10 - After 700BC

After 700BC the pace of change in Britain and Europe starts to quicken, spurred on by developments in the far south.

By this time the western basin of the Mediterranean was being settled by colonists and traders from the east. Phoenicians had settled in North Africa and southern Spain. Greeks had set up their colonies in Italy, Sicily and southern France and a civilisation whose origins are still shrouded in mystery had sprung up in Tuscany in north-western Italy. These people were the Etruscans, famed as workers in bronze and like the Phoenicans and the Greeks, merchants and traders.

The Phoenicians founded the city of Carthage and established the kingdom of the Carthaginians in present-day Tunisia. From there they set up colonies in western Sicily, Sardinia and southern Spain. In Sicily they came into conflict with the Greeks who settled the eastern half of the island. In southern Italy the Greeks had colonies as far north as Naples and Pompeii on the western coast.

The relevance of these developments to the rest of Europe was that the merchants and traders in these places were ready to exchange their manufactured goods for raw materials that could be supplied by barbarian chieftains further north and as far afield as Britain where the traders came to Ictis to obtain tin.

The first part of the western and central European period from the eighth to the fifth centuries takes its name from the Hallstatt cemetery. During this period rich burials mark the emergence of the aristocracy and greater social distinctions.

These distinctions became more pronounced in the sixth century BC when Europe north and west of the Alps came into direct trading contact with the merchants in the western Mediterranean. The route up the Rhône and along the Saône became a major trading artery and the stronghold of Mont Lassois in Burgundy became the home of chieftains who were making their fortunes from commerce. Similar princely strongholds like the Heuneberg appeared in south-western Germany. These sites too received many Mediterranean imports such as pottery and bronze vessels for serving and drinking wine, the fashionable new drink.

The Hallstatt princely fortresses were abandoned in the 5th century BC snd power shifted northwards to the Middle Rhineland. This begins the La Tène period, the second phase of the European Iron Age which lasts up to the Roman conquest. Although trade with the Mediterranean continued, the new chieftains were less rich than their Hallstatt predecessors. A period of depression and unrest seems to have set in until c250BC and when things settled down again, large defended towns appear known as oppida, coins were copied from the Greek staters, and the development of states occurred whose leaders are described by the Romans as kings.

Mediterranean imports become increasingly common in oppida but it was Roman Italy rather than the Greek colonies or the Etruscans that was the source of these luxury items. So Roman cultural infiltration preceded their conquest of Gaul which took place in the middle of the first century BC.

These events had effects on the British Iron Age. As in Europe there were two periods when economic links with the south were important, one at the beginning of the period and the other at the end. We too used coins and by the time of Caesar there were 'kings' in Britain also.

Hillforts began to proliferate in the sixth century. We presume they were built by chieftains who were establishing their power in a visible fashion. The earlier hillforts may well have been copied from sites like Mont Lassois and the Heuneberg and they are built as much as status symbols as for defence. Their walls are revetted with timber and vertically framed so that in effect they were timber boxes filled with the material dug out of the ditch. This gave them an architectural appearance so that they looked more like buildings than ramparts. Gateways were similarly treated.

An early hillfort built in this way is at Ivinghoe in Buckinghamshire. In the west of Britain stone was used for revetment as at Old Oswestry in Shropshire and elsewhere a combination of timber and stone was used to give a similar appearance.

Timber for revetment in hillfort ramparts continued to be employed for many hundreds of years but seems to have become less elaborate with time and this may be be due to a shortage of suitable timber. In the west, stone continued throughout the Iron Age and in many cases the ramparts were built entirely in stone with no ditches because of the impossibility of digging ditches in many stony areas.

An example of a hillfort which, unlike the overwhelming majority, has been exhaustively investigated is Danebury in Hampshire. The sequence of events on the chalk hill-top in Hampshire has been established. It starts in the fifth century BC with the first defences which consisted of a rampart of chalk and soil quarried from the external ditch. At the front of the rampart a box construction oif timber had been used to give the external face a vertical appearance. Along the top was a patrol walk which may have continued across the entrances on timber bridges. The two entrances were simple gaps in the rampart with single gates which gave access to the five-hectare interior from opposite sides.

