[laughs]

It's bad both for the cats and the pigeons.

Uh, all I can say is that for sure the religion of the long barrow people and of this huge tradition of great mounds and internal megalithic chambers comes to a halt at different places, different times, but it really grinds to a halt round about 3000 Before the Common or Christian Era.

And certainly in Southern Britain, this is quite a traumatic change because the mounds are not just deserted, the chambers are actually blocked up, and, uh, in, in some cases very carefully closed against anybody trying to get in ever again.

This is probably because of a religious reformation equivalent to that which swept Christianity in the 16th century.

We used to be told, well, we were told by the Victorians, that this was the work of an invading force called the Beaker people, who brought a new cultural package like big drinking vessels and metals and stone circles and urban circles and so on.

The Victorians thought that everything was due to invasions by new and superior races with new and superior technologies, because this was exactly the treatment the Victorians themselves were meting out to indigenous peoples all over the world as part of the imperialism with which both of you are historically so deeply interested.

What, what role does mistletoe play? play? And, and why do we believe them when they talk about mistletoe?

[laughs]

Uh, he was the most heavily studied prehistoric human body until his time, which is the 1980s.

Uh, he was found in a peat bog south of Manchester called Lindow Moss in 1984, and he was the first really well-preserved British bog body found in recent enough times to be scientifically studied.

He was taken to London, where a top clinical pathologist said that he had been killed three times over.

Uh, his throat had been cut across the jugular vein, his neck had been broken by strangulation by a grot, and his skull had been smashed with a, a heavy blow.

Now, this is overkill by anybody's reckoning, and so this looks like a heavily ritualized death.

And because the Romans had said that the Druids, the priests of ancient Britain and neighboring areas, committed human sacrifice regularly, this was taken as proof positive that the Romans were correct.

Tell us, Ronald, how this does, or if it does or might it link up to ideas of death or, or, or is this something else entirely when we're talking about Stonehenge specifically?

Is that really something that we see preserved archaeologically?

The question of the cult of the severed head in Iron Age Northwest Europe is a vexed one.

Because on the one hand, the idea of it comes very specifically from one rather wonderful person.

Somebody who was not actually an academic, but who was a foundationally great scholar.

And that's Anne Ross, who wrote this breathtakingly good book, Pagan Celtic Britain.

It was good for its time, which was the 60s, the late 60s.

And it was she who had the idea that the Celts, which in her day were still believed to be a confederacy of peoples, all related, stretching across Europe, had a cult of the head, severed or otherwise.

So how skeptical should we be of this particular description that's left to us by Julius Caesar or Caesar adjacent? Yeah.