- Chapter Four -
yoke and harness rested. The body of a warrior had been laid on the floor of the
chariot with the legs on either side of the pole; a series of weapons had been laid cer-
emoniously to accompany the body, four spears with iron heads and butts, a long
iron knife, and a magnificent bronze helmet. The clothing did not survive, apart from
a bronze brooch and four bronze buttons decorated with rosettes, to which slight
traces of a woven woollen garment still adhered. Nor did the organic parts of the
chariot survive, but the iron tyres and the bronze axle bands and hub caps still
remained to indicate that the diameter of the tyres was about I m and that they were
set about 1.3 m apart. The horse harness comprised bronze bits and chains inlaid
with coral. The burial was accompanied by joints of pork, fowl and eggs, as well as
by a bronze wine flagon of Etruscan manufacture, the latter providing the dating
evidence for the burial within the later fifth century BC. In the upper part of the fill-
ing of the grave pit a second burial had been inserted, that of a man accompanied
by a sword. The principal burial suggests the armament of a warrior leader, the
practical weapons of sword and spears as well as a resplendent bronze helmet, tall
and pointed, but offering only limited protection to the head. The function of the
helmet is for parade and display, to show that its bearer is a person apart. In shape
and decoration, however, the helmet is part of a scattered group with examples in
the Marne, Diirrnberg in the Austrian Alps, and in Slovakia; the decorative palmettes
on the helmet from Berru (Marne) point to Italy as one source of inspiration (Schaaff
1973; 1988 : 315; Megaw and Megaw 198 9: 63-4; Duval 198 9: 45-6, 51)·
A burial comparable to that of La Gorge Meillet, excavated at Somme-Bionne in
1873, also illustrates the careful layout of objects round a chariot including a long
sword in an engraved bronze scabbard and a red-figure Greek pottery cup dating to
about 420 BC (Stead 1991a). Jacobsthal, in evoking the princely nature of such
deposits, dubbed the burial that of Monsieur Ie Comte de Somme-Bionne. Such
burials represent on the one hand the potential for reconstruction of a warrior fully
armed - helmet, sword suspended from a chain at the waist, spears at the ready, as
well as the two-wheel chariot, doubtless with wicker sides, and the richly decorated
harness for the two horses; on the other hand such burials are found only in distinct
groups and at discrete periods within the Celtic world. There are, for example, some
250 burials in the Champagne area of France which date to the La Tene period.
Another distinct group has been found in the Rhineland with that from Bescheid
Tumulus 6, for example, containing the two wheels from a dismantled vehicle, a
sword with an anthropoid handle, a coral-decorated suspension chain, three spear-
heads, three arrowheads, a knife and a drinking horn with a gold mouthpiece
(Haffner and Joachim 1984: 78, fig. 7).
In eastern Yorkshire there is another discrete group of burials with chariots, or
less grandly, carts. Evaluation of the finds from the last century has been refined as
further burials are revealed, largely in advance of gravel extraction (Stead 1984;
1991b: 58-61). In some cases the vehicle had been dismantled before deposition,
whereas in others the vehicle was laid over the body. The Yorkshire burials seem to
represent a distinctive religious tradition rather than being in every case the burial of
a warrior, for there are few associated weapons. However, at Kirkburn, a burial with
a two-wheel vehicle was accompanied by a shirt of mail, which may be reconstructed
in a style that finds parallels elsewhere in Europe (Stead 1991b: 54-6).
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