Bogucki P., Crabtree P. Ancient Europe 8000 B.C.-A.D. 1000: Encyclopedia of the Barbarian World. Volume 2

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ﬂuence; and were sufﬁciently addicted to alcohol to

be willing to pay exorbitant prices to obtain it. In

the fourth century

B.C., Plato’s Laws included the

Celts in a list of “six barbarian, warlike peoples who

are given to drunkenness, as opposed to Spartan re-

straint.” And according to the Roman historian

Ammianus Marcellinus in Rerum gestarum libri,

calling a fellow Roman a “sabaiarius,” or “beer-

swiller,” was considered an insult. In the ﬁrst centu-

A.D., Pliny the Elder, another Roman writer, de-

scribes the nations of the west as consuming an in-

toxicant made from grain soaked in water. In

Historia naturalis he writes that “there are many

ways of making it in Gaul and Spain, and under dif-

ferent names, though the principle is the same.”

The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, in the ﬁrst

century

B.C., describes the Celts in his Bibliotheca

historica as “exceedingly fond of wine,” sating

themselves “with the unmixed wine imported by

merchants; their desire makes them drink it greedi-

ly, and when they become drunk they fall into a stu-

por or into a maniacal disposition.” The historical

value of these texts is difﬁcult to determine, partly

because so many classical authors borrowed from

one another without attribution, particularly in the

absence of ﬁrsthand knowledge of the peoples they

were describing. There is also the obvious propa-

ganda value of denigrating cultures and peoples

who were in the process of being conquered or as-

similated.

ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE

Feasting and the consumption of alcohol are essen-

tial components of several European cultural tradi-

tions: elite marriage and inauguration rituals, sover-

eignty and patron-client rituals, death and funerary

rituals, and sacriﬁce and offering rituals. In its socio-

political manifestation alcohol functioned as a vehi-

cle for maintaining elite prerogatives through feast-

ing and the distribution of liquor to warrior retinues

and other clients as an incentive and a reward for

service. Sharing food and drink simultaneously

communicates messages of membership and exclu-

sion, particularly in Celtic and Germanic societies,

where communal feasting served to rank individuals

in relation to one another. The structured con-

sumption of alcoholic beverages accompanied most

rites of passage, with those of elite groups being

most visible in the material culture and the docu-

mentary record.

Archaeologically, the elite drinking complex is

particularly clearly deﬁned in mortuary contexts.

Signiﬁcantly, when drinking and feasting equip-

ment is not associated with elite mortuary ritual, it

appears in the form of votive deposits in rivers, bogs,

and springs, an example of the conspicuous destruc-

tion of wealth that marks competitive elite signaling

behavior in prehistoric Europe. When the energy of

a community was invested in elaborate deposition

of the dead, however, elite individuals were buried

with a standard set of recurring elements that distin-

guish such graves from the majority of burials.

One of the earliest archaeological examples is a

beaker containing mead from a Bronze Age burial

at Ashgrove in Fife, Scotland, dated to 1000

B.C.

Evidence for fermented ale was found in a vessel of

roughly the same date from North Mains in Perth-

shire, Scotland. Beeswax residue was present in an

even earlier ceramic vessel of Neolithic date from

Runnymede Bridge in Berkshire, England, suggest-

ing that it originally held mead. One of the latest ex-

amples is the Kavanagh Charter Horn, a brass-

decorated ivory horn that was the basis of the

Kavanagh family’s claim to direct descent from the

royal house of Leinster as late as the ﬁfteenth centu-

A.D. The geographic range of the sociopolitically

signiﬁcant drinking and feasting complex appears to

have Indo-European roots, surviving as a funda-

mental aspect of cultural identity in northern Eu-

rope for much longer than in those areas where it

is presumed to have originated.

DRINKING VESSELS

Initially, elite drinking vessels were made of pottery

and, more rarely, of exotic materials such as amber

or gold, followed by a gradual increase in sheet-

metal vessels, with the addition of silver and glass in

the Roman and early medieval periods. Occasional-

ly, under ideal preservation conditions, wooden

drinking equipment has been documented in ar-

chaeological contexts, from ﬁnely turned cups and

ﬂagons to enormous tuns (casks) or barrels made of

wooden staves bound with organic materials or

metal. From Neolithic times on, however, there is

a pervasive association between drinking and feast-

ing equipment and high rank or status, even though

the number and combination of vessel types vary.

