ABSTRACT
Debates about the existence of prehistoric maritime contacts along the Atlantic seaboard tend to fall into two mutually exclusive arenas of discussion where one must either reject all suggestions of contact in favour of indigenous development or embrace visions of thousands of Childean argonauts clogging up the Atlantic sealanes from Cadiz to Shetland. Clearly, however, more subtle relationships took place between Atlantic communities during the Iron Age.There are difficulties in defining the kind of contacts that existed precisely because they do not appear to be visible through the movement of material culture on any large scale. Instead, our view of Iron Age communities is based almost exclusively on settlement evidence. In the absence of distinctive material assemblages it seems likely that the appearance of settlements played a role in the construction of Atlantic social groups and identities. The settlement evidence reveals a range of communities immersed in a common state of existence, an existence that was dominated by the sea. It is perhaps hard for us in the age of air travel to appreciate the major role the sea would have played in people’s everyday lives in the past. At the beginning of the twentieth century it was commonplace in many Atlantic coastal areas to carry out everyday journeys such as a trip to the local shop by boat. It is not unreasonable to assume that Iron Age communities were in at least episodic contact by sea and viewed themselves as being part of a series of maritime peoples who lived on the very edge of the known world – the sea being a common point of access (both physical and conceptual) for all the peoples of the shore.
