00:00 Professor Ian Armit, chair in archaeology at the University of York, discusses his interest in archaeology and the significance of the Iron Age as a period just on the cusp of written history with limited written records.

04:27 Professor Ian Armit discusses the tension between written and archaeological sources in Iron Age studies, highlighting the tendency to rely on late antique sources and the need to separate classical sources from the material record in order to better understand the Iron Age.

09:52 Headhunting practices, including the veneration of heads, are common across different cultures and time periods, and are often tied to cosmology, religion, and ideas about human's place in the world. In Iron Age Europe, head hunting was associated with ideas of fertility, power, and gender, and was co-opted by emerging elites as a display of power and prestige. The archaeology of head hunting in Iron Age Europe reveals a wealth of evidence for these practices.

14:30 Headhunting practices, including the preservation and veneration of heads, are recurrent across different time periods and cultures, and in Iron Age Europe, head hunting evolved from being associated with communal fertility to becoming a symbol of power and control for emerging elites.

19:04 Headhunting in Iron Age Europe was not solely an act of aggression against outsiders, but also a symbol of assimilation and the building of a polity, as seen in depictions of warriors holding heads from different ethnic or tribal groups.

24:13 The study of ancient DNA and isotope analysis has allowed researchers to gain insights into language contact areas, the development of dialects, and how people moved and interacted in prehistory, but further collaboration with linguists is needed to fully understand these complex dynamics.

28:54 The key to using ancient DNA within archaeological frameworks has been embedding archaeologists within interdisciplinary projects that address archaeological questions and integrating ancient DNA with isotope studies, osteoarchaeology, and cultural archaeology to gain a more comprehensive understanding of population genetics, life histories, health, pathology, and regional connectivity in prehistoric societies.

33:32 The use of ancient DNA in studying population dynamics and connectivity in prehistoric societies is part of a broader approach that incorporates various scales of analysis and challenges essentialist notions of ethnicity and culture.

38:16 The distribution of archaeological finds and the identification of cultural groups based on artifact distribution is not reflective of how people behaved in the real world and expressed themselves through material culture, making the archaeologist's job of understanding site dynamics more difficult.

43:11 The use of ancient DNA allows researchers to analyze biological relatedness between individuals and make propositions about kinship organization and marriage patterns in prehistoric societies.

47:48 The use of ancient DNA analysis has allowed researchers to study biological relatedness and kinship patterns in prehistoric societies, revealing evidence of matrilineal structures in certain communities and highlighting the need for large sample sizes to account for the complexities of individual human lives.

52:27 Ancient DNA analysis has revealed that the arrival of farming in Iron Age Europe involved the migration of new people from the continent, but there is regional variation in genetic contact between incoming farmers and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, particularly in western Scotland.