ABSTRACT
The Iron Age is usually taken as spanning the period from around 800 bc until the rst century ad. No single archaeological horizon clearly marks the transition from the Late Bronze Age, however, while the Roman conquest took three generations to complete and affected only part of Britain. Many attributes once used to dene the Iron Age – including the construction of hilltop enclosures and the development of a new repertoire of domestic pottery – can now be traced back into the Late Bronze Age. The adoption of iron technology was itself a lengthy process, difcult to follow in its earlier stages because of a lack of relevant evidence. Iron was already being worked at some sites as early as the tenth century bc, but the new metal initially had fairly limited impact and it was not until the later Iron Age that major social and economic changes occurred.