This interior contained a number of settings of four postholes arranged in squares which are thought to have been the foundations of granaries with raised floors that kept the grain off the ground and allowed air to pass beneath to keep it well-ventilated. This might suggest that one of the functions of the early hillfort was to provide a secure storage area for the community's grain. Was there grain-rustling at the time? Similar 'four-posters' have been discovered at Ivinghoe Beacon, at Grimthorpe in Yorkshire and close by Danebury at Balksbury.

By the fourth and third centuries BC significant changes had occurred in the use of the fort. A roadway running between the two gates divided the interior into two parts. On the north side a large area was set aside for the digging of grain storage pits while to the south were several roadways lined with rows of 'fourposter' and 'sixposter' above-ground granaries. Storage pits were dug between the rows. Beyond the roadways and also laid out parallel to the rampart were circular houses perhaps built there to gain shelter from the wind.

The houses were some 6.5m in diameter with wattle-and-daub walls and conical roofs probably covered with thatch. A number had porches with stout doors and frames. Inside some houses were hearths and ovens and some had storage pits dug into their floors.

The commonest feature that the excavators came across was the storage pit. It is estimated that there are probably about 8000 dug into the ground but not all are contemporary, of course. They range in size, averaging about 1.5 to 2.0m in depth, the larger pits being the later ones. Most were probably used for the storage of grain.

Experiments at Little Butser in Hampshire have shown that wheat or barley stored inside them will remain fresh for over a year as long as the pits remain sealed and airtight. This grain can then be used as seedcorn or for food. The pits were re-used several times, the spoilt grain being burnt inside them before each fresh use. When they were eventually abandoned, they were used as rubbish pits.

Some time in the third century BC the defences of the fort were refurbished and greatly strengthened. The timber box structures had by this time rotted away and the rampart was reshaped so that it sloped down from the top in a single slope to the bottom of the ditch outside which was redug for the purpose. This deep, 'V'-shaped ditch was regularly cleaned out and the silt thrown out on to the outer side of the ditch. Part of the material needed for enlarging the northern rampart was dug out of quarry hollows inside the rampart. Along the crest of the rampart a breastwork of of flints was built.

As part of the regular refurbishing of the defences, the entrances were remodelled. The western entrance was blocked entirely and the eastern entrance made very elaborate. A wider double gate replaced the earlier single gate and an entrance passage created with another gate at its inner end. This entrance passage was eventually some 50m long with outlying ramparts built in front of it and its walls faced with flints. A platform was built in the middle of this complex from which slingers had a clear field of fire of about 60m in all directions. Many thousands of sling shot were collected during the excavation, most being rounded pebbles from local stream valleys, but some were made of clay.

The environmental evidence included many thousands of animal bones. About 96% are from farmyard animals: sheep, cattle and pigs. Most of the rest were horses and dogs with wild animals such as hare, red deer and roe deer. 70% are sheep with cattle amounting to some 19%. Most of the bones are the debris from butchery and cooking but a few complete skeletons have been found in the pits.

It seems likely that the animals spent a good part of their lives outside the hillfort grazing in the fields but it may be that they were brought inside at certain times of the year, for shearing, for example.

Evidence for grain production is very strong apart from the presence of the storage pits. It would have been grown in the small rectangular fields on the nearby downs that are evident in aerial photographs spreading out over many hectares around the fort. Both spring and winter-sown varieties of wheat and barley were grown and were reaped by hand during the prolonged harvest season. After it was dried, it was ready for storage.

