- Chapter Eighteen -
Bronze Age and the iron-working Celtic world usually small joiners' tools, but the
planks of the burial chamber of the Hohmichele, of sixth-century Hallstatt D date,
over 6 m long and 0.35 m wide, appear to have been not split, but sawn by a large
timber-yard saw. The other technological innovation, also sixth-century in the Celtic
world of west Europe, was the adoption of the lathe for wood-turning, to which we
will return later.
In the meantime, heavy timber posts and beams were extensively used in the
Celtic world, especially in fortifications (Figure H)' The problems of felling and
handling massive tree stems had been faced and mastered by neolithic societies build-
ing in Britain the ceremonial and burial monuments of henges and long barrows by
the third millennium Be, when oaks of up to a metre in diameter were worked into
posts up to an estimated 3.25 m in height and a weight of over 2,000 kg. Such timber
could be split and hollowed into log-boats (Ellmens 1969; McGrail and Switsur 1975)
as detailed in Chapter 15 (Figure 15.6), but Chapter 5 describes the vast amount of
timber used in the facing and internal lacing of so many types of defensive ramparts
of forts and the later oppida of the Continent, where timber-laced walls with lengths
of 5 or 6 km in circuit must have drawn heavily on the natural resources ot wood-
land. All types of wood, from heavy timber to brushwood, and including discarded
worked pieces, were used to make up the artifical islands for settlement in lakes or
marshes, as at Glastonbury and the crannogs of Ireland and Scotland, as well as piles
which could be massive posts driven into the lake bed (Morrison 1985). In the Milton
Loch crannog in Scotland the woodwork included the plough-head and stilt of an
ard which gave a radiocarbon date coincident with a structural pile of C.450-500 Be
(Guido 1974). An ard beam from 45 km away is of the first century Be and the
type goes back to the second millennium in Italy and south Russia. Heavy timber
again was needed for the single-piece or composite wheels of ox-wagons, as we shall
see on pp. 324-6, on the craft of the Celtic wheelwright, but before this we may con-
sider two minor forms of woodworking, figural sculpture and wooden containers,
which may involve raw material of varying dimensions.
Such human representations as survive seem to fall into two classes (Coles 1990).
The first comprises seven dated figures from Britain and Ireland, all naked and some
ithyphallic, and ranging from the early second millennium to the fourth century Be.
Those from the sixth-century could include the large Ballachulish female nearly
1.5 m high of 728-524 Be, the contemporary little figures holding round shields
and standing in a boat from Roos Carr, and the 34 em ithyphallic figure from
Kingsteignston, of 426-352 Be. Later prehistoric figures from the Nordic world
beyond the Celts provide vague parallels. The second class is formed by an enormous
number of Gaulish or Gallo-Roman wooden votive figures from two sanctuary sites
at sacred springs, 300 or so from Sources-de-Ia-Seine near Dijon, and up to about
5,000 at the twin springs at Chamalieres in the Massif Central. Some of the wood
carvings are ex votos of human organs, but the complete human figures are clothed,
and at Sources-de-Ia-Seine less romanized than at Chamalieres (Megaw and Megaw
1989: 172-3, with references). Animal sculpture survives from one site, a waterlogged
well or shaft within a ritual enclosure of the Viereckschanze type at Fellbach-
Schmid en near Stuttgart with a tree-felling date of 123 Be, where a spirited stag
protome and an antithetical pair of rams or goats originally flanking a human figure