- Chapter One -
power, the trade-routes were perhaps reorientated to facilitate direct trading between
the Celts and the Etruscans. This geographical shift is marked by the appearance of
new elements in material culture, which archaeologists call La Tene, after the metal-
work from the site of the same name on Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland. Precious
items of war-gear and other implements, together with animals, were deliberately
deposited in the water over a long period, presumably as a series of votive acts. The
La Tene phase of the European Iron Age demonstrates the presence of a warrior-
aristocracy, some of whom were still buried with vehicles, but now with a light,
two-wheeled cart or chariot replacing the heavy wagon of the later Hallstatt period.
The La Tene tradition is above all characterized by a fine art, essentially an aristo-
cratic art which was employed principally for the embellishment of metalwork.
La Tene artists owed much to their Hallstatt forebears but they were also heavily
influenced by themes and art forms from both the classical world and the Near East.
Celtic art was dominated by abstract, geometric designs, but images from the natural
world - foliage, animals and human faces - were often incorporated as integral
components of these designs. The material culture of the La Tene phase represents
the floruit of Celtic civilization. The archaeological record presents us with a picture
of a heroic society in which war, feasting and display were important, a society which
is recognizable as that alluded to by classical chroniclers of their 'Celtic' neighbours.
Celtic culture per se is generally considered to come to an end around the end of
the first century Be, when most of temperate Europe was subjected to the domina-
tion of the Roman world. The new hybrid culture resulting from the interaction
between Roman and indigenous Celtic ideas retained many elements of pre-Roman
tradition, whilst at the same time adopting new influences from Graeco-Roman
Europe. The new 'Romano-Celtic' culture is nowhere better represented than by
religious imagery which manifested itself in stone and other media. Here, Graeco-
Roman iconographic traditions of depicting divine figures in human form were
imported to Celtic lands and used by the native inhabitants of those regions to
represent their own distinctive religious vision of the supernatural world. Deities
essentially alien to the classical pantheon were now depicted for the first time in
Gaul, the Rhineland, Britain and elsewhere, and the Celtic and Roman cult systems
combined to form a rich, dynamic new Romano-Celtic religion.
It will be clear from the foregoing discussion that there are major problems in
defining Celts and Celticness. The difficulties arise partly from the fact that 'Celts'
and 'Celtic' are terms which mean different things to different people. The archaeo-
logical approach to the Celtic question is different from that of the linguists and
perhaps also from that of anthropologists. So the varied types of evidence at our
disposal - archaeological, linguistic and literary - themselves cause problems of
determination. The only way to deal with this conflict of approaches is to recognize
that they are, to an extent, irreconcilable. There is a lack of congruence between
language, material culture and ethnicity so that direct correlations cannot be made
between the evidence for the distribution of language and that of archaeological
indicators. It is equally impossible to make precise links between these categories of
evidence and actual peoples. Ethnic boundaries are fluid, blurred and mutable;
language cannot be used to define populations with any precision; specific artefacts
and settlement types can spread through channels other than those of their use by