The Celtic World (Routledge Worlds)

• People and Nature in the Celtic World -

in up to a quarter of pits on some British sites (Hill 1989). At Danebury the animals
forming special deposits are all domestic, with the exception of a significant associa-
tion with ravens (Grant 1984), birds which feature in Celtic iconography (Green
1992). A recent survey of the French evidence (Meniel 1987) indicates that bone
assemblages from shrines are overwhelmingly of domesticates in comparable
proportions to those which occur on domestic sites. That boars were of particular
ritual significance is suggested by bronze figurines, occurring widely across the
Celtic world (Foster 1977), as well as bones in sacrificial deposits and burials,
although there is sometimes uncertainty as to their wild or domestic status (Meniel
1987; Bokonyi 1991).
At a wider environmental scale Parker Pearson (forthcoming) argues that the
layout and orientation of iron age enclosures and huts may reflect the cosmology of
the groups concerned, thus providing important clues to their relationship with the
natural world. The most obvious aspect of this is the easterly orientation of most
roundhouses and enclosures, which could reflect the sunrise and daily rebirth of
light.
Celtic ritual activity seems to have been particularly concerned with wild places:
bogs, lakes, springs and groves. These may have assumed particular significance at a
time when the environmental evidence shows that the landscape was being quite
dramatically transformed by cultural activity. Such an hypothesis echoes current
emphasis on the opposition between wild and domestic in earlier prehistory (e.g.
Hodder 1990). Probably, however, the relationship between people and nature in the
Celtic world was much more complex than is suggested by simple binary opposi-
tions, for instance. In the animal world domesticates account for most ritual deposits
in Britain and France. The full complexity of the Celtic perception of the natural
world may gradually be clarified as archaeologists give greater emphasis to issues
such as perception, the spatial organization of sites, associations of material in
contexts, and the relationship between archaeological and palaeoenvironmental
evidence.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I am grateful to Jennifer Foster for stimulating my interest in the Iron Age and for

her comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

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