Simon's Blog

I am starting on a project to create a large drawing/watercolour of an Iron Age community with a number of people prominent in the drawing. The question is what do Iron Age people look like? This is an interesting question as the answer is we don’t really know. There are late Iron Age bog bodies that give some idea and descriptions in Roman and Greek sources, notably Julius Caesar, but even these only give a partial answer for numerous reasons.

So the approach I have taken is to look at the life style and see how the people living that life style today might look. Fortunately there is a group of people who fit the description – farmers and so I have been looking at older farmer faces and builds to see where that might take me.

The next question is clothing. Again the evidence for this is somewhat mixed but they certainly had woven cloths, perhaps a form of tartan. The final question would be stature. Again the bog bodies provide a possible answer in that they were significantly short with a body developed by hard work in the fields with scares from battles.

So I am trying to create an image of a short, tough, weathered faced individual who might only be no more than 20 or so years of age but has spent a lot of his life outdoors. With this in mind this is one of my first stabs at trying to capture such an individual.

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