm happy to answer it in questions um it is possible that the humans on these buckets are possibly portraiture like and so it does make me wonder whether throughout this bucket's lifetime within this person's possession whether when it got broken he was a few years older or maybe that victory that he potentially had that that bucket was um potentially commemorating uh took him up in status in society and the mustache was perhaps not just about seniority in years but potentially status as well Mustachio males are difficult in Britain you only really find them in Southeastern England except for the malur bucket again just ignore that outlier um because it explainable earlier but yeah you only find mustach males actually funnily enough again in hartfordshire or in Kent you don't find that and there's one in Cambridge but it covers catonia area so it it's okay um you don't actually tend to find them anywhere else in Britain on coinage you do uh there's particularly what example or a couple of examples from the regney and Sussex uh but again symbolism on coins and art cannot be equated directly so we can't use that evidence we don't know whether it's to do with seniority we don't know if the mustache is senior in years whether it's status whatever we just don't know but it is interesting that with this bucket we may here have a depiction of somebody's life years so what does the art and Kent tell us do you know what they might be not very many items in Ken there may not be the wealth and depth in chronology that you you see in other regions because some regions like Wales we have are literally from the 4th Century BC onwards same in Norfolk in Kent it's very much this very tight first century BC ad period in terms of the figurative art and actually despite it might it may only have a few items but the items that we have uncovered in Kent over the years that have been reported so dutifully over the years really gave us a wakeup call about the role of Art in politic in life stories and really began to give some depth to how art could be used and to those iron AG societies that are so often pretied made primitive looking by Roman classical writers um and what that's why I love working with the art I think because it really shows you that different aspect from their own perspective in a way that other sources in archaeology don't always do and can't always do depending on what you're looking at and so you might not have very many items in Ken but the items you do have are not just nationally important but items like the lenen and alord booket are internationally important showing just how Cosmopolitan people were but also they show connections with potentially sort of with Strife in terms of Kent has a very difficult history in the first Century's BC first century ad um in terms of the social instability and the way art is part of that actually tells us about where connections were made and where some stability was regained eventually apologies for the technical issues we've had this evening I hope you've enjoyed that and I'm more than happy to uh take any questions I'll risk turning on my video re thank you thank you thank you so much and I I'm really sorry about the um the issues we had there at the start I wish I'd jumped in sooner because whatever you did eventually it was perfect after that so sorry yes I'm now sat next to the rout I apologize for the living room no thank you and I I'm just I'm I'm mostly sorry because of what we what we might have missed at the start there so anybody wants any any clarification ask I don't mind amazing thank you so much that is incredible research and some very stunning items that you are getting to work with there um thank you it must be the lenon bucket was a London day trip it was fabulous I was gonna say it must be amazing just to be able to go in and well I was invited I was invited and it was because everybody was sort of like we've never seen anything like this before what the hell it was that kind of like we're stuck and like you're the only person that might help and as I said at the time I couldn't help um because I hadn't done the work yet I was just there gazing at it like everybody else uh the work didn't come out till a couple of years later um so yeah it's that that was amazing I'm so lucky but mostly I deal with pictures and I'd like to make the point actually that my covid hit halfway through my PhD I was so lucky that so much my data was online because if not it wouldn't have happened um yeah absolutely I was I say I started mine just as Co hit so I had bit of a mess um I've got we've already got some questions um if you have any questions please add them to the chat there and I can ask them for you um or put your hands up if you wish I could literally sit here all night and ask you a million questions and there are so many things that I I'm just I was amazed by the duck mad Britain for the start duck mad oh for God's sake that is just uh but the problem is we don't find them attached to the items they decorated so I can't tell you what the symbolism is about because I don't know because the data is not there some ducks going on crazy the Bears as well the Bears I'm fascinated the Bears cremation varials in the Skins yeah so Andrew Fitzpatrick did a wonderful paper in rud n which is a French uh Journal you might be to get Academia I'm not