In this chapter I will review the discussions in Britain during the 1980s and 1990s on how to reconstruct Iron Age societies, but will especially emphasise problems of the survival of the now-outdated theories and methodologies based on racist and colonial ideas from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that led to the disagreements. I will emphasise the need to understand the historiography of Iron Age studies so that we are clear what are, or are not, acceptable theoretical and methodological approaches. Reconstructions also need to be placed in their archaeological context and the changing nature of deposition.