Various everyday activities have left traces behind at Danebury. Rotary querns were used for grinding the flour baked in the ovens in the houses and perhaps for grinding the malt for making beer. Pottery may have been made inside the hillforts for pits have been found for mixing and settling clay. The earliest pottery falls into two main types: jars and bowls. The potting clay included flint and shell fillers and some of the pots were burnished with haematite to imitate bronze. This type was usually decorated with scratched patterns and the angles of the vessels were sometimes emphasized with cordons. These 'scratched cordoned bowls' were made somewhere in the Salisbury region.

Pottery types became more varied during the third and second centuries and were made of local clay but some wares were imported from Wiltshire and further west. Woollen cloth was manufactured, using antler combs for carding the wool, spindle weights for the spinning and loom weights, also made of clay and chalk, on the upright looms. Carpentry tools included adzes and gouges while pruning saws are evidence for tree husbandry. These saws may have been made on site together with bronze objects like the safety-pin brooches called fibulae (sing. fibula). Shale came from Kimmeridge in Dorset and was apparently worked on the site.

Large quantities of clay containers used for carrying salt were found in the hillfort and are evidence for trade as are the iron currency bars discovered in a cache on the site and three coins.

In the middle of the fort the remains of at least four rectangular buildings were located all facing the main entrance. One is very similar to a site at Heathrow which is usually interpreted as a temple so it is possible that these were ritual buildings. Ritual behaviour was probably involved in the placing of skulls of horses and cattle in some disused storage pits together with pieces of carved chalk. Another practice involved breaking complete pots on pit bottoms and another the dismembering of human bodies.

In some disused pits were complete skeletons; the dead were often disposed of with little ceremony during the Iron Age but the use of human heads for ritual purposes is certainly one of the recurring Iron Age practices and a number were discovered at Danebury. The end for Danebury came soon after 100BC when the gates were burnt down and the population moved away.

One can compare the Danebury excavation with another recent hillfort excavation at Crickley Hill in Gloucestershire.

The first hillfort occupation of the hill took place in the sixth and seventh centuries BC. Just less than four hectares were enclosed by a stone rampart reinforced with a timber framework. In places the rampart was some four metres high with a ditch outside it. A patrol path ran along the top behind a palisade which was carried on a bridge across an imposing timber gateway. Sling throwers apparently operated from timber towers arranged at intervals behind the rampart.

Inside, the inhabitants lived in long rectangular houses built of timber, wattle-and-daub and with thatched roofs. Alongside them were a number of 'four-posters'. This fort seems to have been captured and destroyed by fire so intense that the limestone in the walls was turned to quicklime.

Sometime in the sixth century the hill was re-occupied. The old, burnt wall was patched and extended with new stonework to make a structure five or six metres high using stone quarried from hollows immediately behind it and from extensions of the old ditch in front of it. A patrol path ran along the top of the new rampart. The old entrance was protected by new features: a bastion on either side and a wrap-round rampart in front. Inside the hillfort the inhabitants now lived in round houses, the largest, just inside the entrance, about 15m in diameter. These houses, as before, were accompanied by 'four- posters'.

The fact that these were present suggests that grain was being grown by the villagers and one would suggest that the domestic animals were the same as those at Danebury. Some time before 400BC the fortification suffered the same fate as the earlier hillfort and was destroyed by fire perhaps at about the same time as the Leckhampton Hillfort some two miles away.

So far we have described the classic hillfort, that is, a defensive position built on a hill. When the ramparts run round the hill following the contours, the hillfort is described as a contour fort. But there other types of fortifications in Iron Age Britain that are lumped together under the heading of hillfort.

Some defences are built on the tip of a hill or a spur or on a headland or cliff where a single rampart can cut off the defended area leaving the steep natural slopes on the other sides to serve as sufficient protection. Sometimes the coastal examples are referred to as cliff castles while the generic name for the class is promontory forts.

Other forts could be described as lowland forts since they are on terrain where there are no suitable defensive slopes so that they have to rely upon streams, rivers or wholly artificial defences.