The drinking horn is a category of elite symbol-

ism associated with ideologically constituted alco-

6: THE EUROPEAN IRON AGE, C. 800 B.C.– A.D. 400

180

ANCIENT EUROPE

hol consumption that appears consistently from the

Bronze Age through the early Christian period; in

fact, it is the only item of drinking equipment that

is associated with almost every period of later Euro-

pean prehistory. Most drinking horns were made of

actual animal horn, the largest coming from the

now extinct aurochs, but horns of pottery, bronze,

iron, glass, and ivory are known. Genuine horn ves-

sels were in use throughout prehistory and into

early medieval times, whereas glass horns made a

relatively late appearance, mainly in Roman and

early Germanic contexts.

Numerous examples of metal-decorated horns

are known, particularly from the Iron Age; most are

embellished with sheet gold or bronze. In addition

to the nine horns from the Hochdorf burial of the

sixth century

B.C., near Stuttgart, horns were found

in the Early La Tène (fourth century

B.C.)

Kleinaspergle burial, also near Stuttgart, and a

group of ﬁve Early La Tène burials from the Rhine-

land: Reinheim, Bescheid, Schwarzenbach, Hopp-

städten-Weiersbach, and Weiskirchen A.D. Saar.

Bronze Age examples include the gold-decorated

horn from Wismar in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern

and a silver-mounted drinking horn, together with

other drinking equipment, from the Lübsow burial

in northern Germany, of the ﬁrst century

A.D.

Adorned pottery drinking horns are documented in

the Lausitz culture (Late Bronze Age and Early Iron

Age) of northeastern Germany and Poland, with

roughly sixty known examples. In Britain silver-gilt-

decorated drinking horns are known from two

Anglo-Saxon burials of the sixth century

A.D., at

Sutton Hoo and at Taplow Court.

Drinking horns are found in archaeological

contexts throughout eastern Europe, including the

Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Hungary, Cro-

atia, and other parts of the former Yugoslavia, as

well as in northern Germany and Scandinavia. A

drinking horn is depicted in an important seven-

teenth-century painting from Frisia, in which it acts

as a symbol of dynastic succession. Clearly, the sym-

bolic “load” of this particular element of the drink-

ing complex was geographically and temporally re-

silient. Other indigenous vessel categories were

cups, beakers, cauldrons, and various kinds of ﬂag-

ons, including the La Tène Schnabelkanne, an

Etruscan form that was copied as well as imported

by Celtic elites.

DRINKING, FEASTING, AND RITUAL

The alcoholic beverages consumed by European

elites were imbued with ritual signiﬁcance, owing to

the pyrotechnic (involving ﬁre) production process,

the psychoactive (mood-altering) nature of alcohol,

and the relative rarity of some of the raw materials

required for production, which could (as in the case

of honey or grapes) themselves have symbolic sig-

niﬁcance. Saint Patrick, for example, is said to have

refused to touch honey even when he was suffering

from severe privation, because of its pagan ritual sig-

niﬁcance, and in Ireland both beer and mead are

found as elements in personal names. Beer has fairly

prosaic associations for today, compared, for exam-

ple, with wine, which appears as a ritually redolent

alcoholic beverage in post-Roman, early Christian

Europe at least in part as a result of syncretistic asso-

ciations between wine, blood, and sacriﬁce.

In secular as well as religious contexts in Mero-

vingian Gaul, for instance, symbolic exchanges of

weaponry, precious objects, and food were a critical

component of the creation and maintenance of

friendship (amicitia) and elite power. The link be-

tween drinking equipment and mortuary ritual is

present in these early Christian societies until at least

the sixth century

A.D., both in terms of objects

placed in the graves and with respect to the funerary

feasts conducted at the grave site. The monasteries

took over from Celtic and Germanic leaders as pro-

ducers and distributors of alcoholic beverages, with

feasting continuing as the most important form of

gift exchange and patronage. The symbolic link be-

tween elites and spectacular drinking vessels of pre-

cious metals also was retained, and ritualized pre-

sentations of such tableware continued in the

Carolingian and Merovingian courts. If given on

behalf of the poor, they represented appropriate

gifts by laymen or clerics to the church.

In the Celtic as well as the Germanic literary tra-

dition (from the Mabinogion to Beowulf), drinking

vessels sometimes were given names, a phenome-

non also associated with weapons, especially swords,

underscoring the ritual signiﬁcance of the equip-

ment used in drinking alcoholic beverages. In early

Christian contexts, gifts of feasting and, especially,

drinking vessels were thought to retain something

of the identity of the person who had bestowed

them; it is possible that a similar anthropomorphiza-

IRON AGE FEASTING

ANCIENT EUROPE

181

tion of drinking equipment existed in prehistoric

Europe.

