50 Fun Facts About Iron Age

Which part of the world never had an Iron Age, because nobody there smelted iron before Europeans arrived?

The Americas. Inuit hunters hammered knives and harpoon tips from a fallen meteorite for centuries, but nobody in the New World smelted iron from ore before Europeans came.

By convention, what marks the local start of the Iron Age?

Meteoric iron had been hammered into beads and daggers for thousands of years before anyone could smelt ore.

Which raiders, known from pharaohs' inscriptions, were long blamed for the upheavals around 1200 BC as the Iron Age began?

The Sea Peoples. Ramesses III boasted of beating them back on land and sea, yet where they came from is still debated.

Christian Jürgensen Thomsen devised the Stone, Bronze and Iron Age sequence while arranging a museum's antiquities in which capital?

Copenhagen. Thomsen was a businessman and collector with no training as a historian, yet the three labels he gave its jumbled collection became the framework for prehistory worldwide.

Which early Greek poet described five ages of mankind, sinking from a Golden Age to his own harsh Age of Iron?

Hesiod. In Works and Days he wished he had died earlier or been born later than the fifth age, an era of endless toil whose name archaeologists later borrowed.

Nine beads hammered from a meteorite some 5,000 years ago, among the oldest iron objects known, were found in which country?

Egypt. The beads from a cemetery at Gerzeh date to about 3200 BC, yet ironwork stayed so rare there that a meteorite dagger was still fit for a pharaoh's tomb almost two thousand years later.

How can smelted iron objects be distinguished from meteoric iron?

They lack nickel. Iron from space arrives already alloyed with it, which is how a laboratory can show that a blade was hammered from a meteorite rather than smelted from ore.

Whose tomb held a dagger whose iron blade was hammered from a meteorite?

Tutankhamun. Howard Carter found the dagger in 1925 inside the mummy's wrappings, its blade unrusted after more than 3,000 years; X-ray tests in 2016 showed the iron had fallen from space.

Why was iron smelted thousands of years after copper?

It needs more heat. Early smelters never got iron hot enough to melt, so their furnaces left a spongy lump that had to be hammered into shape rather than poured into a mould.

Kaman-Kalehöyük, with the earliest tentative iron-making evidence, is in which country?

Turkey. A Japanese team digging the mound found fragments of steel about 4,000 years old, forged centuries before the Iron Age is reckoned to begin.

Which Bronze Age people were long credited with a monopoly on iron smelting?

Hittites. The old story held that their empire's fall let the secret out, but digs have turned up no more early iron in their lands than anywhere else in the region.

Which Gaulish chieftain united the tribes against Julius Caesar, only to surrender at Alesia?

Vercingetorix. Caesar held him prisoner for about six years, paraded him through Rome in his triumph, then had him executed.

What was the earliest type of furnace capable of smelting iron?

Bloomery. It never melted the metal: what came out was a pasty lump of iron and slag, the bloom, which had to be reheated and hammered again and again before it was usable.

What crude form of iron comes straight out of a blast furnace?

Pig iron. It comes out so rich in carbon that it is too brittle to hammer, so most of it is refined again into steel.

A shortage of which metal about 1300 BC may have pushed smiths toward iron?

Tin. Bronze needs it and it travelled huge distances, so a break in trade is one old explanation for the switch; yet bronze stayed plentiful in the early Iron Age, so many now doubt there was a shortage.

Which continent's smiths largely skipped bronze and went straight from stone tools to smelting iron?

Africa. South of the Sahara, ironworking spread with Bantu-speaking farmers and reached the continent's southern tip in the early centuries AD, with no bronze era before it.

Which Nigerian culture, famed for its terracotta heads, was smelting iron by about 500 BC?

Nok. The culture is named after a Nigerian mining village where the first of its terracotta heads turned up in 1928, dug out of the workings by accident.

The rise of which empire, around 550 BC, traditionally marks the end of the Iron Age in the Near East?

The Persian Empire. Cyrus the Great founded it around 550 BC by rising against his Median overlord, who by some accounts was his own grandfather.

What marks the Iron Age's end in Central and Western Europe?

The Roman conquests of the 1st century BC, above all Julius Caesar's eight-year war in Gaul, turned Celtic Europe into provinces; Britain followed about a century later, in AD 43.

Where in Europe is the Iron Age reckoned to run until about AD 800?

Scandinavia. Its Germanic Iron Age runs until the Viking Age begins, so the heroes of Beowulf, set there around the sixth century, are Iron Age warriors.

The early Iron Age Hallstatt culture is named after a village in which country?

Austria. Graves full of fine metalwork began turning up above the lakeside village in 1846, and the early Iron Age of central Europe has carried its name ever since.

Which giant chalk figure on an Oxfordshire hillside was cut in the late Bronze or Iron Age?

Uffington White Horse. It has stayed visible since prehistory only because people keep cleaning it; for centuries the district gathered every seven years for a festive 'scouring'.

Which Iron Age horse nomads of the Black Sea steppe, described by Herodotus, buried their chiefs with lavish gold animal art?

Scythians. When King Darius I invaded with a vast army, they refused battle and fell back across the steppe, wrecking wells and pasture until he turned for home.

The La Tène culture of the Celts is named after a lakeside site in which country?

Switzerland. When the level of Lake Neuchâtel fell in the 1850s, rows of old timber piles appeared in the shallows, with iron swords and other offerings lying among them.

Celts who migrated east in the 270s BC gave their name to which people St Paul wrote to?

The Galatians. A king of Bithynia invited three Celtic tribes into Asia Minor around 278 BC to fight in his civil war, and they stayed for good.