sure um and it's the it's called the paper is called the fire the feast and the funeral and it's about the Welling Garden City burials which um the ELA booket are sort of related to uh the sort of the half of one lot of the tradition that the other book is in Kent are related to um so yeah that's the paper to go read about that about because there's a few of them that were actually in Bekins yeah and including being an age invent I love it 19 yeah oh em J wrote about that in 1983 and it's just like hidden it's just like laid there as if people have like tried to avoided it and I'm like no he's absolutely right these are not normal it's true and yeah it's mental I love it I love that so much there so honestly there's so much to pick out I like I say I have so many questions but I'm gonna go to these questions from actual people that have joined us um thank you everyone for for sticking around throughout um I'm glad that you all stayed past that first little technical I'm so sorry incredible no no no I promis to come back well in fact the first question was is there any chance we could have a summary afterwards because it's really interesting but difficult to follow which was yes of course I I will yeah I can do that that's fine oh thank you so much um Charlie asked if your PhD was published anywhere so that people could read it okay I owe archo press the manuscript yes it will be published there will be an ebook version that will be cheaper because I'm very aware of how expensive these specialist artifact volumes can be and I felt very guilty about the idea of going to a publisher despite most of my data technically being open access so that's how I've tried to mitigate that um I owe them the manuscript I I I am trying to get it done I I Am My Own Worst Enemy with this I'm trying uh but can find it's on its way you can find papers with snippets on my Academia edu page and if you ever can't access anything for any reason or you struggle with something just pop me an email I'm I I'm quite liberal about these things brilliant brilliant um greme asked uh how did you get around selection bias When selecting the artifacts okay so it was okay so selection bias in what there was sort of several different types of selection bias I could have okay so I focused on metal work I didn't actually focus on metal work metal work ended up being the predominant material because that's what survives but where I could I included chalk um I didn't include stone for the very important reason that dating Stone figurines human or animal is a total nightmare you can't just do it stylistically because they don't follow the rules and I can tell you they officially don't follow the rules because of the projects I'm currently doing at York Cults of the head project have a look at the prehistoric news letter Society um sorry prehistoric Society newsletter from Summer and you will see that um and basically I try to include every known item from England and Wales that was definitely Lut 10 definitely a recognizable animal species I naturally obviously missed some being confined to not being able to go look at Museum stores but I tried to do a whole sample approach I tried uh and I would continue to try and do that going forward cool um he also said it's interesting that the fines appear to follow the ridgeways I think that must have yeah they do you do find some OD GE geographical things like that but you can't I'm is that also where people are detecting that that is a problem with so many being detecting biases that is one of the things that come out so I'm always a little bit more cautious about interpreting the landscape archaeology element unless there's some contextual other stuff to go with it I.E excavation data um there's there's a lot of straight lines on the map and uh being a wife of a Roman Road specialist um is like oh are these Roman roads and he's like no stop it they're straight lines not equate Roman roads and so you have to just be a little bit cautious there on that of course um this one's uh not really a question so much um it's about one of your slides I think the percentage of bines humans and birds on might have yeah so okay so uh bines over half the animals depict well about half the animals depicted in latena Britain which in this instance is about 3rd Century BC to 3rd Century ad culturally it continues are bines um birds made up for about a quarter of the whole sample and humans made up uh about just less than that as well um what you've got to remember in those numbers there are items that come up a couple of times because there are multiple items so humans with Bine horns come up twice there I try and simplify the data but in doing that little mistakes creeping that I wouldn't publish so apologies for that so yeah but basically in popularity it goes bow Vines humans Birds por signs others echin oh I did it right that's the order so would that be massively skewed if the coinage was brought in I presume oh yeah yeah uh yeah absolutely it would be uh yeah so horses are on 97% of coinage um humans are again popular but in some places avoided we would have to bring in a lot of abstract stuff for the coins as well you do get a few poor signs but not as many um oh God coinage it's just such an other and also with coinage you have to tease out what comes from a 10 cultural background what comes from