- Chapter Twenty-One -
with nevertheless some show of distant trade: Campanian glossy black ware (Ward
Perkins 1941: 49-51, 79-81), and part of a La Tene iron brooch (identified by the
author while working on site and finds with the excavator, N. Lucas-Shadwell, in
1938); this brooch must have come from far away to the north-east (d. the Dux-type
brooch with Agris helmet (Moscati et al. 1991: 292). Then we still need to know
much more about oppidan relations with the hinterland, in economy and cultural
matters (see Nash 1976: I I 1-14). They do seem to have consolidated Celtic Europe
into a politically viable pattern of tribal territories, as Caesar later recognized, and as
the coinage (its art charged with meanings) can demonstrate.
SOCIAL LEVELS, ARTWORK AND HABITATION MODES
We must now enquire into the life style and dwellings of the various levels in Celtic
communities which we have sampled so far only through burial evidence, so little of
which in Celtic Europe can be directly related to any feeder habitation sites. Many
of those burials have shown rich and excellent artwork, stylistically distinctively
Celtic.
At Hallstatt itself we as yet know nothing of the habitations in which these
prosperous salt-producing and salt-trading people lived through three centuries
(as the cemetery shows). Were the dwellings grouped, or scattered among this
precipitious inaccessible mountain terrain? The same lack of relation between
cemeteries and habitations is largely true for most of Celtic Europe until the second
century Be, with a few possible exceptions in areas of north Italic contact, directly
influenced by the ways of the southerly world (Moscati et al. 1991: 220-30; see
also Sop ron, Hungary, ibid.: 379). The problem is seen at its most acute for the
Hohenasperg (north of Stuttgart), where a core defensive habitation site has to be
inferred from the ring of rich burials ranged within some 10 km round the eminence
(e.g. Klein Aspergle Qacobsthal 1944: pI. 16-17, 26-7)), and Greifenbiihl with the
clothing embroidered with gold thread (Bittel et al. 1981: 390-3; Moscati et al. 1991:
108-13; Frankenstein and Rowlands 1978: 98-1°3), or the luxury silks of Hohmichele
(Hundt 1969), and Hochdorf-Eberdingen with the nine drinking-horns (Bittel et al.
1981: 395-8; Moscati et al. 1991: 86). The suggestion that the Hohenasperg chieftains
commanded territory from the Black Forest and the Schwabischen Wald to the
Albvorland may be not unreasonable, but it is quite suppositious (Moscati et al. 1991:
113; Frankenstein and Rowlands 1978: 98-1°3).
But where did this swaggering elite of the sixth-fifth-century 'princely' tombs
such as Hochdorf or Vix (Moscati et al. 1991: 103-7) actually live? Their precise
relations with nearby fortresses such as the Heuneburg or Mont Lassois are still
largely inferred, though reasonable in the light of items such as the Heuneburg gold
strainer (Bittel et al. 1981: fig. 265). However, burial mound IV, 200 m north of the
Heuneburg, proved to have been piled up over the remains of a rectangular, three-
chambered plank-built structure, which with two hearths and an oven (all set inside
a lightly palisaded enclosure) might well have been just such a dwelling (Figure 21. 7).
It had been burnt before the 4 m-square burial chamber had been dug within it, and
would have been modest living accommodation for what Ziirn (1970: 108) saw as the