Only a proportion of the early hillforts survived throughout the Iron Age. Most seem to have disappeared, like Crickley Hill, around 400BC leaving stronger hillforts like Danebury but these too disppeared by about 100BC leaving only a few in Durotrgian territory to face the might of the Roman army in AD43.

The reason for this decline in numbers seems to be that there was a process of consolidation going on throughout the Iron Age as smaller and weaker chieftains were gobbled up by more powerful neighbours and their hillforts abandoned. This process resulted in the creation of tribal kingdoms by about 100BC with 'kings' at their heads who had no need, in southern and eastern Britain at least, for hillforts.

There has been a good deal of debate about the function of the hillfort. Cunliffe, the excavator of Danebury, sees it as a 'central place', a centre for defence, for industrial production, for redistribution of goods and as the residence for a social elite. Other researchers reject this idea, pointing out that there is minimal evidence for industrial production at Danebury, no evidence that its inhabitants had a higher status than those living on other sites and no reason why it should have been a centre of exchange. Rather, they say that it seems to have had a communal role, as a storage centre for emergency agricultural supplies and surplus (perhaps collected together for trade?) and as a status sumbol for the whole community.

Iron makes its appearance in quantities in eastern Europe around 1000BC and this follows evidence of its use earlier in eastern Turkey (Anatolia). The simplest furnaces used for iron smelting were bowl furnaces - hollows in the ground lined with clay. The ore and the fuel (charcoal) were placed inside and covered with a lid of clay through which nozzles (tuyères) were inserted and the temperature brought up to around 1100ºC with the use of bellows. The iron sinks to the bottom of the furnace as a bloom while the unwanted metals in the ore, the slag or gangue, remains above.

The next stage is the hotworking of the iron bloom by forging which is the job of the blacksmith that involves alternately heating and hammering the iron to remove the remaining slag and shaping it into the finished artifact.

Iron on excavation often comes up in the form of a featureless lump of rust. But corrosion products can 'grow' out of an iron object leaving a void in the centre which is the exact shape of the original object. X-rays can reveal the hidden shape and a cast can be made and extracted.

The tools and weapons made with iron were not an improvement on those made with bronze. It was not until the discovery of carbon steel in the nineteenth century that bronze was bettered but iron is the commonest mineral on earth and there are a large number of ores which are described as oxides, carbonates and sulphides. One of the oxides has already mentioned as an earth pigment, much used as a colouring for painting and that is haematite. The ores that were likely to have smelted to make iron in the past are the oxides and the carbonates.

Instead of having to obtain two metals, tin and copper and have the trouble of alloying them, the metalworker now needed only one which was easily obtainable. This is the reason why iron became the favoured raw material for common metal objects.

But bronze continued to be used widely for decorative and better-class metalworking. In fact, during the Iron Age, we have more bronze than iron objects surviving in our museums because the bronze objects were prized and handed down as heirlooms. Iron, too, was more easily reforged so that broken or outdated objects were fashioned anew. A third point is that iron does not survive very well in the ground unless the context is an anerobic one, that is, wet and airless, which also preserves organic materials. So we cannot make a proper estimate of the proportion of iron in use in the past. It is probably safe to say that it was a great deal more than we have evidence for.

In this country imported iron objects in the shape of iron versions of the bronze leaf-shaped swords appear during the seventh century in Britain. But we do have evidence of one of the earliest iron objects that was actually made in Britain, which thus signals the beginning of British iron metallurgy.

This evidence comes from a hoard of metal objects found at Llyn Fawr in South Wales and deposited in a lake round about 650BC. It consists of twenty-four objects, most made of bronze, including two cauldrons and two sickles. A third sickle had been copied in iron by a local smith and the hoard is dated by a spearhead and a portion of a Hallstatt C sword. It is likely that this hoard is an example of a votive hoard that was deposited in a sacred spot as an offering to the gods.

Most of our metal finds from the Iron Age, whether of iron or bronze, but mostly of bronze, for the reasons outlined above, are found in these votive hoards. There is little in settlement sites of the period and we do not have many Iron Age burials.