The iconographic evidence for the ritual signiﬁ-

cance of drinking vessels, particularly those of metal,

consists of a number of so-called cult vessels and

other representations of drinking equipment, rang-

ing from the ninth and eighth centuries

B.C. to at

least the ﬁrst century

B.C. These include vessels that

formed part of the feasting and drinking equipment

of early monasteries and church leaders. Recurring

elements in these “cult” vessels are wheeled vehi-

cles, horses, horned beasts, female ﬁgures, and

drinking vessels. The silver Gundestrup cauldron

found in a Danish bog in 1891 represents a continu-

ation of this tradition; it is dated to the late second

century

B.C. and may be of Thracian origin, despite

its obviously Celtic iconographic elements (ﬁg. 1).

INSULAR WRITTEN SOURCES

In the insular literary tradition, drinking vessels rep-

resent the obligation of the ruler to be generous and

to provide for his or her people, a constant theme

Fig. 1. Detail of the silver Gundestrup cauldron, showing a woman’s face. THE ART ARCHIVE/

NATIONALMUSEET COPENHAGEN DENMARK/DAGLI ORTI. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

in northern Europe, as it is in most so-called heroic

societies. Horns and cauldrons often are “testing”

vessels, in the sense that only a true king can drink

them dry. The largest of the nine horns in the

Hochdorf grave is evocative of such a tradition: at

5.5 liters (ten pints), it had ﬁve times the capacity

of the remaining eight horns found in the burial.

The huge iron horn with its gold decorations hung

directly over the “prince’s” couch, suggesting that

the ability to drink as well as dispense large quanti-

ties of alcohol was one of the deﬁning characteristics

of a ruler. In one of the best known of the Irish epic

tales, Táin Bó Cúalnge, also called the “Cattle Raid

of Cooley,” the king spends a third of the day oc ól

chorma, that is, “drinking cuirm,” or beer. This is

quite a lot of swigs from the royal drinking horn,

calculated on an hourly basis! By drinking from

magical horns unharmed, the protagonists in the

numerous Irish, Welsh, and Scottish tales that deal

with “drinking the feast” of sovereignty conﬁrm

their title to the kingship; the horns and other

drinking equipment become the symbol of their

right to rule.

6: THE EUROPEAN IRON AGE, C. 800 B.C.– A.D. 400

182

ANCIENT EUROPE

The symbolic signiﬁcance of the communal

consumption of alcohol as a marker of elite social

obligations and prerogatives is a constant element

in pre-industrial northern Europe. The composition

and meaning of elite drinking equipment appear to

have gone through shifts from one structural option

to another within the same transformational set, re-

producing the basic structure in a novel cultural

form. Even though the beverages and vessels may

have changed through time—from a stoup of un-

hopped ale or spiced mead to imported Greek or

Roman wine to distilled liquor in a glass cup—the

material culture and its ideopolitical signiﬁcance ap-

pear consistently in recognizable form.

See also Hochdorf (vol. 1, part 1); Sutton Hoo (vol. 2,

part 7).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arnold, Bettina. “Power Drinking in Iron Age Europe.”

British Archaeology 57 (February 2001): 12–19.

———. “‘Drinking the Feast’: Alcohol and the Legitimation

of Power in Celtic Europe.” Cambridge Archaeological

Journal 9, no. 1 (1999): 71–93.

Barclay, Gordon J. “Sites of the Third Millennium

B.C. to

the First Millennium

A.D. at North Mains, Strathallon,

Perthshire.” Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of

Scotland 113 (1983): 122–281.

Biel, Jörg. Der Keltenfürst von Hochdorf: Methoden und

Ergebnisse der Landesarchäologie. Stuttgart, Germany:

Konrad Theiss Verlag, 1985.

Dickson, J. H. “Bronze Age Mead.” Antiquity 52 (1978):

108–113.

Dietler, Michael. “Driven by Drink: The Role of Drinking

in the Political Economy and the Case of Early Iron Age

France.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 9

(1990): 352–406.

Dietler, Michael, and Brian Hayden, eds. Feasts: Archaeologi-

cal and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and

Power. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution,

2001.

Effros, Bonnie. Creating Community with Food and Drink

in Merovingian Gaul. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan,

2002.

Enright, Michael. Lady with a Mead Cup: Ritual, Prophecy,

and Lordship in the European Warband from La Tène

to the Viking Age. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996.

Flandrin, Jean Louis, and Massimo Montanari, eds. Food: A

Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present. New

York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Kaul, Flemming. “The Gundestrup Cauldron Reconsid-

ered.” Acta Archaeologica 66 (1995): 1–38.

Kaul, Flemming, and J. Martens. “Southeast European In-

ﬂuences in the Early Iron Age of Southern Scandinavia:

Gundestrup and the Cimbri.” Acta Archaeologica 66

(1995): 111–161.

