Around 500 BC, the Greek author Hecataeus of Miletus wrote about people he called Keltoi, with specific reference to the peoples from northern Europe who had migrated into the southern Balkans, Greece and even Anatolia, and whom the Greeks had encountered at their trading colony of Massalia. Scholars call words like Keltoi or Celts an ethnonym, meaning an externally applied collective name given to a group of people to distinguish them from their neighbours. With time, this term came to be applied to barbarian aggressors with whom the Greeks and later the Romans had contact during the second half of the first millennium BC, when Celtic bands penetrated into the Balkans and Italy, sacking Rome in 390 BC.
From writings of classical authors such as Posidonius and later Caesar and Tacitus, we know something of Celtic society. Various traits were ascribed to Celts, most notably fighting and drinking. They had oral traditions that were managed by priests (later identified as ‘druids’), bards and poets. A warrior elite served the leaders, whose success in battle was a claim to power and authority. Craft specialists became expert in working materials such as bronze, gold and coral, which also took on spiritual significance. Feasting cemented relations among the elite. An important Celtic institution was the practice of clientship. Noble patrons provided clients with protection and prestige while obtaining support and service in return.
Many books have been written on the barbarians known as Celts,2 but this term will not appear much in the remainder of this book. One reason is that the prehistoric Celts represent only some of the barbarians of temperate Europe, and the distinction between them and contemporaneous inhabitants of temperate Europe is largely imposed by the outsiders. A major theme of this book is the ‘diversity in uniformity’ of later prehistoric Europe, and separating Celts from other barbarian peoples introduces a discordant note. The major reason for not focusing more on Celts, however, is that another ethnonym is being used throughout this book, namely ‘the Barbarian World’, which includes both peoples known as Celts and all the other pre-literate societies of temperate Europe.
Waterlogged lakeside villages in northern Poland
Many parts of northern Poland are lakelands in which Ice Age glaciers left shallow depressions and valleys that filled with water. These were attractive places for settlement in prehistoric times as they are today, because the surrounding dryland areas are covered with fertile soils and the streams that connected these lakes enabled easy travel by watercraft. One such lake is Lake Biskupin, located about 60 kilometres (40 mi.) north of the city of Poznań. On a soggy peninsula jutting into the lake, a remarkable fortified Iron Age settlement was discovered in 1933.3
A local schoolteacher, Walenty Szwajcer, had read about the Swiss Lake Dwellings. One day, he noticed waterlogged timbers protruding from the boggy soil by the lake, and he imagined that he had found their Polish equivalent. He reported his discovery to the Archaeological Museum in Poznań, where the news made its way to Józef Kostrzewski (1885–1968), one of the founders of modern archaeology in Poland. Kostrzewski recognized the importance of the find, and the following summer, he began excavations.
Aerial photo of the 1930s excavations at Biskupin, Poland, taken from a Polish Army observation balloon.
Kostrzewski and his team of assistants and workmen systematically uncovered the tangle of waterlogged timbers. Eventually, outlines of houses and streets began to emerge. The houses were built in long rows, with shared walls between them, separated by streets paved with oak logs. Each of over 100 houses was similar to the others, measuring about 8 by 9 metres (26 × 30 ft). They consisted of a large central room with a stone hearth, entered through an antechamber used for storage.
Surrounding the settlement was a rampart of timber boxes filled with earth and stones. It enclosed an oval area approximately 160 metres (525 ft) wide and 200 metres (660 ft) long and is estimated to have been 5–6 metres (16–20 ft) high. Sharpened wooden stakes along the shore of the lake on three sides of the site served as a breakwater to protect the rampart from erosion as well as a deterrent to enemies trying to launch a waterborne attack. A main gate permitted access to the interior street system. The internal organization of the streets and houses suggests that planning went into the layout of the settlement before it was built.
