SIMON JAMES
Archaeologist
Of course one of the main things that you don't see at a re-enactment event like this are the blood and guts spilling all over the ground in the course of a battle. You don't get an impression of the sheer horror and the stench and the sweat and the noise of an ancient battle.

The armour in its general structure is really very accurate. It's based on archaeological finds which allows archaeologists to produce reconstructions which groups like the Ermine Street Guard can then actually make. For example this reconstruction of a Roman legionary helmet of the 1st century AD. They really did look very much like this. It probably would have been for the most part more or less this shiny if you looked after them. This one is actually spotted with rust, and I think that's one of the things you would have seen. If you'd seen real Roman legionaries they would have looked a bit rough round the edges with the best will in the world. They didn’t have "duraglit", they didn’t have "WD40" to oil the hinges. Everything would have been a bit ropey, I think.

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
So what was Britain like at the time of the invasion? And what about the people the Romans found here? Were they as primitive as is often depicted in films?

(Clip from "Carry on Cleo" feature film)

(At Butser Ancient Farm)

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
A good place to find out about the Britons is this reconstruction of a Celtic Iron Age village in Hampshire. I've come to meet Eugene Fraser, who helps run Butser Ancient Farm.

Eugene I've got to ask why you're dressed like that?

EUGENE FRASER
Well (laughs), we don't normally do that sort of thing. Our problem is of course is that we don't really know that much about the Celts, and who knows, this may be authentic, but I don't think so.

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
So what sort of evidence do we actually have for the way Iron Age people lived? What have we got to go on?

EUGENE FRASER
Well we have two two avenues of exploration; the archaeological and the historical. The archaeological of course is based on things that can be dug up out of the ground, and things that are found on the surface. The historical is based very largely on what the Greeks and the Romans had to say about the Celts. But we can take take with fistfuls of salt all the things that the Greeks and the Romans had to say about the Celts, because they painted a picture of a very primitive and very backward people.

What we are trying to do is to disprove a lot of those things, as well as test hypotheses. If we have an idea about how a roundhouse might have been built, we test it by actually going about and building the roundhouse.

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