Kendall, Calvin B., and Peter S. Wells, eds. Voyage to the

Other World: The Legacy of Sutton Hoo. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

Nebelsick, Louis Daniel. “Trunk und Transzendenz: Trink-

geschirr im Grab zwischen der frühen Urnenfelder- und

späten Hallstattzeit im Karpatenbecken.” In Chronos:

Beiträge zur prähistorischen Archäologie zwischen Nord-

und Südosteuropa: Festschrift für Bernhard Hänsel. Ed-

ited by C. Becker, M.-L. Dunkelmann, C. Metzner-

Nebelsick, H. Peter-Röcher, M. Roeder, and B. Terzan,

pp. 373–387. Espelkamp, Germany: Verlag Marie Lei-

dorf, 1997.

Neumann de Vegvar, Carol. “Drinking Horns in Ireland and

Wales: Documentary Sources.” In From the Isles of the

North: Early Medieval Art in Ireland and Britain. Ed-

ited by Cormac Bourke, pp. 81–87. Proceedings of the

Third International Conference on Insular Art, Ulster

Museum, Belfast, April 7–11, 1994. Belfast, Northern

Ireland: HMSO, 1995.

Sherratt, Andrew. Economy and Society in Prehistoric Europe:

Changing Perspectives. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni-

versity Press, 1997.

Unwin, Tim. Wine and the Vine: An Historical Geography

of Viticulture and the Wine Trade. London: Routledge,

1991.

ETTINA ARNOLD

IRON AGE FEASTING

ANCIENT EUROPE

183

THE EUROPEAN IRON AGE, C. 800 B.C.– A.D. 400

LA TÈNE ART

■

The European Iron Age, termed the Hallstatt cul-

ture after a major Austrian site, began in the latter

part of the eighth century

B.C. At this early stage the

embellishment of items of metal and pottery (and

also, though less often preserved, of such organic

materials as textiles) was largely geometric, al-

though animals and birds, especially waterbirds, and

occasionally humans also were depicted. With re-

spect to humans, there was little attempt at natural-

istic representation.

Thus, in the Hallstatt period, abstract decora-

tion, whatever the medium, was just that: decora-

tion and certainly not art. It was not until about the

middle of the ﬁfth century

B.C., with the blossoming

of the second phase of Iron Age culture in Europe

(the La Tène culture, named after a site in Switzer-

land) that a type of decoration developed that, in its

beauty, its technical virtuosity, and at times the al-

most overwhelming power of its personality, may be

regarded as art in the truest sense. This rightly has

been seen as the ﬁrst great art of Europe outside the

classical world.

ORIGINS

It has been said that La Tène art had no genesis; it

came into the world in fully developed form, with

a distinctive personality. It is evident, however, that

Ionian Greek colonizers in the south of France and

Etruscans in northern Italy supplied the models that

ignited the creative skills of Celtic craftsmen. The

wine trade from these areas acted as the catalyst, in-

troducing, besides the liquid itself—in great quanti-

ty—the goblets, ﬂagons, cauldrons, mixing bowls,

and all the appropriate equipment for its proper

consumption.

The ruling elite of the Late Hallstatt period was

eager to display its wealth and power through its

links with the cultured world to the south. Such

wealth is evident in the rich graves containing im-

ported Mediterranean produce and is illustrated

dramatically by an extraordinary bronze couch,

probably of northern Italian manufacture, found in

a warrior burial at Hochdorf in southwestern Ger-

many. A mud-brick wall at the Heuneburg hillfort

imitates in close detail the defensive construction of

the Mediterranean. This was a powerful statement

of prestige and wealth.

By 500

B.C. the craftsmen of the Late Hallstatt

world had been exposed for more than a century to

the best of Mediterranean craftsmanship and art.

Nonetheless, for a generation or two this seems

scarcely to have impinged on the conservatism of

their own artistic repertoire. With the breakup of

the old order, however (probably in the second

quarter of that century), change and transforma-

tion, dramatic in their suddenness, ensued. The old

centers of Hallstatt power declined (there is debate

as to the reasons for this), and new centers emerged

farther north, especially in the Marne region of

France and the middle Rhine in Germany. There

followed rapid expansion across Europe, sometimes

involving entire tribal groupings, into Italy, Greece,

and the Balkans and along the Danube as far as Ro-

mania. The centuries between 400

B.C. and 200 B.C.

have been described as the age of migration, and the

Roman commentator, seeing land and plunder as

184

ANCIENT EUROPE

the motivating force, cannot have been far from the

truth. Archaeology and the written sources present

a consistent picture of expansion and settlement

across the European mainland.