Kostrzewski employed novel techniques for the time.4 He enlisted the Polish Army to fly an observation Zeppelin over the excavations to obtain photographs taken vertically to show the settlement layout, while Polish Navy divers explored the lake bottom. Careful attention was paid to the recovery and analysis of animal bones and plant remains. Kostrzewski organized an extensive publicity campaign in the press. His excavations were interrupted by the Second World War, during which further investigation was carried out by the ss-Ahnenerbe (see Chapter Six). After the war, Kostrzewski’s pupils continued research at Biskupin. Although major excavations ended in the 1970s, research on the site continues today.
Analysis of plant remains and animal bones revealed that the inhabitants of Biskupin were farmers who grew millet, wheat, barley, rye and beans and kept pigs for meat and cattle for meat and milk. A big question is how many people lived at Biskupin. Some estimates are in the order of 700 to 1,000 people, although those seem high. Nonetheless, Biskupin clearly represented a concentration of several hundred people that made heavy demands on the surrounding fields, pastures and forests. Cattle were also used to pull wagons and ploughs, since wooden wheels and ploughshares were found among the timbers.
Early radiocarbon dates indicated that Biskupin was occupied between 700 and 600 BC, but more accurate dating has been provided by tree-ring dating of the waterlogged timbers.5 Most of the trees used in the construction of Biskupin were cut between 747 and 722 BC. Almost half of them were felled during the winter of 738–737 BC. Although the actual duration of the settlement is unclear, there was at least one major episode of rebuilding after a fire. Nonetheless, the settlement was abandoned in the final decade of the eighth century BC, around 708 BC.
We also now know that Biskupin was not unique.6 Many other lakes in the region also had fortified sites around roughly the same time. Sobiejuchy lies 14 kilometres (9 mi.) north of Biskupin, on an isthmus between two lakes that was probably an island 2,700 years ago. Although it covers a larger area, the internal organization of Sobiejuchy is very different to Biskupin, in that its houses are long and narrow and are not as densely packed. Other sites, like Smuszewo and Izdebno, have the same sort of packed layout as Biskupin. The fact that there were two flavours of settlement plan in this small area highlights the fact that the Barbarian World was far from homogeneous.
We do not know why Biskupin and nearby sites were abandoned, apparently after only a few decades. The climate did turn a bit moister at this time, so rising lake levels have been suggested. Attacks and raids by marauders have also been proposed, and the massive ramparts indicate that defence was a major concern. Perhaps the cause of their collapse was internal. Their construction would have required so much timber that acres of forest needed to be felled, although that area would have been put to good use for fields and pastures. Several hundred people packed into confined spaces also would have posed a problem. Conflicts between individuals and families would have been difficult to resolve, and in the end it may have been that internal stresses caused the downfall of Biskupin and its neighbours.
Reconstruction of rampart and gate at Biskupin, Poland. Note the sharpened posts outside the rampart, which served as a breakwater and a defensive feature.
Salt becomes wealth
Salt was an essential commodity for ancient societies in which the supply of meat and fish exceeded the ability of people to consume it all at one sitting. By the beginning of the first millennium BC, communities throughout Europe living near natural sources of salt had figured out how to trade it to other communities that were not so fortunate. This required the ability to produce salt on an industrial scale by mining salt deposits or evaporating brine or seawater; the ability to pack it densely into containers for tr
ansport; access to transportation systems capable of hauling heavy loads, using oxcarts and watercraft; and the ability of the consumers to pay in metal goods, crops, furs and anything else they could grow or make.
The more salt a community could produce, the more goods flowed back to it. By the time the flow of traded goods reached back to the source, their value had been channelled into luxury items rather than mundane commodities. The result was that some communities became fantastically wealthy. Thus began a golden age for the salt miners of central Europe. Salt evaporation from seawater or brine was limited by the fact that it was a batch process, and there were natural limits on its volume. Evaporation operations appear to have served local demand. Mining the giant salt domes of central Europe, on the other hand, was limited only by the supply of labour and how fast salt could be carried out of the ground and shipped.
