- Wood and the Wheelwright -
show us how much Celtic art in fugitive substances we must have lost (Megaw and
Megaw I989: I62-3).
Small pole-wood obtained by coppicing was extensively used for building
trackways across bogs and marshes from the early third millennium BC, and in later
prehistory in the Somerset Levels and the Cambridgeshire fens and the Dutch bogs,
and in late prehistory in north Germany, sometimes flanked by highly stylized
human figures cut from planks. Planks were used for shields of long oval type
from the third century BC at Hjortspring on the Danish island of Als and at La
Time (Rosenberg I937; Vouga I923: pI. XVI-XVIII) and of course for arrows and
spear-shafts, bows, and the handles of domestic tools from Neolithic times onwards.
Woodwork was also freely used for vessels and containers of various types and it is
here we must consider the early use of the lathe in prehistoric western Europe.
The earliest evidence for lathe-turning is in the ancient Orient and Aegean, and a
lathe is technologically the application of the principle of the long-established
bow-drill to a horizontal spindle driven into intermittent rotation by a wrapped-
round cord or strap. This motion needed an assistant strap-puller or the return of the
slack obtained by a springy upright in the pole lathe, common to most European
peasant contexts, and in Britain surviving until modern times among, for instance,
the chair-bodgers of the Chiltern beech woods. In prehistoric Europe the lathe must
derive from Mediterranean sources, either Aegean or Etruscan. There is inferential
evidence for the lathe finishing of bronze bowls in late bronze age central Europe,
but general agreement puts the first real use of the wood-turner's lathe to sixth-
century Hallstatt craftsmen in south Germany (Piggott I983: I62), and a rapid
adoption of the pole lathe or its equivalent throughout the Celtic world. The true
lathe with continuous rotation had to await the invention of the crankshaft around
AD I400 (White I978: 305).
Despite their importance in the Celtic world, wooden containers for liquids or dry
stuffs have scarcely been discussed by archaeologists and the only technical study
seems to be that made on the Glastonbury material (Earwood I988; I993). Lathe-
turning may playa part, but vessels hollowed from the solid by axe and adze, chisel
gouge and knife are part of the neolithic ancestry of woodcraft: at the lakeside
settlement at Chalain in the Jura, for instance, hand-carved wooden bowls copy the
contemporary early third-millennium neolithic pottery styles. In late prehistory
finds from Northern Ireland are remarkable feats of carving from the solid wood
block: one such cauldron is over half a metre in diameter (Coles et al. I978)
and another, from Altatarte, Co. Monaghan, and 30 cm across, is decorated with
incised La Tene ornament and has free ring-drop handles (e.g. Raftery I93 I: fig. 256).
Some of the bowls and platters from La Tene itself were certainly turned (Vouga
I923: pI. XXIX) and in the third-century Hjortspring find were elegant little turned
boxes with knobbed lids (Rosenberg I937: fig. 34). From Glastonbury came the two
well-known shallow flat-bottomed bowls with incised La Tene ornament, turned
from solid blocks some 35-40 cm across. Decorative lathe-turned bases were incor-
porated in some British stave-built vessels, a class of construction of widespread
employment in the Celtic world (Earwood I993).
The stave-built hooped cask or barrel (Figure 8.3) to hold liquids was a Celtic
invention, a northern barbarian counterpart to the Mediterranean amphora. Such a
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