The art of these people thus is clearly rooted in

the Mediterranean. Elements of earlier Hallstatt

geometric ornament survive, of course, but general-

ly as minor background ﬁllers to the larger orna-

mental compositions. It also has been suggested

that elements of eastern inspiration can be detected.

Attention has been focused on nomadic horsemen

from the eastern steppes, the Scythians, who devel-

oped a lively and imaginative animal art. Hints of

this art form, such as dragons on a pair of wine ﬂag-

ons of the fourth century

B.C. from Basse-Yutz in

the Lorraine region of France (ﬁg. 1), have been put

forward, but no objects of deﬁnitely Scythian manu-

facture have been found in Celtic areas. Thus, the

phrase “orientalizing” is preferred, suggesting that

seemingly eastern elements were transmitted not di-

rectly but via the southeastern Hallstatt or the

northern Italian zones. Chinese silk fragments from

several Late Hallstatt tombs are, at any rate, indica-

tions of long-distance trading; in this regard the

tooth of a mule—a pack animal—from one such

burial is interesting. Astonishing, however, are the

hen bones that somehow reached the Heuneburg

fortress in southern Germany from as far away as

India.

LA TÈNE ART

No consideration of La Tène art can commence

without reference to Paul Jacobsthal’s two-volume

1944 work, Early Celtic Art. In the years since it

was written it has, not surprisingly, been overtaken

in many ways by new discoveries and fresh ideas, but

it remains a seminal text. His four divisions of early

Celtic art are still the starting point for modern dis-

cussion.

In essence, the art form of the La Tène Celts is

a curvilinear style growing from the palmettes, lotus

blossoms, vine scrolls, and myriad other motifs from

the classical world but rendered in uniquely original

variations of great imagination and at times bewil-

dering complexity. The compass commonly was

used in the early stages, but from the beginning

there was a ﬂamboyant exuberance that transcended

such mechanical aids. The art of the Celts is unique

and essentially different from that of the Mediterra-

Fig. 1. Flagons from Basse-Yutze, France. © ERICH LESSING/

ART RESOURCE, NY. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

nean. The Celtic craftsmen were embarked on their

own artistic journey, with the designs of the Medi-

terranean acting as the catalyst, but no more. It is

small wonder that Jacobsthal was moved to remark,

“Celtic art has no genesis.”

The style is one of light and shade, of twisting

shapes, and of meanings that change in the eye of

the observer. La Tène art puzzles and tantalizes.

Curves combine in birdlike forms, and human faces

appear embedded in the seemingly abstract scrolls.

There are eyes or pseudo-eyes, at times cartoon-like

and at other times glowering in latent menace.

Nonetheless, in such apparent ambiguity there is

doubt. How intentional are the embedded shapes,

to what extent are they no more than forms created

by the mere accidental juxtaposition of curving

lines? The point is illustrated by the engraved orna-

ment on the bronze covering of an iron sword scab-

bard from Filottrano in northern Italy, probably of

the fourth century

B.C., which bears a series of

writhing S ﬁgures along its length. Where each pair

of S ﬁgures meets, the line of the S ends in the arc

LA TÈNE ART

ANCIENT EUROPE

185

of a circle linked by an elongated loop. Here the

willing observer can see faces. Is this a deliberate

creation, or is it only the eye of the beholder that

creates this image? It is quite impossible to decide.

A small sheet-gold fragment from Bad

Dürkheim in Germany is unambiguous. A double

face, rendered with extraordinary skill, is evident.

Viewed from one side there is a mournful, bearded

elder. From the other angle, the old man dissolves,

to be replaced by an anxious youth. Seamlessly, the

beard of the elder has become the elegant coiffeur

of the young man.

Our knowledge of contemporary technology

rests, to a considerable extent, on the ﬁnished ob-

jects. These items, of course, are the culmination of

complex processes involving the acquisition of the

necessary metals and the presence of an organized

workshop with furnace, charcoal, and bellows for

raising heat to the required level. There must have

been apprentices who carried out the basic tasks,

learning from the master the many skills necessary

for successful work. Artisans needed crucibles of va-

rying sizes and tongs for holding them when they

were ﬁlled with molten metal. Designs were pro-

duced by hammering, casting, or engraving, and

many specialist tools were necessary, including ham-

mers, chisels, implements for cutting and chasing,

anvils, drills, measuring devices, spatulas for shaping

the wax, and much else. In the earlier phases, coral,

probably from the Mediterranean, was used; later,

red enamel/glass was substituted. Little of this ma-

terial survives, but an important deposit at Gussage

All Saints in southwestern England has yielded the

remains of moulds for the manufacture of perhaps

ﬁfty matched sets of chariot and horse ﬁttings.

