- The Social Implications of Celtic Art -
Figure 21.3 Coin of Cunobelin. A British foot-soldier - the best view we are likely to get -
early first century AD. (Photo courtesy of D.F. Allen; Allen 1958: pI. v.38.)
SOCIAL RANKING
Artwork has played a major part in showing just how sensitive early Celtic peoples
could be to the hierarchical ordering of society. This is well shown by Hodson's
(1990) analysis of the grave contents in the large cemetery of the salt-producing and
salt-trading community at Hallstatt (Kromer 1959). No habitations have, however,
so far been located for this prosperous and specialized close-knit community, living
under restrictive conditions in a precipitous, fragmented terrain. This Hallstatt
community of the seventh-fifth centuries Be has provided an invaluable yardstick of
social grading for barbarian Europe in this age (Figure 21.4 a, b), and we shall return
to this.
We start at the top, with the elite among these early 'Celtic' people, from eastern
Europe to the Atlantic, from Italy to Scandinavia, from the sixth century Be to well
into the Christian era. Their wealth, as displayed through funerary rites, is (in the
earlier centuries) eloquent of power and authority, emphasizing the separateness of
the elite (Kromer 1982; Moscati et al. 1991: 72-123). Frankenstein and Rowlands
(1978: 100ff.), following Kimmig (1969), invoking medieval analogies (d. Radford
1935 and pers. comm.), have marshalled the available evidence into a hypothesis of
hierarchical levels of chieftaincy - paramount, vassal, subchief and lower levels,
and also their domains, as reflected in material wealth, artwork and control over
production of luxury goods, such as fine cloth, etc. All the wine-drinking, the
symposia, followed southerly example (though sometimes with a Celtic flavour)
and continued (with some dilution of exuberance) well into the Christian era, as
imported amphorae in the first centuries Be-AD in Britain, and somewhat later, as
capital places like Tintagel (Thomas 1993) or Lydford in Devon (Saunders 1990: 62)