What decorative feature is most characteristic of the La Tène style of Celtic art?

Curving swirly patterns. Celtic smiths borrowed plant motifs such as the palmette and lotus flower from Mediterranean art, then stretched them into spirals and S-shapes of their own.

The huge bronze wine vessel buried about 500 BC in a Celtic noblewoman's grave at Vix was made by which people?

The Greeks. Their krater from Vix stands over 1.6 metres tall and holds about 1,100 litres, the largest bronze vessel to survive from antiquity; its handles and base came apart for the journey north.

A Celtic chieftain buried at Hochdorf about 530 BC lay on a wheeled bronze couch beside a huge cauldron of which drink?

Mead. The cauldron held about 400 litres of it, and nine drinking horns hung on the chamber wall beside dishes for nine: a full service for hosting feasts in the next world.

What kind of object is a torc?

A rigid metal neck ring. The name comes from the Latin for 'to twist', after the twisted metal of many examples, and Rome later handed torcs to its own distinguished soldiers as decorations.

The Snettisham Hoard of Iron Age torcs was found in which English county?

Norfolk. A farmer's plough struck the Great Torc at Ken Hill in 1950, and the same ground kept giving up buried gold for another forty years.

The Snettisham torcs are dated to the first century BC partly by which finds alongside them?

French coins. One was found caught in the Great Torc itself, so the torc cannot have gone into the ground before that coin was struck.

Where was the Gundestrup cauldron discovered in 1891?

A Danish peat bog. Peat cutters found the silver cauldron taken apart, its plates stacked in the base, and the elephants and lions on them show it was made somewhere far to the south.

The Battersea Shield is a bronze covering for a shield made of what?

Wood. The bronze facing is too thin and the shield too short for real fighting, so it was probably made for show and then cast into the Thames as an offering.

Where was Tollund Man, the famously well-preserved bog body, found in 1950?

Denmark. He looked so fresh that the family who found him while cutting peat near Silkeborg reported a murder, and the police arrived before the archaeologists.

How did Tollund Man die?

Hanging. A leather noose was still tight around his neck, yet he lay curled up as if asleep with eyes and mouth closed, which is why many think he was a sacrifice, not a criminal.

What was Tollund Man's last meal, according to a 2021 re-analysis?

A thick barley porridge. It also held flax and weed seeds, probably a little fish, and threshing waste that may mean it was a ritual meal; he ate it 12 to 24 hours before he died.

In which English county was Lindow Man discovered in a peat bog in 1984?

Cheshire. A skull dug from the same bog a year earlier had led a local man to confess to murdering his wife, before tests showed it was ancient.

What is a broch?

A drystone tower in Scotland. Brochs were built without mortar as two skins of stone with a stair winding up between them, so solidly that Mousa in Shetland still stands 13 metres tall.

What is a crannog?

An artificial island dwelling. Builders heaped brush, logs and stone into the shallows of a lake until it broke the surface, and some crannogs were still lived on in the 17th century.

Which Iron Age hillfort in Dorset, tripled in size by its builders, ranks among the largest in Europe?

Maiden Castle. Excavators in the 1930s found skeletons with terrible wounds by its east gate and pictured a last stand against Rome; later study suggests the dead were buried over many years.

Which weapon of war did Britons turn on Julius Caesar's legions, dismaying troops who had never faced it?

Chariots. Caesar wrote that British drivers could gallop down a steep slope, run out along the pole, stand on the yoke and dart back to the car in an instant.

Julius Caesar claimed the Gauls burned victims alive inside towering figures built of what?

Wicker. Caesar's report of limbs woven from osiers and packed with living men gave the 1973 horror film The Wicker Man its title and its fiery ending.

Pytheas, the first Greek known to describe Britain, also told of a land six days' sail further north called what?

Thule. Nobody knows where it was (Iceland and Norway are the usual guesses), and 'ultima Thule' became a byword for the edge of the known world.

Julius Caesar reported that the Druids refused to do what with their sacred teachings?

Write them down. Novices spent up to twenty years learning the verses by heart instead, Caesar says, which is why almost nothing of what the Druids taught survives.

What shape were the typical dwellings of Iron Age Britain?

Round with a conical roof. Almost nothing of them survives but rings of post holes in the ground, so every thatched roundhouse you can walk into today is a modern reconstruction.

Butser Ancient Farm in Hampshire, with its rebuilt Iron Age houses and ancient crops, is a pioneering centre of which discipline?

Experimental archaeology. The farm was founded so excavators could test their ideas by actually building and farming; Peter Reynolds, a former classics teacher, ran it from 1972.

Which Mauryan emperor, ruling as India's Iron Age closed, left its earliest datable written texts carved on rocks and pillars?

Ashoka. Appalled by the bloodshed of his own conquest of Kalinga, he renounced war, embraced Buddhism and had his new principles cut into stone across the empire.

Wootz, a pioneering crucible steel with a banded pattern, was developed where?

Southern India. Cakes of the steel were shipped west to the Middle East, where smiths forged them into the Damascus swords famed for their rippling surface.

Which metal did Chinese ironworkers master around 500 BC, more than 1,500 years before Europe?

Cast iron. Chinese furnaces ran hot enough to melt the metal and pour it into moulds, so tools could be turned out in bulk while smiths elsewhere still hammered every piece by hand.

The prehistoric mines above Hallstatt, the source of its wealth, were dug for which mineral?

Rock salt. Before refrigeration it was the way to keep meat, so Hallstatt's miners could trade it to the peoples around them, which is what paid for the rich graves found nearby.