Doubtless, rituals and incantations were needed

to ensure success in the work, but most important

were the inherited skills of generations, even centu-

ries, of ﬁne metalworking. This was the preserve of

an elite, working under the patronage of a powerful

ruling class and creating at their behest objects of

the highest technical and artistic quality for display

and ostentation, for ceremonial occasions, and

some, perhaps, for the ﬁeld of battle. Ultimately,

however, the ﬁnest material was destined for the

Otherworld, through deposition in graves, in water,

or in other abodes of goddesses and gods.

Jacobsthal’s “early” style, today more common-

ly termed the “strict” style, is closest to the Mediter-

ranean. Spectacularly rich burials in parts of Germa-

ny, France, and Switzerland have yielded the ﬁnest

objects, one outstanding piece now in the museum

of Besançon in France (probably taken from a plun-

dered burial). This Etruscan bronze ﬂagon was

transformed by a master artisan through the addi-

tion of a web of ﬁnely engraved ornament—

including palmettes, S scrolls, comma leaves, even

the yin-yang symbol—around its sides and on the

base. The ornament, delicately traced, washes across

the surface in sensuous waves, transmuting the staid

container into a Celtic masterpiece. This was an ob-

ject ﬁt to grace a royal feast.

Abstraction was the essence of this early phase,

and the same artistic ethos applied to ﬁgural repre-

sentation. This style was relatively common at this

early stage. Safety-pin brooches, the standard Celtic

dress fastener (probably deriving its inspiration from

northern Italy), combined animals, birds, human

faces, and creatures of fantasy, sometimes in combi-

nations of at times bewildering complexity. Belt

hooks, often with paired, grifﬁn-like creatures, also

belong to this early trend, and these creatures, en-

closing smaller human ﬁgures, must have had mean-

ing, but a meaning forever denied us. There is much

more in metal. In stone, too, there are carved pillars,

such as a four-sided example from Pfalzfeld in Ger-

many, combining ﬂeshy S scrolls with a stylized

human face on each side. On each there is a so-

called leaf crown, resembling a pair of bloated com-

mas. This is a widespread Celtic motif, probably a

symbol of divine status. Stones with wholly abstract

ornament also are known, especially in northwest-

ern France and, three or four centuries later, Ire-

land.

The human form, especially the head, is a popu-

lar motif, but in true Celtic art the anatomical natu-

ralism of the Mediterranean is never found. There

are striking examples. Among the most spectacular

is an almost life-size bearded warrior of stone that

was found lying beside a rich burial mound of this

early phase at the Glauberg in Germany. Although

the rendering of form and physique is far from na-

ture, the detailed reproduction of weapons, armor,

and a neck ornament is a startlingly faithful copy of

known originals. The symbolic leaf crown sur-

mounts this carving, too.

Human representations on a ﬁfth century

B.C.

sword scabbard from grave 994 at Hallstatt in Aus-

6: THE EUROPEAN IRON AGE, C. 800 B.C.– A.D. 400

186

ANCIENT EUROPE

tria also are striking. Engraved along its length are

variously occupied ﬁgures, including both infantry

and cavalry, and, in one instance, a prone ﬁgure,

speared and crushed by one of the mounted war-

riors. Here, differing cultural traditions are evident,

not only Celtic but also some deriving from the ela-

borately embossed buckets (situlae) of a people

known as the Veneti of the northern Adriatic.

As Celtic peoples expanded across Europe in

the fourth and third centuries

B.C., their art devel-

oped further along its individual path. The strict

style gave way to what Jacobsthal called the Waldal-

gesheim style, after an exceptionally rich female

burial in Germany, which contained native pieces as

well as a bucket from southern Italy. Today there is

a tendency to use the more neutral term “vegetal

style” to describe the new artistic trends, especially

in view of the current emphasis on northern Italy as

critical in the genesis of the style.

Although Mediterranean elements persisted in

this phase of La Tène ornamentation (which may be

seen as beginning around the middle of the fourth

century

B.C.), the art typically was dominated by

continuously moving tendrils of varying types,

twisting and turning in restless motion across the

surface. This is well illustrated on golden torcs from

the Waldalgesheim grave, and there are many other

examples across Europe that showcase the wide-

spread popularity of the new style. The writhing

shapes on a series of bronze mounts said to be from

Commachio in northern Italy are similarly ﬁne ex-

amples of this stylistic development south of the

Alps.

