Holme Timber Circle, aka ‘Seahenge’. The plank to the left of the central tree stump is from a 19-century shipwreck.
Rock art
Practices that emerged in the preceding millennia, especially the decoration of megalithic tombs, continued in traditions of rock art that flourished in parts of northern and western Europe during the Bronze Age.16 The term ‘rock art’ means literally that: exposed outcrops decorated with images of people, objects and symbols that were pecked, ground and chiselled into the smooth surface of the rock. Major regional manifestations of rock art during the Bronze Age are found in Scandinavia and in the southern Alps.
The rocky Bohuslän region lies along the west coast of Sweden facing the North Sea. Along with central and southern Sweden and adjacent parts of Norway and Denmark, Bohuslän contains the greatest concentration of Nordic Bronze Age rock art. The Tanum area north of Gothenburg is the rock art capital of Bohuslän. Several hundred distinct outcrops have engravings, while hundreds more lie buried under moss and soil. The smooth, flat surfaces made marvellous canvases on which the carvers could kneel or lie while doing their work. When Bronze Age artists made them during the second millennium BC the Bohuslän engravings were close to the shoreline, but by the twenty-first century they had risen to 25–30 metres (80–100 ft) above sea level because the Swedish peninsula continues to rebound after being pushed down by ice over ten millennia ago.
Many outcrops have complex displays that are trying to tell us something about the social and spiritual lives of the societies that produced them. Ships with raised prows and sterns, often carrying people, are the most abundant image, and thousands have been recorded. Other people are shown bearing weapons, playing bronze trumpets, pushing ploughs, riding chariots drawn by oxen and having sex (many of the figures are unequivocally male). Animals include cattle, horses, deer, aquatic birds, dogs and wolves. Abstract images include cup marks (simple hemispherical pits), suns and spirals. Tracings of feet and hands are also common.
Many Scandinavian rock engravings were planned compositions, while some seem more haphazard or additive. Combat, rituals, processions, ploughing, hunting and seafaring would have been familiar elements of life in the Bronze Age, but we do not know what the carvings were trying to communicate. Were the carvings locations or backdrops for activities such as initiations or celebrations? Did the capture of these images hold deeper significance in cosmology, magic and beliefs? What did they say about the relationship between the world of the living and the world of myths and deities? Or were the carvings simply a Bronze Age version of Pinterest?
The other region that contains a concentration of Bronze Age rock art lies in the southwestern Alps of northwest Italy and southeast France. Here lie two exemplary sites: Mont Bego in the French Maritime Alps and Val Camonica in Lombardy. At both places, and several other important localities, the tradition of rock carving began during the Stone Age and continued through the first millennium BC, but it flourished spectacularly during the Bronze Age.
The rock here is softer than Scandinavian granite, and the schist and sandstone outcrops could be chiselled with pointed metal or stone tools to produce many thousands of images. At Mont Bego, nearly 100,000 carvings are known, while at Val Camonica the number exceeds 200,000. Weapons and tools are common motifs at both sites, reflecting both the functional and symbolic significance of these objects. Matching them to dated finds of actual tools and weapons from archaeological sites has permitted the dating of the carvings. In the Mont Bego carvings, another common image is horned oxen, sometimes two or four, pulling a plough. At Val Camonica, some carvings appear to show houses, stables or workshops with pitched roofs. Others have been interpreted as schematic maps of fields and dwellings.
Most parts of the Barbarian World were not so blessed with such massive rock outcrops that lent themselves to chiselling and engraving. A few cupmarks are all that might be expected in most places, although at some tombs like Kivik in southern Sweden, flat stone slabs were decorated in the same way as the boulders.17 We can only imagine, however, how perishable materials such as wood were used for creating displays of people, weapons, tools and ships. Through the images on rock we get a glimpse of ritualized practices and performances that must have been ingrained in life during the second millennium BC.
