Swords, skulls and strongholds
A Time Team Special
First screened 19 May 2008

Swords, skulls and strongholds – Background

They are among the most striking features of the British landscape. Moulded to the contours of some of our highest hills and most dramatic scenery, perched on clifftops and ridges, and dominating the landscape, they can be found throughout the British Isles. More than 2,000 'hillforts' have been identified in Britain, the construction and occupation of which spanned almost a millennium.

The name 'hillfort' was first given to them by 18th- and 19th-century antiquarians, who assumed that anything on such a scale and involving such sophisticated engineering must have been built by the Romans. They were wrong. In fact, these great structures were constructed before the Romans arrived, during the late Bronze Age and the Iron Age, which began around 700 BC.

Nor were all hillforts actually forts – at least not in the conventional sense of a fort as a military stronghold. Recent excavations and other investigations have revealed that they served many different purposes: as centres of population, early towns; as places of storage and trade; as stamps on the landscape, marking off territory; or simply for show, as status symbols – the 'Iron-Age equivalent of suburban stone cladding', as Time Team's Stuart Ainsworth puts it in this programme.

In Swords, Skulls and Strongholds; A Time Team Special, Time Team's experts, including regulars Francis Pryor, Phil Harding and Stuart Ainsworth, bring together the latest archaeological knowledge and thinking about hillforts. They reveal a highly sophisticated society that was flourishing on these islands long before the Roman invasion. And they lift the lid on some of the darker superstitions and practices that may have characterised the world of the British Iron Age – including the discovery at some sites of the buried remains of people who may have been deliberately killed as offerings to the gods.

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