Votive hoards or deposits contain by far the finest metal goods from the Iron Age and it is a measure of the piety of the age that this should be so. The gods that they were addressing were nature deities thought to be responsible for natural phenomena and those things that have influence on human beings like health.

During the Iron Age we see the appearance of the priests of this religion which is conventionally called the Celtic religion and which was observed all over Europe. The priests are our old friends the Druids who came to embody not just the wisdom of religion but also the traditions and lore of the people. If there was such a thing as Celticism which is not absolutely certain, then, along with the warrior, the Driuids were quintessentially the human symbols of it. This reputation they owe to the Romans who came violently into contact with both and have recorded their (prejudiced?) views of them in their writings.

The main problem in the study of the Celtic religion is to find the sites of the shrines. Only a few have been located and these are often discovered underneath Romano-Celtic temples built in the Romano- British period when the fashion was to erect temples to house the gods. But one site in an Iron Age village was found during war-time excavations on the site of what was to become Runway One at Heathrow Airport.

The village, like all Iron Age villages, was inside a ditched and palisaded enclosure and consisted of a number of circular huts built of wattle-and-daub and thatch on timber frameworks. One of the buildings in the village was unusual in that it was rectangular and associated with animal heads that were thought to have been of ritual significance. This structure was identified as a built shrine.

A very similar site has been excavated at Stansted in Middlesex, also with a rectangular building in the middle of a ditched settlement of circular huts. Another rectangular structure which is thought to be a shrine was discovered in the hillfort of South Cadbury in Somerset. Underneath Romano-Celtic temples, circular shrines have been stumbled upon. They seem to be ditched enclosures with settings of postholes inside. Examples are at Frilford in Berkshire, Maiden Castle in Dorset and Thistleton Dyer in Rutland.

Sacred locations unmarked by shrines must have abounded in Britain as in the rest of the Iron Age world. Springs (as at Bath), bogs and rivers would have been the obvious foci for ritual practices together with other striking natural features like large rocks, great trees or groves of particular species like the oak. In all of these places the gods were thought to have their being and that is where they could be found.

Direct archaeological evidence is lacking but the votive hoards are good indirect evidence of sacred locations. Finds from the Thames, the Witham and the Tyne probably originated in this way and so do the lake deposits like Llyn Cerrig Bach on Anglesey and bog deposits like Llyn Fawr, two ritual spoons from Crosby Ravensworth in Westmoreland and the pony cap and bronze horns from Kirkcudbrightshire in south-western Scotland. These are only a few of a long list.

While the discovery of metalwork tends to pinpoint sacred spots beside or in bogs, lakes and rivers, the sacred groves mentioned by classical writers are more difficult to locate. Some help is given, however, by the distribution of the Gallo-Britannic word nemeton, which means a sanctuary in a woodland setting. The word occurs in several Romano-British place-names in different parts of Britain such as Vernemeton near Lincoln, Medionemeton in southern Scotland and Nemetostatio near North Tawton in Devon. The Latin name for the thermal spring at Aquae Arnemetiae also includes the element, suggesting that the spring was in use as a religious centre long before the Roman invasion.

That so many nemeton elements are incorporated in Latin place-names in Britain is an indication of the large numbers of sacred woodland clearings of pre-Conquest date, the use of which continued into the Romano-British period for the Romans had no axe to grind as far as religion was concerned and allowed people to continue to practice whatever their ancestral beliefs were.

