CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
SANCTUARIES AND SACRED
PLACES
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Jane Webster
A
belief that Celtic rituals were centred on atectonic cult sites (Lewis 1966: 4) has
for many years coloured archaeological attitudes to Celtic religion. This view is
increasingly challenged by excavation, especially in northern France. At the same
time, it is now recognized that evidence for some site categories, traditionally
regarded as characteristic Celtic sacred spaces, is in fact poor.
Drawing on iron age texts and a critical examination of archaeological data, it is
possible to suggest some key features of the sacred spaces among the Celts. Such is
the aim of this brief review, which suggests some themes in the demarcation and
function of sacred space among Celtic peoples. This study will concentrate less on
rites within cult sites than on the structure of religious space.
WRITTEN EVIDENCE
As the iron age Celts made limited use of writing, textual accounts of Celtic peoples
derive almost entirely from Graeco-Roman sources. Those classical texts contem-
porary with the In;m Age are most relevant to a discussion of iron age sites, and the
present account concentrates on these. As the product of an external, conquering
society, classical commentaries are in many ways a problematic source of data on the
Celts (Nash 1978; Wait 1985: 192-3; Webster 1991: 1-87). But at the same time, such
accounts are iron age artefacts (Webster 1991: 1-15), and when treated as such can
yield much information.
Most classical accounts of Celtic sacred space date to the later Iron Age (i.e. La
Tene D; C.12Q-O Be). Greek colonization in the western Mediterranean, under way
by the sixth century Be (Benoit 1955; Clavel-Leveque 1977; Wells 1980), and Celtic
expansion into northern Italy from the fourth to second centuries Be (Peyre 1979;
Pauli 1980) and Asia Minor from the third (Mitchell 1974; Rankin 1981: 188-207)
generated limited textual data on the Celts, but it was only from C.125-120 Be, with
Roman intervention in the Provincia, that significant quantities of data emerged on
Celtic peoples and practices. The date of these texts ensures that the question of
Graeco-Roman influence, both on Celtic practices and on their literary depiction, is
ever-present in assessing the literary evidence.