like malalia like those linear potins and what they're based on what then comes from Rome 25 BC and if the artist isn't particularly accomplished you can struggle to to try and split that out so it's a bit of a bind field sure um there's another horses question actually is gram has said um if horses appear on coins more could they have been the pre- coin currency and therefore nothing special but dates don't match unfortunately uh they're concurrent with with mass production of coinage in Britain whether that be gold uh mainly gold and silver that comes in um ignore the poins the poins are socially culturally a slightly different situation um and and unique for for the British context um so yeah we don't know what's passing for money there's been arguments about the idea of bronze ring money and gold talks and stuff like that but that's a whole other question and what's interesting actually on currency on the Pas there's about 400 um Greek and Roman provincial coins of the third to First centuries BC and they've always been assumed to be antiquarian losses but I'm wondering actually because when you look at the patterns there's some odd patterns I'm actually Wonder wondering actually was there some currency use from these provincial other kingdoms that was actually going on and because we just don't think always about this period as being so Cosmopolitan and interconnected are we just getting in our own way a little bit there of assessing the evidence um some of them are going to be holiday losses some of them are going to be antiquarian losses but others might probably aren't um quite few turn up around the TS actually um and also vessels which is you again one that always been said oh it's a late antiquarian loss but um you really are it's it's it's yeah it's one of those that has to be treated carefully but deserves more treatment that makes Karen has asked are the chalk figures related to this age which ones okay so we have figurines in Britain uh because because human figurines from the neic onwards is one of my areas I've been developing like um the chalk figurines of East Yorkshire which are the most famous ones written about by Ian stead yes they are Iron Age I don't know what the specific dates are but I suspect it's third to First centuries BC broadly however they're a very insular thing I mentioned earlier in the presentation about Laten Art Is Not the Only art style that's going on when it's here we've got stuff that's carried on from the Bronze Age early Iron Age through like the decoration of bone weaving Combs um we've got the the stuff like like from masalia as an influence that's coming in and um chalk figurines and some human figurine Traditions like those from orne uh there's an equivalent from Maiden Castle um they are a very insular thing and we also have inula wooden figurines that date to this period as well that carry on their own inula Styles so yes the chalk figurines are part of this but are they Laten art do they take Laten influence are they just insula they're one of these melting pots of local with a little bit of Laten from what I've seen the problem with the chalk figurines is how knackered they are uh we also have a a Rand actually we have a random chalk figurine in in from a pit in Kent thinking about it that was written about by Maranda old house green and somebody else I'll try and find the paper but that was like first or second century ad like Roman but again it's in this insula kind of from what we understand thing but yeah there is one in Kent okay yeah sor sorry just s of just good um I'm so sorry Lou I've only just seen that your hand is up would you like to unmute and ask you a question if you're able to Jacob is she able to unmute herself oh sorry one second I'm just trying to find her on the participants while you do that can I just very quickly address David hman David yes one oh sorry go on Louise sorry you're there David now I have just had the most bizarre phone call in the middle of that Ian and Ste Sheila stead ringing me up to wish me happy birthday oh bless because I was actually present on the garden and Kurt burn digs as the assistant AR theologist and I have just looked up um about that cburn B cuz I was there when it was done the skeleton there there was no real reason given as to why he died yeah he was a male 1725 reasonable condition fa north south facing e Flex on his back with his hands together near his chin so that was interesting so that yeah I just had to share that thank you no no that's great yeah they're some of my oldest friends and I come to see reg so I talk to oh I'm so I'm so glad thank you thank you so much uh the other thing is I'm really interested in your um slide with the horns the two figurines of the horns yes one from asford and the other what I'm interested in with that is that one of them was on a human figure and the other one was on a porine figurine hang on a second right let me try and bring up hang on he got a little pork kind nose sole hang on Oh Hang are you on about the iron fire dogs uh one was one was from Alford I don't know where the other was from Alford was ITF or Al Alford or Alam Alem Al it the one with the two horns on it yeah yeah yeah no human and the other one seem to be por so what I'm wondering are they on some kind of hat no it's not por sign it's definitely a ram unfortunately