The Romans were fascinated by barbarian religions, the bloodier the better, and they took a deep interest in the Celtic one. Caesar, in his memoirs, is no different and he tells us 'Even today, anyone who wants to make a study of it, goes to Britain.' He goes on to say that the one idea the druids wanted to emphasize above all others was that souls do not die but pass from one body to another at death and also he has something to say about the gods, equating most of them with the equivalent Roman deities. 'Their main god is Mercury; they have many images of him. They consider him the inventor of all arts, the god of travellers and of journeys and the greatest when it comes to obtaining money and goods.' Caesar then goes on to describe the lesser gods: Jupiter, the ruler of the heavens, Apollo who wards off diseases and Mars the god of war. 'When they have decided to go to battle, they generally promise the captured booty to Mars. When they are victorious, they sacrifice the captured animals and make a pile of everything else.' Perhaps some of the votive deposits from rivers and bogs were dedications made to this god in thanks for victory.

Despite what Caesar says about many images of Mercury, the archaeological record has none. Perhaps the statues Caesar saw were made of wood. We have some triple-faced stone heads; the Turoe stone in Co. Galway, a phallic symbol and not a great deal else apart from some small carved boars which may be cult objects and some figured horses on metalwork.

From other sources we know that the gods included tribal deities like Brigantia, patron goddess of the Brigantians, a strong tribe who lived in north-eastern Britain, and Camulos, a powerful war god, who lent his name to the Trinovantian stronghold of Camulodunum. Sulis was goddess of the sacred spring at Bath, later to be paired during the Romano-British period with Minerva. Taranis was a thunder god, Nodens, a cloud maker, Nemetona and Mars Nemetona respectively the goddess and god of the sacred grove, Silvanus, a hunting god, Cernannos, a war god, and Leucetius was simply 'the shining one'.

The list of gods was very long: each tribe must have had its own pantheon of favourite deities and every one of the thousands of scared locations would have been the special preserve of a local god whose name and presence would have been part of the natural awareness of the local community. It would have been difficult to travel far in Iron Age Britain before coming into contact with some sign of the gods for religion pervaded all aspects of life in pre-Roman Britain.

The mention of Caesar reminds us that he was not the first classical writer to mention Britain. One of the features of the Iron Age is the growing interest in the barbarian world of western Europe shown by the inhabitants of the Mediterranean.

HECATAEUS was a Greek writer during the Sixth century BC who refers to the Land of the Hyperboreans (the people beyond the north wind).

HERODOTUS was a Greek historian during the fifth century BC who confesses ignorance. 'I do not know the islands called the Cassiterides from which our tin comes.'

The Greek word for tin is kassiteros which comes from Sanskrit, an early Indian language and tin is found in the islands on the coast of India. It is assumed that the Phoenicians first brought the name from the East together with the metal and that in the course of trading cruises they took the name with them to Britain. There is a Cassiter Street in Bodmin.

PYTHEAS, a merchant from the Greek colony at Marseilles (Massilia) sailed round the 'Northern Seas' and put Britain firmly on the map roughly a hundred years later. His own words have not survived but other classical writers often quote him. He sailed from Cadiz in Spain through the Straits of Gibraltar, north by Ushant to Cornwall, Devon and Ictis, the tin port. He then sailed right round Britain describing the inhabitants and the weather.

He says that the British tribes were independent, ruled by kings and preserved their ancient customs. They used chariots in war. Their dwellings were humble, made of timber and thatch; they stored grain in covered pits and granaries and brewed a drink made from corn and honey.

As a merchant, Pytheas knew much about the tin trade. 'The inhabitants of Britain who live in the south-west are especially friendly to strangers and from meeting foreign traders have adopted civilized habits. It is these people who produce the tin, cleverly working the land that bears it. They dig out the ore, melt it and purify it. They then hammer the metal into ingots like knuckle-bones and transport them to an island off the coast called Ictis, for the channel dries out at low tide and they can take the tin over in large quantities on their carts. Merchants purchase the tin from the natives there and ship it back to Gaul.'

STRABO was a contemporary of Caesar and a Roman writer and he speaks of Pytheas, telling us that he travelled along the whole of the coast of Britain that he could reach and reported that the total coastline was about 5000 miles long.

DIDORUS SICULUS, another Roman writer and another contemporary of Caesar, describes Ictis as an international British port for the tin trade. It is possible that, like Strabo, a good deal of what he says about Britain is copied from Pytheas.

