The Atlantic Iron Age: Settlement and Identity in the First Millennium BC

Jon Henderson surveys the Iron Age communities of Europe’s Atlantic façade, bringing together archaeological evidence from western Britain, Ireland, France and the Iberian Peninsula during the first millennium BCE. Rather than assuming that an ‘Atlantic Iron Age’ was a single coherent culture, he asks what the term actually describes and how far communities separated by sea were connected through settlement patterns, exchange and maritime movement.

The study compares material culture and regional forms of social identity while examining the Atlantic itself as an environment that could connect rather than simply divide communities. Henderson identifies both shared features and substantial local differences, using them to question broad models of Celtic identity and cultural uniformity. This is a substantial archaeological synthesis for readers interested in Iron Age settlement, maritime networks and the ways archaeologists reconstruct identity from material evidence.