The Iron Age people referred to in this book are Britons and Gauls. The Gauls were the inhabitants of what is now modern France and belonged to a group of people whom Archaeologists call ‘The Celts’
This term, ‘The Celts’ has been misleading and many people today think that the inhabitants of Britain and Ireland were also Celts. However, it is now generally accepted that the Britons and Gauls were different cultural groups but whom both understood iron production and traded with one another.When the Romans spoke off Gauls, Gallia or Celtae they were referring to different tribes of people who stretched from Northern Italy to France, from southern Germany to parts of Spain.
We know that the basis for their language was shared but had many regional dialects, they worshipped the same God’s and Goddesses, but each tribe used variations on the names of these deities.
Britons and those Iron Age people in Ireland are thought to have been the descendants of the Bronze Age Farmers and earlier Mesolithic hunters who had lived in Britain and Ireland since the Stone Age or before the water levels rose and separated them from the European Continent. The Romans tell us that they too considered the Britons to be separate from Gauls however; Caesar describes trade between the south of Britain and the Gauls and notes that in those areas the communities were very similar.
So, for the purposes of this book, by Iron Age people I mean both Britons and Gauls whom were masters in their production and use of Iron.