One salt-rich community was found at Hallstatt in the Austrian Alps, already mentioned above as having given its name to this general period. During the middle of the first millennium BC, Hallstatt came to sit at the top of an economic system in which mined salt was traded to farming hamlets in a wide area of central Europe and the northern part of the Mediterranean basin in exchange for all sorts of luxury goods. Thanks to nearly two centuries of archaeological investigation, we know quite a bit about the mining community at Hallstatt.
Hallstatt’s miners and their graves
The Austrian Alps south of Salzburg (the clue is the name, since Salz is German for salt) tower over the valley of the Salzach river (again, the name) and enclose lake basins in their depths. The modern town of Hallstatt (again, the name is a clue, as Hall- is an older German root meaning salt) is reached over winding roads through mountain passes which descend into the basin of a deep lake surrounded by steep mountainsides. Between two slopes that overlook the town clinging to the narrow lakeshore, a valley, the Salzbergtal, leads back into the mountains. In the valley lie prehistoric salt mines and an Iron Age cemetery that make Hallstatt one of the most important sites for understanding how wealth was accumulated during the first millennium BC.7
At Hallstatt, ancient miners followed veins of nearly pure rock salt by sinking shafts that angled down from the mountainside, reaching depths of nearly 330 metres (1,100 ft). The veins are about 5 metres (16 ft) thick, and ladders made from notched tree trunks were used to reach higher spots. Using bronze picks, miners cut a vertical groove in the salt face, then two curving grooves to each side. The two lobes of salt thus formed were prised off and carried out to the surface, while loose salt was scooped up and shovelled into cowhide backpacks with wooden frames.8 Miners’ backpacks had a clever but simple feature, a wooden rod sticking up from one side. When the carrier reached the collection point, he or she simply bent over and pulled the rod, which tipped the bag forward and allowed the salt to spill out.
The most common traces of human activity inside the Hallstatt mountain are burnt pieces of wood used by miners as torches and heating fires. Miners also left clothing made from wool and linen, along with leather shoes and hats. They were simply made. For example, a cone-shaped cap is stitched together from triangles of hide with the hairy side on the interior for warmth.
Mining was dangerous, and despite shoring, cave-ins took their toll. In 1734, the corpse of an accident victim was found inside the mountain, preserved in the salt. His clothes and shoes, as well as the circumstances of the find, made it clear that he was a prehistoric miner. When he was found, the concern of the eighteenth-century miners was whether or not he was a Christian. They decided that he probably was not, so his corpse was buried in unconsecrated ground outside the parish cemetery, where pagans and suicides were interred. Removed from the salt, the body decayed quickly. How many more corpses of prehistoric miners are still entombed in the mountain?
The wealth derived from salt is reflected in the cemetery a short distance down the Salzbergtal from the mine entrances. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, over 1,100 prehistoric graves have been found, including both cremations and skeleton burials, while many more were probably destroyed by later mining. The Hallstatt burials contain bronze and iron swords and daggers, bronze bowls and cauldrons, helmets and ornaments of glass, amber and metal. Exotic materials testify to the extent of the network that brought these goods to Hallstatt. For example, one sword handle was made from ivory with amber inlays. It is not known whether the ivory came from Africa or Asia, but the fact that it wound up on a hillside in central Europe in the middle of the first millennium BC testifies to connections between the Barbarian World and lands far beyond.
Bronze Age backpack for carrying salt from the Hallstatt mine; presumably similar equipment was used during the Iron Age.
We do not know where the Hallstatt miners lived, for no settlement has yet been found. Analysis of the graves suggests that it was a normal Iron Age community composed of family households rather than a specialized mining settlement with a disproportionate number of men. Women and children as well as men worked in the mines. Examination of female skeletons indicated that they often carried heavy loads over one shoulder, so perhaps it was they who used the backpacks described above.