Iron helmets, sometimes with a decorative

gold-foil cover, became widespread at this time,

from northern Spain as far east as Romania. These

items, clearly derived from the Mediterrannean, fre-

quently bear decoration of the highest quality and

probably were for parade rather than for the ﬁeld of

battle. One ﬁne example, a gold-plated iron speci-

men from Amfreville in France, features applied

sheet gold decorated with a chased ornament of

running, interlinked triskele designs. A spectacular

and wholly unique helmet came from a burial of the

third century

B.C. at Ciumes¸ti in Romania. A

winged bird with hinged, ﬂapping wings—an eagle

or raven—mounts the top. This magniﬁcent object,

worn by a warrior on horseback wearing chain mail

(for such also came from the burial) must have been

an object of admiration and awe on ceremonial oc-

casions.

From the third century

B.C. onward Celtic art

gave way to two stylistic variants, Jacobsthal’s plastic

and sword styles, terms that remain in current use.

The ﬁrst style is conﬁned largely to personal orna-

ments, with decoration in high relief. The latter, far

more widespread, is found most commonly, though

by no means exclusively, on scabbards. The artists

of the sword style operated in discrete schools of

craftsmanship in different areas of Europe, and indi-

vidual styles can be recognized. Especially impor-

tant centers were present in Switzerland and Hun-

gary, but there were others, certainly in parts of

France, and there also were insular schools.

There is considerable variety in the art of the

scabbards, which is concentrated most frequently at

the mouth. Typical of the Hungarian variant are

ﬂeshy tendrils that may overlap in their twisting and

turning; they occur with lyres of various types and,

at times, with tiny spirals. An especially ﬁne example

of a scabbard, found at Cernon-sur-Coole in France

but certainly Hungarian in inspiration, features a

crested bird’s head, its beak ending in a tightly

coiled spiral. In the Swiss variants of the style, birds’

heads are of various types, and there are numerous

S ﬁgures and tendrils of diverse forms. A distinctive

characteristic of the Swiss scabbards is overall stip-

pling, or ring punching (chagrinage), which is ab-

sent on scabbards of the other groups.

A speciﬁc scabbard type, characterized by an

opposing pair of so-called dragons or stylized vari-

ants of dragons at the mouth, has been a subject of

considerable discussion. There are differing versions

of this motif—which must have had meaning for the

scabbard engravers, as for the owners. Their wide

dispersal across the Celtic world, even as far as the

River Thames in southeastern England, prompted

one commentator to regard this motif as “common

Celtic currency.”

There is much that could be said about Europe-

an Celtic art. The diverse iconography, developing

from the mid-fourth century

B.C., of the extensive

coinage of the period merits a chapter of its own. At

any rate, by the ﬁrst century

B.C. the momentum of

Celtic expansion had run its course, and the bur-

geoning of Imperial Rome rapidly subsumed the ex-

uberance and individuality of Celtic art. The curvi-

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187

linear art style continued, at times still to a high

standard of artistic excellence, but soon decline set

in. The rich inhumation burials were a thing of the

past, and cremation burials, very often with the sim-

plest of grave goods, increasingly became the norm.

On mainland Europe the glory days of La Tène art

were numbered.

THE INSULAR WORLD

This spectacular early development of Celtic art on

the European mainland is scarcely present on the is-

lands to the west. In Ireland there is certainly noth-

ing dating earlier than about 300

B.C., whereas in

Britain there are only occasional items that could be

dated earlier. There are, for example, a few scattered

trinkets, and it has been claimed that an openwork

mount from a hillfort at Danebury in Hampshire,

England, dates to the ﬁfth or fourth century

B.C.

A fragmentary bronze vessel lid (or lids) from

Cerrig-y-Drudion in Wales has engraved decora-

Fig. 2. Detail of a bronze shield from Witham, northern

PERMISSION

tion, predominantly palmettes and lotus blossoms,

with a stippled and hatched background resembling

early Continental designs. There are, nonetheless,

hints of insular manufacture.

The widespread appearance of the new art style

in Britain and Ireland once was seen as indicating

population intrusion. Apart from accepting the late

settlement of southeastern England by Belgic peo-

ples, however, modern scholarship places heavy em-

phasis on indigenous development. Insular art in

the last centuries

B.C. thus can be seen as almost en-

tirely a product of local workshops. As on the Euro-

pean mainland, the ﬁnest art, notably, is lavished on

high-status items, such as weapons, shields, and

horse trappings, which clearly reﬂect considerations

of display and ostentation.