that's the only photo of it I have and it does make it look Porky but no it's like he got a Porky Pig nose yeah no he's he's got because he's got red enamel in his nose for God knows what reason but but the other one is definitely human yeah definitely yeah that one human so is that mean that the human is almost like wearing a hat yes yeah we believe all these horned headdresses are hats and actually there was a recent find from puckeridge in um hartfordshire of it's actually a finger ring and now I was sent this um to have a look at to assess it because it's it's nationally unique but you can find it on the Pas database if you go and have a look and it's a finger ring with a human and it's he's wearing a horned headdress and it's clear as day absolutely clear as day um but it's not capped have any headdresses ever been found because I've just been reading about the they've literally think they've identified possibly bits of a helmet of that SSH are big yes and it's really exciting they've literally only the last couple of days FL has seen it yeah uh apparently there only four helmets Yeah helmets are are very few uh in Britain headdresses in terms of that there is one I don't know if it's mil Hill mhill you've got the crown thing which is strange because the art doesn't fit our typologies and that there's lots of other problems with mhill that hopefully are being rectified through the commos project Ian armit project the big DNA sequencing and burial uh project at York um so there's that one I know earlier inage headdresses in Europe or what looked like remains of headdresses uh there are a few but not any more that I know that are preserved in Britain we have we have the kedigian helmet there's the jockey cap from the temps there's the other horned thing from the temps um that's actually not Iron Age possibly I can't quite remember off the top of my head yeah and then this potential snsh business um which I I'm yet to read up so I can't quite go quite go into that one I'm afraid ah waterl helmet thank you I think that's the one I was forget I was Miss Miss thing but I can't quite remember um the date of the water one's one I would likeor this be available this when I go up to Ian and Sheila I'd like them to see this talk yeah absolutely it's gonna go online in a few weeks we will post this to our YouTube channel so thank you so much Louise thank you for those questions Reb I'm gonna um jump you on to these questions because I can see the clock's ticking and people are still very keen to know more as you are it's okay there's no time limit so we're we're gonna go on to this the question from David hman there an excellent example of H capping on the reverse of a k so although I wasn't meant to look at coinage of course I've looked at coinage because I can't help myself it's like I wasn't meant to look at humans but I looked at humans anyway um yes David you're absolutely right and it is the only coin in Britain that's got it and it drives me nuts though because when you look at all the other examples on ABC there's some variation in the die designs and it drives me even further nuts but what's really amazing about that one as well as well as the date is the fact that on the back of it it's it's got a bear and it can't help but think about the Baldock burial with the horn capping and the bear skin and is it all related or is it just a bit too true and this is where we've got the issues of not understanding the context of coinage imagery to what's going on on the ground often because dating coins can be a pain in the backside unless you're a genius like David with with cantil linear poins and you can get it down to a fine art so um as soon as you mentioned horn cin my immediate thought was the waterl helmet because I've looked at that thing a million times and seen those little mushroom ends on the end of it and thought is this you know are they attaching something to this is it what what's going on there okay so culturally yeah that thing yeah that thing it drives me nuts you see I don't think I've got theories about this but I'm not going to mention them in case I upsert someone water helmet requ does require further looking at um helmet sorry horn capping as a cultural practice you see it all over the world in various guises um not just in modern Traditions I believe you can see it in bronzo if I know you can see it in bronzo Scandinavia what I haven't yet worked out is how it gets from bronzo Scandinavia to Laten art Europe that's the is it something that's just on the the artistic representations or is it something they're doing for the animals themselves we believe it genuinely reflects farming practice and there's probably the reason we're probably not seeing them is because they're not surviving the archaeological record because they're probably made from T turned wood like they were in the 17th and 18th centuries in Britain ad that's why we think we're not seeing them there is one potential odd bronze bear um that's in joke and is it from kerington it's either Lincolnshire or Scotland I apologize uh I can always find the reference um and that might be a fragment of one but we're only ever going to be able to hypothesize because of a lack of data sure how fascinating uh Charlie has asked on the the horns um topic uh the waterl helmet obviously we just talked about um also the cork