Stone, bronze, iron
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What you will learn
By the end, you can put the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages in order and say what changed in each one.
In 1850 a wild storm tore the grass off a sand dune in Orkney, Scotland. Underneath was a village about 5,000 years old, with stone walls, stone beds and stone dressers still standing. Its people had no metal at all — yet Skara Brae has outlasted almost everything built since.
Read the explanation
For most of the Stone Age, people in Britain hunted, fished and gathered wild food, using tools of flint and bone. About 4000 BC farming arrived: people kept animals, grew crops and settled in villages. Later they learned to melt copper and tin together to make bronze, and later still to work iron, a harder metal.
- Stone Age: flint tools, then farming. Skara Brae and Stonehenge were built by people with no metal tools.
- Bronze Age (from about 2300 BC): the first metal tools, made from copper mixed with tin.
- Iron Age (from about 800 BC): iron tools, round houses and hillforts with big banks and ditches.