Irish gold
A visitor to the National Museum of Ireland on Kildare Street in Dublin has an opportunity to see some of the most spectacular prehistoric gold objects from anywhere in the world.18 Even more remarkable is the fact that these come not from a literate civilization but from the Bronze Age in Ireland, between about 2200 and 800 BC.19 Not only is the quantity of gold in the museum cases impressive, but the craftsmanship demonstrated in the fabrication of these artefacts also represents mastery of a challenging material.
The working of gold during the Bronze Age in Ireland has two peaks, one at the beginning during the transition from the Stone Age to the use of metals, and the second at the end, just before the appearance of iron. During the Early Bronze Age, between about 2200 and 1800 BC, Irish goldsmiths hammered gold into thin sheets and then shaped it into flat objects. The most impressive of these are the lunulae, or crescent-shaped neck ornaments so named because of their resemblance to a waxing moon. Over eighty have been found in Ireland. The pointed ends of the lunulae are often bent at an angle to the plane of the gold sheet to form terminals, while their surface is often covered with fine geometric engraving that continues motifs seen on Stone Age pottery or bone. Many have rippled surfaces from having been rolled or folded. Lunulae were presumably worn suspended from the neck. Other Early Bronze Age sheet-gold forms include round plaques that may have been worn on clothing, as well as earrings.
Bronze Age rock carvings at Tanum, southwest Sweden, highlighted in red paint, showing male warriors fighting on a boat.
It was long assumed that the source of the early Irish gold was in Ireland. Stream deposits in the mountains of eastern Ireland were often mentioned as likely sources. Recently, however, a research group led by Christopher Standish of the University of Southampton in England has studied trace elements in the thin gold sheet used to make artefacts like lunulae and discs.20 Their surprising discovery was that the elemental composition of these artefacts did not match any known Irish gold sources. Thus, two possibilities emerge. The first is that the gold came from an unknown Irish gold source or one that has been exhausted. The second, which is more straightforward, is that the gold came from somewhere else. In Standish’s study, Cornwall in southwestern England has emerged as a likely source. Thus it seems that gold from Cornwall was being traded to Ireland early in the second millennium BC in exchange for copper from southwestern Ireland and perhaps other resources. This copper, in turn, would have fed the demand for copper to alloy with Cornish tin and satisfy the desire for bronze in Britain and beyond. Despite the fact that there were local gold sources, Irish Bronze Age elites could point towards their access to a material from a distant source as a sign of their prestige. They needed to make the imported material go as far as possible, hence it was hammered wafer-thin.
Later in the second millennium BC, Irish goldworking went into decline only to re-emerge with new techniques around 1000 BC. In addition to gold sheet, now hammered so thin it would be called foil, solid objects of cast, shaped and twisted gold were made. Thus they are much more three-dimensional than the earlier flat objects. Bracelets and collars of twisted gold known as torcs are the most prominent, but some of the most interesting are thick and smooth curved objects with round ends given the speculative name of ‘dress fasteners’. Late Bronze Age gold objects are often found in deposits or hoards, where they were placed for ritual reasons. In marshy ground along a lake at Mooghaun in Co. Clare, a hoard found in 1854 contained over 150 gold artefacts, mainly bracelets but also gold collars and neck rings, which weighed over 5 kilograms (11 lb).
In 1932, young Patrick Nolan was hunting in a part of Co. Clare known as the Burren, which today is a strange, de
nuded limestone landscape but which in prehistoric times had much more vegetation.21 A rabbit ran into a fissure in the limestone. Patrick looked into the hole to find it, and instead of a rabbit he pulled out a spectacular gold collar measuring about 31 centimetres (1 ft) at its widest point. Today, the Gleninsheen Gorget, as it is known, is one of the most iconic Irish Late Bronze Age gold artefacts. Like the earlier lunulae, it is made from sheet gold in a crescent shape, only now it has thick ribs along its arc, separated by fine beaded decoration made by careful hammering. The terminals of the Gleninsheen Gorget are formed from round, concave pieces of ornamented sheet gold stitched to the crescent with gold wire. Gorgets like the one from Gleninsheen were composite artefacts formed from multiple gold sheets decorated and assembled with a remarkable level of detail and care.
