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Hello, in 1907 during the construction of the Brooklyn's Motor Racing Track in Surrey,

Workman uncovered the remains of a prehistoric village. The objects they found included a bronze bucket and a hoard of Roman coins.

But perhaps the most interesting discovery of all was the remains of a furnace dating from 5th century BC and used for smelting iron.

The Brooklyn's furnace was the earliest evidence of iron production yet discovered in Britain.

Until the beginning of the 1st millennium BC, tools had been mainly made from bronze.

The introduction of iron working to Europe in the following centuries was one of the great technological breakthroughs of history.

And the beginning of the Iron Age was accompanied by significant changes in societies, lifestyles and cultures across the continent.

With me to discuss the dawn of the European Iron Age are Timothy Champion, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton,

Sue Hamilton, Professor of Prehistory at the Institute of Archaeology University College London,

and Barry Cunliffe, Emeritus Professor of European Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Oxford.

Tim Champion, prehistory is commonly divided into three years, the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age.

What exactly do those terms mean and how did that classification originate?

Well, the classification started in Denmark in the early 19th century as a means of trying to find order in the rapidly accumulating evidence of prehistory that was building up in what was then called the Museum of Northern Antiquities,

which is now the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.

And it was the work of the curator, Christian Thompson, who noticed that among this massive material there were sort of three groups,

and with very little other lines of evidence about how to order them, he suggested that what we had was three successive phases

where different materials were used as the prime material for making everyday tools and weapons,

so a Stone Age, a Bronze Age, and an Iron Age, as represented in the finds they had in the Museum, and that was how he displayed them in the Museum.

And that caught on very quickly?

With some opposition at first, other people had other ideas derived from the classical or biblical chronologies, but...

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