There are very few likely imports from this peri-

od. One is a gold torc from a bog at Knock, in

County Roscommon, Ireland, as is the earlier noted

dragon-pair scabbard from the Thames. The latter

stands apart from a series of ornate bronze scab-

bards in Britain and Ireland that have engraved or-

nament along their lengths, a feature of predomi-

nantly insular character. Their decoration, for the

most part consisting of wave tendrils, S scrolls, and

variants with a bewildering array of minor ﬁlling de-

signs (especially in Ireland), is distinct from art on

the Continental scabbards. These two insular

groups, each characterized by unique and differing

forms of chape (the ﬁtting attached at their ends)

probably reﬂect parallel streams of inﬂuence from

the European mainland. This theory, of course,

does not preclude subsequent cross-fertilization be-

tween the two islands.

A series of unique bronze shields from Britain

(with a single exception, they are shield covers) rep-

resents a set of objects of the highest technical

craftsmanship and artistic quality. Signiﬁcantly, al-

most all are from rivers. Votive deposition thus is a

likely scenario—such extraordinary objects proba-

bly would not have been used on the ﬁeld of battle.

Exact miniature bronze copies of such shields, in-

cluding twenty-two from a hoard at Salisbury that

was found by illegal metal detecting and then se-

cretly dispersed to collectors worldwide, support

the notion that such objects were not primarily for

practical use.

The decoration on these shields is as varied as

it is magniﬁcent. One of the earliest specimens, a

6: THE EUROPEAN IRON AGE, C. 800 B.C.– A.D. 400

188

ANCIENT EUROPE

bronze shield boss of spindle form, was found a cen-

tury ago in the River Trent at Ratcliffe-on-Saor. It

features complex designs of Continental sword style

derivation, comprising writhing scrolls that undu-

late across each other in ceaseless motion. On the

boss, strange, contorted, stylized quadrupeds lurk

in the undergrowth of an otherwise abstract, curvi-

linear jungle.

There are other ﬁne shields, including three

from the Thames and one from the River Witham

(ﬁg. 2), each unique and each a product of masterly

craftsmanship. There is also a horned ﬁtting of

bronze from Torrs in southwestern Scotland, prob-

ably a pony cap, with holes for the animal’s ears and

relief-hammered ornament. The ornamentation in-

cludes a variety of interconnecting elements, such as

peltae, spirals, leaf designs, and pointed-oval motifs,

which bend across the bronze in carefully balanced

symmetry. A curved pair of horns, possibly the ends

of drinking horns, was added to the cap in the nine-

teenth century. The ornament on these horns is en-

graved rather than hammered and has much in

common with the engraved ornament of the insular

scabbards, but the tiny face peering out from the

curvilinear undergrowth is unique in an insular con-

text.

Hammered ornament on a bronze disk decorat-

ing the mouth of a large, curving, superbly crafted

sheet-bronze horn from Loughnashade, County

Armagh, Ireland, also is related stylistically to the

designs on the Torrs piece, indicating the close rela-

tionships between craft centers on the two islands.

Gold is rare in the insular Iron Age, in striking

contrast to the extraordinary proliferation of this

metal in the preceding Bronze Age. There are, how-

ever, several important gold ﬁnds, all, apart from the

Knock torc discussed earlier, dating to about the last

century

B.C. In Ireland the most notable ﬁnds are

the seven gold artifacts discovered together at

Broighter in County Derry. Several neck orna-

ments, a small bowl, a model gold boat, and a beau-

tifully decorated buffer torc were among the items.

The torc is adorned with an elegant series of relief

trumpet curves and snail-shell spirals, clearly laid

out by means of a compass and set against a back-

ground web of overlapping arcs, also compass-

drawn.

Contemporary with this group, though of en-

tirely local manufacture, is an extraordinary series of

Fig. 3. Engraved bronze reverse side of a mirror from

RESOURCE, NY. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

torcs—of gold, silver, electrum, and bronze—found

in a series of pits placed randomly together in a ﬁeld

at Snettisham in Norfolk, England. The torcs were

both complete and fragmentary, some obviously

scrap and others carefully deposited in a tiered ar-

rangement. Ingots and cakes of gold and silver also

were found. In all, about 11 kilograms (24 pounds)

of gold and 16 kilograms (35 pounds) of silver have

been brought to light. The torcs vary in form, some

resembling the one from Broighter; the ﬁnest are

penannular creations of twisted gold strands, some

massive and many with ring ends decorated with

raised curvilinear ornament of insular type.

As the art of the Continental Celts declined

under Roman domination, insular developments

continued, especially in Ireland, where Roman le-

gions never trod. Around the time of the birth of

Christ, the compass, so important in Early La Tène

artistic composition, once more became a dominant

element in insular art, which grew increasingly dis-

tant from its Continental origins. In Britain at this

time a distinctive series of elaborately decorated

bronze mirrors occurs, characterized by varied and

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189