During the second explosion of Irish goldworking, it seems likely that gold from local sources came into greater prominence, given the vast amount needed to produce massive torcs, bracelets, gorgets and other gold objects. Identifying the sources is still a challenge, however, and the recovery of gold particles from deposits in streams would have been a tedious and time-consuming process. Another question is the role that this extensive gold production played in arrangements of wealth, status and prestige in Irish Bronze Age society. Might such valuable objects have been gifts between chiefs to cement alliances? Why were they then buried in hoards or in hiding places? These questions, along with many others about Bronze Age Europe, await answers.
The Barbarian World in 800 BC
By the beginning of the first millennium BC, the general outlines of the Barbarian World that are of interest because of their eventual interactions with Mediterranean civilizations were falling into place. Bronze was in widespread use for weapons, tools and ornaments, often in massive forms that enabled its conspicuous display. Copper mines such as Mount Gabriel in Ireland, Great Orme in Wales and the Mitterberg in Austria fed the demand for raw material. Metalsmiths were masters of alloying, casting and finishing bronze in ever more elaborate forms. In addition, in particular areas like Ireland, goldworking techniques became especially advanced.
Bronze Age agriculture was a mature, integrated system of field cultivation and animal use, using the same primary domesticated plants and animals as before. Oxen were widely used for ploughing and pulling wagons. House forms varied from place to place, but in much of northern Europe a three-aisled longhouse was a standard domestic form. In some places, farmsteads were enclosed by ditches, while elsewhere they were open.
At the beginning of the second millennium BC, burial under mounds was a widespread burial rite, but by the beginning of the first millennium it was only found in Scandinavia, where huge mounds were built on ridgelines in Denmark and southern Sweden. Elsewhere, cremation was again the preferred means of disposing of the dead, often in large, flat cemeteries with the bones placed in urns along with bronze ornaments.
Trade networks flourished across the Barbarian World. First, tin and copper to make bronze needed to be brought together from separate sources, often necessitating transport of raw materials across bodies of water. Scrap bronze from broken and worn-out tools was melted down and reworked. Finely made bronze objects often wound up in abundance in places such as Denmark that utterly lacked both tin and copper, indicating the acquisitiveness of the inhabitants of such areas. Boatbuilding technology developed to meet the requirements for bulk transport of materials and products, as well as of people.
The Gleninsheen Gorget, a masterwork of Irish Late Bronze Age goldwork.
Finally, after some glimmers during previous millennia, we see the beginnings of ceremonial and spiritual life focused on making offerings by depositing costly items in wet places like bogs, ponds and rivers. Localities like Flag Fen became sites of sustained offering activity over several centuries. Stonehenge continued to be a place of congregation, and artefacts like the Nebra Disc reflect a keen interest in celestial bodies. Rock art across Scandinavia and in the Alps provided yet another medium for the expression of ideology and cosmology.
THREE
TRADE, SALT, GREEKS AND WEALTH
Early in the first millennium BC, the Barbarian World experienced local and regional bursts of economic and social complexity. Many of the themes running through this book continue to intersect and converge, and between about 800 and 400 BC we see the elaboration of trade networks and mortuary ceremonialism on a regional scale. Although this period is referred to as the early part of the Iron Age, the introduction of iron and its use for tools and implements took place gradually. As with the transition from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age was seamless, especially from the perspective of people who lived through it.
The coming of iron
Iron had already started coming into use, but at first without major economic importance, during the final centuries of the Bronze Age. Unlike bronze, which requires that two metals from different sources be alloyed, iron ore is very widely distributed in Europe. A source was probably very close to most centres of population from the Atlantic to the Urals. This could be high-grade ore from montane regions or low-grade bog ore or limonite from sedimentary zones. Either could be concentrated through smelting to produce similar intermediate products that could be forged and shaped into all sorts of useful items.
