5.4 Facial appearance

According to Poseidonius, the elite wore mustaches, but shaved their cheeks to visually distinguish themselves from the masses. According to Diodorus, Celtic warriors smeared their long hair thick with lime and drew it back from their forehead.  However, sculptural evidence implies this was not the only style popular with Celtic men.  Of course, no one bothers to mention the women.  

It is likely that many people in Iron Age Britain would have died from diseases as babies or children. Many of those people who survived to be adults rarely lived beyond the ages of 35-45. Only about a third of all adults lived longer. Studies of the bones of Iron Age people suggest that at least a quarter suffered from arthritis in their backs from an early age. This was probably due to the hard work needed on Iron Age farms. Some women also suffered arthritis in the leg joints caused by squatting for long periods.

People's teeth were often bad, and in general women's teeth were less healthy than men's. This was, perhaps, the result of calcium deficiency due to the effects of pregnancy. In some parts of Britain the diet was poor, leading to anaemia in up to half of all children and a quarter of all adults.

Celts seem to have universally removed body hair. Some postulate this as religious, but was more realistically part of the Celtic propensity for cleanliness. Body hair kept dirt close to the body, and Celts were an extremely clean people, so this was unacceptable.

Many aspects of life changed in the last one hundred years of the Iron Age in Britain. These changes were most strongly felt in south-eastern England. Aspects of everyday life, such as dress, facial appearance and jewellery altered dramatically, influenced by Roman and other foreign fashions. People who dined off fine dinner services, also spent time washing and dressing to impress. A few people could also afford perfume imported from Egypt, Persia or Arabia.

5.5 Trade and Crafts

There is strong archeological evidence to suggest that the pre-Roman Celtic nations were tied into a network of overland trade routes that spanned Eurasia from Ireland to China. Celtic traders were also in contact with the Phoenicians.

Trade links developed in the Bronze Age and beforehand provided Great Britain with numerous examples of continental craftsmanship. Swords especially were imported, copied and often improved upon by the natives. Early in the period Hallstatt slashing swords and daggers were a significant import although by the mid 6th century the volume of goods arriving seems to have declined, possibly due to more profitable trade centres appearing in the Mediterranean. La Tène culture items appeared in later centuries and again these were adopted and adapted with alacrity by the locals.

There appears to have been a collapse in the bronze trade during the early Iron Age.

Exports certainly included British weaponry which has been found on the continent. The products which later Roman writers describe Great Britain as providing include slaves, hunting dogs, wool and hides, none of which survive well in the archaeological record. The tin trade from south western Great Britain is better attested in archaeological and historical sources.

Local trade was largely in the form of barter, but as with most tribal societies they probably had a reciprocal economy in which goods and other services are not exchanged, but are given on the basis of mutual relationships and the obligations of kinship.

There is an idea that metal being so important, the craft of a blacksmith was of high value and automatically gave everybody obtaining it a high status. Any blacksmith's forge of this time would have such objects as an anvil, tongs, sledge hammer, chisel and poker. Many of the tools found in bogs and rivers had been bent or broken before they were placed there as some kind of offering, but it’s clear that both tools and forging techniques changed little from the pre-Roman Iron Age until the early years of the twentieth century. Iron was obtained from many natural sources in Britain, but the iron ores always needed to be smelted to produce workable iron metal. The ore was heated with large amounts of charcoal and the resulting red hot metal was hammered into ingots in the form of long bars, sometimes called currency bars. Iron ingots were often traded over great distances.