- Wood and the Wheelwright -
A novel type of vehicle, of light construction and drawing on small timber and the
produce of coppicing, is that associated with paired horse draught, having four, but
more often two, spoked wheels, when it takes the form of the chariot for parade,
hunting or warfare. Such chariots were highly developed in the Near East from
early in the second millennium Be, and their counterparts are known in Europe in
the Urals and the Carpathians from the middle of the millennium. Immediately
antecedent to our Celtic period are the Hallstatt C (seventh-century) graves of
central Europe such as those in the Grosseibstat cemetery (both wagons and a
chariot) or the Czechoslovakian wagon graves such as the Hradenin cemetery. It is,
however, in Hallstatt D, from 600 Be, that the great series of wagon or carriage
burials belong, to be replaced from the fifth century by chariot burials (Piggott 1983:
138 -7 0 ; 1992 ).
The Hallstatt D graves with four spoked-wheeled wagons or carriages (Figure
26.8) which have been excavated number nearly 250, distributed from the Alps to
Alsace, from Burgundy to Bohemia (Pare 1992; Barth 1987); the timber burial
chambers have often been plundered in antiquity, but occasionally have survived, as
at Vix or the staggering intact burial at Hochdorf (Biel 1985). The vehicles, many
with elaborate bronze or iron sheathing and decoration on the basic woodwork, have
a surprising uniformity in their structure and even dimensions. The axle-trees have a
separation (wheelbase) averaging about 1.8 m, and a wheel track or gauge of about
1.3 m. This average track goes back to the earliest ox-wagon of the third millennium
Be in south Russia, continues in the La Tene chariots and survived to determine the
'standard gauge' of 4 ft 8~ in for English railways and their continental derivatives
of the nineteenth century (Piggott 1992). The Hallstatt D axles were joined by a Y-
shaped perch and there was an articulated draught pole for a pair of horses under a
yoke in the manner of oxen, a system of harnessing replaced in western Europe by
collar and shafts only in the early Middle Ages.
The Hallstatt undercarriage supported a shallow and narrow body, only about
10 cm deep, with bronze-decorated sides and something under a metre wide. The
long (40-45 cm) wheel naves allowed for a pivoted front axle with a quarter-lock
of 20° and a turning circle of about 8.5 m, but most examples seem to have had a
pair of fixed axles, as in all four-wheeled vehicles up to the later fourteenth century
AD.
The spoked wheels used on horse-drawn vehicles in the Celtic world demand a
fuller discussion. As we saw, the spoked wheel as opposed to the single or tripartite
disc is an invention of the second millennium Be in the ancient Orient and eastern
Europe as a part of the creation of a lightly built vehicle suitable to paired equid
traction at high speeds compared to the lumbering ox-cart. Already by Hallstatt C
in the seventh century such wheels were made with nail-studded iron tyres on
wooden felloes which could be of complex construction incorporating both
bent wood and segmental elements with elaborate iron clasps. By 600 and the
beginning of Hallstatt D, wheel types had become simpler, with a single-piece bent
felloe around 80 cm diameter, made from a coppiced pole 6-7 cm in diameter, over
3 m long, heat-bent into a true circle with an overlapping scarf joint, a type of
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