Barbarians meet the Greeks
Until now, the Mediterranean World has hovered outside the picture to the south. During the first millennium BC, Greek civilization was reaching its zenith. Greek city states looked beyond the Aegean for new opportunities for power and wealth. The epic tales of Jason and Odysseus were anchored in a seafaring tradition, and Greeks set out west across the Mediterranean and north into the Black Sea basin to establish trading posts. Their goal was not to conquer indigenous peoples and colonize territory but rather to obtain products and raw materials in exchange for the output of Greek workshops and vineyards. Over time, these emporia became embedded in local economies and attracted settlers from the Greek homeland, which brought Greeks into contact with the Barbarian World.
Initial forays led Greeks to the Adriatic, where traders from Corinth established a colony on Corfu. Then they reached southern Italy and Sicily, which over time developed into a cluster of Greek colonies collectively known as Magna Graecia, in which the city state of Syracuse became the largest polis in the Greek world. Colonists from Thera (Santorini) crossed the Mediterranean to set up shop in Cyrene in North Africa. It was when the Greeks reached further north, through the Hellespont into the Black Sea basin, and north from Magna Graecia to the southern coast of France, that they had their most important contacts with the Barbarian World. These contacts not only were profitable for the Greek colonists but they also transformed barbarian societies not just at the site of the colony but far inland.
Greeks trigger a gilded age in central Europe
One such colony, named Massalia, lay at the mouth of the Rhône river on the Mediterranean coast of France. The history of Massalia (the Greek spelling, also encountered in the Latin spelling, Massilia, which became the modern Marseilles) really begins at the city state of Phocaea (modern Foça) in western Turkey. Colonists from Phocaea set out westward to found a trading colony at the mouth of the Rhône around 600 BC. A marriage between a prominent Greek and the daughter of a local chief is said to have sealed the deal to enable the Greeks to set up their trading post.
Massalia’s location was propitious, for the Rhône, its tributary the Saône and the Saône’s tributary the Doubs lead nearly 950 kilometres (600 mi.) north into the heart of west-central Europe. At its headwaters, the Rhône–Saône–Doubs system connects overland to the headwaters of the Seine, the Rhine and the Loire, providing a direct route from the Mediterranean to the North Sea and Atlantic coast. Barbarian communities throughout much of western Europe soon felt the effects of the Greek presence at Massalia.
What the Greeks could offer the central European elites were finely crafted products of the workshops of Magna Graecia and wine, as well as objects from the Greek homeland itself. Etruscan products from northern Italy also made their way to Massalia or in some cases over the Alps. Eventually,
Massalia’s own workshops and vineyards began to produce goods for this trade. From Massalia, wine and luxury goods made their way north, possibly through chains of middlemen or Massaliote agents, until they made their way to southern Germany and eastern France.
Trade with the Greeks in Massalia made some people in central Europe very wealthy. This wealth, in turn, was transformed into status and prestige, resulting in very elaborate settlements and lavish burials. While we do not completely understand the microeconomic factors that led to this sudden concentration of wealth and status, the effect was the display, sometimes seemingly ostentatious, of material trappings of prestige in life and in death. The strongholds and burials of the Iron Age elites of central Europe have a very nouveau riche aspect to them. If these people were alive today, we would read about them in the Daily Mail or People magazine.
These acquisitive elites of central Europe fashioned hilltop locations into fortified compounds across southern Germany and into eastern France. Here they displayed their status to the surrounding countryside. These compounds are parts of complex settlements at which hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of people lived, presumably retainers of the local chief and his family. About a dozen sites stand out, bearing the fanciful name of ‘princely seats’ (Fürstensitze in German). Recent research has led to new insights about the organization of these settlements, the activities that went on there, and their hinterlands.
Mont Lassois
About 200 kilometres (125 mi.) southeast of Paris in Burgundy, Mont Lassois overlooks the village of Vix along the Seine river. Its higher end is a broad plateau with a surface of about 5 hectares (2 acres). This plateau was already the site of a Bronze Age fortified settlement, but after a hiatus of three centuries it was redeveloped into a densely occupied citadel in use between 620 and 450 BC.
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