Any discussion of the later stages of iron age metallurgy and metalworking in western Europe must review the effects of the Roman conquest of Gaul and the Alps and the arrival of the Romans at the Channel. Here we have space to be concerned only with the effects in Britain and its century of continued independence. We have already seen major changes in the metal economy around the middle of the first century BC but the exact causal relationship with the Roman expansion is not known. Celtic art styles continued to evolve vigorously in Britain and metallurgy was fully exploited in this development. Some techniques, such as tin-plating, become apparent only in this period. The major contribution of the Romans was a new copper alloy, brass, combining copper and zinc (Bayley 1990). Initially brass was imported in two forms, as fibulae, and, probably, as coinage then being recycled into the coinage of the Trinovantes (Northover 1992). Brass brooch blanks from Baldock with a date close to the conquest show that brass came to be worked in Britain (Bayley 1990) but it was probably not made there until after the Roman occupation had started. Brass then spread to smiths continuing to work in the Celtic tradition; for example, there are brass ingots and Celtic-style objects in the Seven Sisters, Glamorgan, hoard deposited in the 80s AD (Davies and Spratling 1976). Romanization of style spread with the romanization of technology but in northern Britain objects continued to be made in developed Celtic forms into the second century AD and some of the most elaborate achievements date to this period (MacGregor 1976), in the south the Celtic techniques became completely submerged by the Roman.
World History
