8th October 2011, 11:36 AM
For most of their history the Romans had pretty specific views on who was who, even in Italy you were generally either 'Roman', 'Latin', 'Ally' or 'Slave' for instance, they all had different legal/political status - we're just a bit unlucky over here in that all our 'Romano-British' history happened in the tail end of it all when things had got a bit confused and they'd started handing out 'Roman' citizenship to all and sundry, but I'm sure in reality the 'real' Romans knew who they were.
More usefully, can we get rid of the pointlessness that is the 'Bronze Age'? :face-stir:
The 'Early Bronze Age' is just the tail end of the Later Neolithic/Beaker bit (as reflected these days is most reports where most people have to reach for LNeo/EBA as a section heading - I've just done that and have another one coming up) and the rest of the 'Bronze Age' just seems to be the beginning of the 'Iron Age' but without the iron - they've stopped building henges etc, finally got bored with littering the landscape with henges and roundbarrows and settled down to sticking up big roundhouses, dividing the place up into fields, building hillforts, raising cows, making c**p pottery and occasionally heroically slaughtering their neighbours with fancy swords, sounds like a seamless transition straight into the Iron Age to me! :face-thinks:
More usefully, can we get rid of the pointlessness that is the 'Bronze Age'? :face-stir:
The 'Early Bronze Age' is just the tail end of the Later Neolithic/Beaker bit (as reflected these days is most reports where most people have to reach for LNeo/EBA as a section heading - I've just done that and have another one coming up) and the rest of the 'Bronze Age' just seems to be the beginning of the 'Iron Age' but without the iron - they've stopped building henges etc, finally got bored with littering the landscape with henges and roundbarrows and settled down to sticking up big roundhouses, dividing the place up into fields, building hillforts, raising cows, making c**p pottery and occasionally heroically slaughtering their neighbours with fancy swords, sounds like a seamless transition straight into the Iron Age to me! :face-thinks: