- Chapter Thirteen -
territories into Celtic communities as marriage partners (Kramer I96I; Polenz I982:
2 I 4-I 5). Textual sources at the end of the Iron Age attest to the practice of such inter-
group marriage, and the foreign jewellery may be the archaeological reflection of
that practice. This mechanism of exchange would involve transmission of cultural
information between Celtic and other peoples too, along with the material signs of
the exchange.
ORGANIZATION OF TRADEWe can distinguish at least three systems of goods circulation in the Celtic Iron Age.
The luxury objects, best represented by the Mediterranean imports, are associated
with elite groups, as is apparent from the grave assemblages in which they occur. A
second category consists of everyday manufactured articles, such as bronze fibulae
and bracelets, and glass beads and arm-rings. These objects were much more widely
distributed through the social system, and they occur in graves of differing degrees
of wealth. The third category is trade in raw materials - iron, copper and tin, salt,
graphite-clay and stone.
In the period 600-450 Be, circulation of Mediterranean luxury goods was in the
hands of elites at the centres. The products of the centres' workshops circulated
into the countryside, where they are found in the graves of the small communities
(Wells I980: 38-46; I987). Trade in raw materials such as metals and salt was handled
differently, because their extraction and circulation had to be managed at the
locations where they occurred. We do not have the same evidence suggestive of elite
control of the circulation of these materials as we have for the manufactured goods
at the centres.
For trade at the oppida between 200 Be and the Roman conquest, there is no clear
archaeological evidence for control by elites. The coin evidence points to a profound
change in the organization of trade (Haselgrove I 98 8), from circulation of personal
ornaments that was in the control of elites at small centres of the earlier period, to
export of large quantities of mass-produced goods by specialist industrial workers
who were increasingly controlling their own output and the resulting commerce, in
the late period.
The lack, in the rich graves of the Late Iron Age, of unique foreign imports
comparable to the Vix krater and the Grafenbiihl tripod, and their replacement by
mass-produced Roman bronze jugs, basins and pans, indicates the profound
change in the relation between elites and trade during the Iron Age. The presence
of the mass-produced Roman vessels may indicate that even the circulation of
Mediterranean wine paraphernalia was by this time in the hands of professional
merchants, not transmitted through personal relationships involving the elites. In the
final century Be, Roman writers distinguished between the large-scale merchant
(negotiator), who dealt in such bulk goods as grain, and the merchant who traded
on a smaller scale (mercator). According to those authors, persons of high social
status were sometimes involved in the large-scale trade, but not in the more modest
undertakings (Timpe I985: 273-4). These circumstances may have been peculiar to
Gaul, brought about in part by the intensive interactions with the Roman world.