horns yeah cork horns yeah I've not look at Ireland because Ireland needs its own separate cultural thing um they are horns but I don't believe they capped they don't have that really specific spherical end to them which is what I would Define them as capped horns specifically um but whether they've got the same spread the same cultural uh social economic symbolism in Ireland whether they've got the same in France or Belgium in Belgium they probably do because I believe that's where our Traditions derived from the British Traditions derived from but Ireland of Scotland I would like to take in their own without trying to be too um without trying to let modern geog geographical boundaries skew things but they need looking at within their own archaeological contexts uh because the data from England and Wales has now shown how important that is Charlie has also asked do you have any opinion on the triple horned B Vines okay they definitely exist in Europe and they are probably related to a very similar thing there's probably an extra ritual aspect judging by where some of them come from particularly the ones in Germany interestingly you also get uh a chest frame is it it is Germany and it's birds that have then been given Bine horns and caps like eagles but then given Bine horns and cats so you do get a little bit of a transference of that imagery in Europe um so but I've not seen a I think there's only one semi- convincing British example and the others I'm just not sure about um you know we're just going to have to I I have no problem in saying we don't know right I think it's something that we don't do often enough sure definitely and so I do I will sit on the fence when necessary brilliant okay well I think that is us for questions Reb thank you so much thank you guys so much thank you so much for persevering I'm so sorry for those technical issues but any questions that come up after please just pass them on by email I'll be more than happy to answer them and uh thanks so much as an audience for for tuning in and thank you so much for your questions brilliant well I mean we've got so many thanks coming in and um if anyone wants to contact web you can get in touch with us at the society and we can pass on your messages or or or however we can do it so thank you all for attending um what an amazing talk uh what amazing research and um I look forward to hearing more in the future yeah I mean I'm not actually doing any of it at the minute but I'm doing something completely different right now but so it's kind of weird to come back to it but yeah if if anything you're interested I'm doing an animals and humans in Yorkshire talk next month on the 11th of February via Zoom that's with for CBA Yorkshire so ccel archaeology Yorkshire and next month I am yes and then next month I am also doing in fact it's in two weeks uh Sussex archaological Society via Zoom poor signs in Sussex if anybody's interested thank you no so as I mentioned ear as I mentioned earlier if anyone's not a member and they fancy it please do think about joining us works out about 3 P3 a month and you'll get our Journal um for the most current historical and archaeological research in the county you'll receive our biannual newsletters exclusive access to our collections conferences selected events opportunities to get involved in excavations and research projects and everything Kent Heritage based that you can ever dream of uh we can offer we have lots more coming up so please keep your eye out for upcoming talks I'll flash through them really quickly uh Thursday the 21st of February we've got David brownr bringing us a presentation on aerial Imaging to record and view archaeological excavations in space and time on the 27th of February it's a little bit different uh this is actually at midstone Museum I will be giving a talk live in person randomly about p Pirates so uh two pirates in particular uh Francis Drake and Henry Morgan but also covering a brief history of piracy we have lots of familiar faces I'm sure um it will focus mainly on my personal adventures and often amusing experiences researching those pirates and we'll have some intriguing Mysteries actually so you should come along if if you want to it's h it's five band entry um it's all run through Maidstone Museum so have a look on for that most importantly included in your ticket price is rum lots of rum and snacks and hopefully lots of fun so if you fancy it come along to ma Museum 27th of February uh Thursday the 20th of March Janice thoron will be talking to us about sheepy munes munes sorry I always always struggle with that mouth the word there munes women in the shess dockyard in World War I that'd be amazing uh Thursday the 17th of April Dr Martin wats will deliver his talk Richboro the secret Port um and in May or June we are going to hear a talk from Dr Emily stti Campbell and jelle kiray about their work in inclusion in archaeology including the positive activities of the enabled archaeology foundation and operation ningo check the website for more details um on these talks and a wide range of other Camp based events and how to become a member if you fancy it and that is all for me thank you all very much thank you Reb you're amazing that's brilliant um take care everyone have a good night and we will see you all next month for our next talk good night