The Celtic World (Routledge Worlds)

(Barry) #1

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN


WOOD AND THE


WHEELWRIGHT


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Stuart Piggott


T
he Celtic world from the sixth century BC inherited a very long and sophisticated
tradition of woodworking, in continental Europe and Britain going back to at
least the beginning of the fourth millennium. The recovery of this fundamental
episode in the history of technology has been a product of the exploitation over
the last three decades of the potentialities of what has become known as wetland
archaeology, where waterlogged conditions provide a medium for the preservation
of wood, otherwise a fugitive natural substance save in exceptional circumstances
such as extreme aridity or permafrost. An early example of wetland investigation
was of course that of the Swiss lakeside sites first revealed in the I 850S and increas-
ingly with the lowering of water levels in I870-5; the great iron age site of La
Tene was first discovered in I858. In Britain the Glastonbury and Meare wetland
iron age sites were excavated from I892 (Coles and Coles I986), but the co-ordinated
work of archaeologists and natural scientists on the Somerset peat bogs and their
contained artefacts, which has given us such astonishing new information, dates from
the early I960s, supplemented by similar projects in the Cambridgeshire Fens. We
can now talk with some confidence about the salient facts of prehistoric European
woodworking shared by the Celts before the Roman period.
All woodworking demands one or other of two types of timber, heavy or light
(Coles et al. I978; Piggott I983: I6-2I, 28 with refs). Traditionally, from medieval
Latin to modern English, 'timber' denotes heavy stuff for posts and beams, or split
into planks of appropriate thicknesses; 'wood' small-diameter poles which can
themselves be split for hurdling or basketry. Already by the early fourth millennium
BC in neolithic Britain there is evidence of conscious woodland management both in
the selection of trees (usually oaks) for heavy timber posts up to a metre in diameter,
log-boats from halved hollowed stems, and planks split or riven 'on the chord' and
along the natural medullary rays for, among other things, single-piece or composite
disc wheels and plank-built boats. More surprising is the neolithic achievement of the
techniques of coppicing and pollarding for the controlled production of pole wood
and its use when split for hurdling, the wattle element in wattle-and-daub walling,
and basket-making. All this was the product of stone tools, to be replaced first by a
bronze and in the Celtic world by an iron toolkit of axe and adze, chisels, gouges
and knives. The saw was a late-comer to European prehistory, and from the Late


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