JULIUS CAESAR, our main documentary source for Britain in the Iron Age, came to Britain in succeeding years in 55 and 54BC on military campaigns and later wrote his memoirs 'On Britain and Gaul' published (posthumously) in paperback by Penguin Classics.

In the last chapter Hallstatt was mentioned as the chronological scheme for dating the late Bronze Age and the early Iron Age in Europe. Following on from Hallstatt around about 450BC is a scheme called La Tène which carries the sequence up to the arrival of Caesar in Gaul. This scheme is based very largely on brooches known as fibluae (sing. fibula) which is a kind of safety pin. The type sequence was found at a cemetery at Munsingen just south of Berne in Switzerland, the most famous Iron Age cemetery in Europe. The graves date from c450 through to 100BC and contain a wide range of goods apart from the brooches.

The cemetery lies on a narrow spur of land which meant that it could only expand in one direction, along the spur. Thus all the early graves are at one end and the late ones at the other and each chronological period between is largely restricted to a particular area. This horizontal stratigraphy has made it possible to test out theories on the typological development of brooch types and place them in a typological sequence.

As these brooches are discovered widely in Europe, it provides relative dating for the contexts where they are found.

In recent years computer analysis has enabled a more sophisticated division of the brooch sequence into some twenty sub-phases. This method compares individual brooches with one another in terms of their characteristics (attributes) including their shapes and decoration. Once individual types had been defined, it was possible to use the computer to work out the approximate order of the graves on the basis of the different types associated with one another in each grave. In Britain the commonest fibulae belong to the earliest period of the Munsingen sequence.

Because brooches were so popular and produced in such enormous numbers, they were subject to swiftly changing fashion so their forms and designs did not remain the same for very long. This makes them ideal material for this sort of analysis and also ideal chronological pegs on which to hang the dating of a particular context. Another excellent sequence that can be used for this purpose is provided by Roman brooches and in the Post-Roman period, the penannular brooch.

Although the brooches are important artifacts for dating the La Tène period of the Iron Age in Europe there are other metal types involved, many of them discovered at the site which gives us the name of La Tène at the eastern end of Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland where a very large number of bronze and iron objects were found alongside the remains of a wooden bridge and causeway.

The La Tène influences in Britain relate mainly to metalwork and to the curvilinear designs which appear on the better-class objects. This art style, referred to as La Tène art was developed in Europe during the fifth century BC from a variety of motifs which had emanated from the Middle East. They included palmettes, lyre patterns, lotus flowers, mythical creatures and human masks. They were transformed into an elegant abstract art which must rank as one of the great art-styles of the world. In the Mediterranean area this same set of motifs was transformed into a much more realistic, formalized art in Greece and Rome.

With the coming of the Romans, the Celtic art seems to wither and in Britain, certainly, dies away completely, giving place to execrable attempts by British craftsmen to ape the classical styles. However, in Ireland which was not affected to any great extent by the classical influences that the Romans brought to Britain, Celtic art continued to flourish and develop right through the early first millenium AD so that in the post-Roman period Christian missionaries were able to re-introduce the style into Britain in the form of metalwork and in illuminated manuscripts which are some of the glories of the age.

In Ireland during the Iron Age, perhaps the finest example of Celtic design is on the Turoe stone. In Britain the craftsmen/artists were as talented as any in Europe and produced masterpieces like the Battersea shield and some of the engraved bronze mirrors whose backs were decorated with extremely sophisticated examples of the style.

All these objects were produced in bronze, iron was not suitable for this sort of work, and were often further enhanced with the use of coral brought from the Bay of Naples in the Mediterranean or with red enamel which was the British alternative when the pink coral could not be obtained.

However, we do have some potttery known as Glastonbury Ware some of which is decorated with a rudimentary version of the style.

9 - The Late Bronze Age
Contents
11 - The Iron Age