The smelting of iron requires a large amount of fuel, usually charcoal, and enough air to heat the charcoal and ore mix to produce a ‘bloom’. At first this was done in pits, but techniques later improved to use clay furnaces above the ground. Temperatures reached 2000–2400°C (1100–1300°F), substantially higher than needed to smelt copper. After sufficient heating, the slag waste would settle to the bottom of the furnace, leaving the bloom to be extracted and worked further by heating and hammering.
Although iron is more ubiquitous than copper and tin, its production nonetheless required considerable skill to achieve the high temperatures needed for smelting, refining the bloom and forging the metal into useful products. New techniques had to be learned and perfected. Casting, the principal method of the Bronze Age, was not especially useful for early iron. Forging and blacksmithing came to be important and valued skills.
The advantage of iron over bronze is that it is exceptionally durable and can keep a sharp edge. Swords made from iron would break only under tremendous impact, and their edges could be repeatedly sharpened. Since it was less expensive to produce, useful implements such as kettles, hooks and shears could be made. Rivets and nails became available for fastening wood, simplifying joinery and allowing heavy items to be suspended. It took a while before these useful applications of the new metal were figured out, but centres of iron production soon sprang up across the Barbarian World.
One such centre was at Stična in modern Slovenia.1 Here, local high-quality iron ore was smelted, forged and transported throughout the eastern Alps and northern Italy. As a result, considerable wealth flowed into Stična, reflected in the contents of thousands of nearby burials.
Yet iron did not replace bronze, especially for luxury goods. Many finely made objects, such as elaborately decorated buckets, found in the Stična graves were made from bronze. Throughout later prehistory, bronze was the primary metal for making really nice things, whereas iron was the pragmatic choice for making tools that needed to be cheap and abundant or tough and sharp. Iron goods were meant to be used.
Antenna-hilted dagger with iron blade from Hallstatt, Austria, in the Natural History Museum, Vienna.
The traditional periodization for the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age uses the term Hallstatt, which, as we will see below, is the name of an important site in Austria. The Hallstatt period is divided into four parts, A to D, with the first two being the final stages of the Bronze Age characterized by cremation burials and the last two being the first stages of the Iron Age. Hallstatt stages are primarily markers for archaeological specialists, but the term crops up often in descriptions of the period betwe
en 800 and 400 BC. It is often applied to the strongly differentiated societies of the seventh, sixth and fifth centuries BC in central Europe.
Who were the Celts?
‘Were the people who lived at the sites you study . . . Celts?’ I have been often asked this question when talking about the Stone Age settlements that I investigate in Poland. I have to answer, ‘No, my farmers lived several thousand years before people who could have been called Celts lived in Europe.’ The passive phrase ‘could have been called’ is important. No one in the southern or western part of temperate Europe during the final millennium BC would have recognized the name ‘Celt’. Celts are only what other people called them, both in the past and in more recent times. Nonetheless, they were real people, and during the period discussed in this chapter we begin to see common traits that mark a Celtic tradition in language and decorative style running through the later prehistory of Germany, France and the British Isles.
Peoples known as Celts have deep archaeological roots in late Bronze Age central Europe, before 800 BC. This tradition continues through Hallstatt chiefdoms of west-central Europe between 600 and 450 BC, in which trade with Greek merchants produced remarkable demonstrations of status and wealth. We will explore this relationship in greater detail below. Although these trading contacts abated around 450 BC, Celts were now known to the Mediterranean world. Some groups moved south, into the Balkans and Italy, even as far as Anatolia. The Celtic tradition then continued into the remarkable La Tène art style of the final centuries BC that will be described in the next chapter and persists today in the native languages of Ireland, Scotland and Brittany and the cultural identities that accompany them.
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