- Celts and Germans in the Rhineland -
Apollo at Delphi, and the following year, having crossed into Asia Minor, settled
around Ancyra (Ankara) in Asia Minor, where they maintained their culture and
their language for centuries, so that Jerome in the fourth century AD records that
their language resembled that of the Treveri.^3 The Treveri in Caesar's day were
still the great horsemen that the practice of chariot burial in the Early La Tene
period shows their ancestors to have been.^4 Caesar does not include them among
the Belgae, who were their neighbours to the north and west, nor among the
Germani cisrhenani, the Germans who lived on the left bank of the Rhine, a some-
what anomalous group, discussed below, that did, however, include their clients, the
Eburones and Condrusi; Hirtius, however, who completed Caesar's account of
the Gallic War, says that the Treveri resembled the Germans in their behaviour and
their ferocity because of continuous warfare against them, and Tacitus later reports
that, like their Belgic neighbours, the Nervii, they claimed German ancestry as a
status symbol that distinguished them from the more sluggish Gauls.^5 It is hard to
see what this 'German' ancestry might have been, if 'Germanness' is also linked with
origins east of the Rhine, as Caesar seems to suggest it is, since the Treveri appear to
have been essentially autochthonous since the Bronze Age.^6
It seems then that the start of the La Tene period in the Hunsriick-Eifel region
is marked by increasing social stratification, to judge by the burials, but the region
does not develop centres of population that stand out for their size and their wealth,
such as marked the Hallstatt period on the upper Danube. There are some small hill-
forts, but most of the population, including the wealthy elite, seem to have lived
in the valleys, possibly in undefended settlements,? or in what were effectively the
precursors of rural villas. Early in the fourth century, there may have been some
depopulation of the area, and perhaps less social differentiation among the remain-
ing population, and this may be connected with the migrations already referred
to, but the evidence comes mostly from burials, and the fact that we find smaller
cemeteries with fewer and poorer burials in La Tene II and III than in La Tene I may
also be due to changes in fashion. Trade with the Mediterranean seems to decrease.
This is the period in which La Tene culture reaches its largest extension throughout
'Celtic' Europe, but its old heartland seems to be suffering from a degree of
economic decline and isolation, compared with the fifth century.
By the middle of the second century Be, however, the economy begins to revive.
Trade contact with the Mediterranean is re-established, and Celtic coinage appears,
based largely on Greek prototypes. Burial customs change, cremation replaces
inhumation, and although grave goods comprise mostly local pottery, objects
imported from Italy still appear. The living begin to group themselves into larger
settlements, veritable urban agglomerations, to which we attach the term that Caesar
used, 'oppida'. Just outside our area, one of the best-known of these is Bibracte, on
the Mont Beuvray some 27 km from Autun in Burgundy, which Caesar describes as
'by far the largest and the best supplied of the oppida of the Aedui'.^8 It was on the
basis of his excavations here that the great French archaeologist Joseph Dechelette,
'mort pour la patrie' in 1914 at the age of 52, recognized the essential unity of the
La Tene world and, in initiating his great Manuel d'archeologie prehistorique,
celtique, et gallo-romaine, of which the first volume appeared in Paris in 1908, made
his great plea for an end to modern nationalistic bias in archaeology: 'Nos antiquites
(^605)