- The Celts in France -
Aisne. During the same period, in a valley-bottom setting at Villeneuve-Saint-
Germain, surrounded by a meander of the Aisne, a town developed (Figure 29.5). Its
industrial and residential areas were separated by a long, cruciform, roofed structure.
This arrangement seems to represent a unique instance of urban planning, such as
would be associated with the activities of Roman aedili, but executed in wood. The
detailed chronology of these late pre-Gallo-Roman developments is probably easier
to discern at present in east-central France than in the northern valleys.
THE ATLANTIC TERRITORIESBefore Caesar, the only texts that mention the Atlantic coastlands relate to the
expeditions made by Himilco and Pytheas. It was primarily the search for tin which
underpinned trade with these distant regions. This quest probably offers the best
explanation for the presence of artefacts of Mediterranean origin as far north as the
mouth of the Loire as early as the First Iron Age. Archaeological evidence of these
contacts is thereafter difficult to perceive until the second century BC, when
Campanian pottery was distributed to the Charente valley, but no further north-
westwards. Slightly later, wine amphorae were exchanged as far as Armorica and
southern England, but in small numbers. Distribution maps show concentrations at
ports, but recent discoveries show that our information on the overall pattern is still
very incomplete.
A number of traits are shared by the western peninsulas from Cornwall and
Armorica to Galicia. It is thus possible to contrast a western community with a
continental one. Current research, however, extends beyond simply contrasting an
Atlantic tradition and continental Celtic influence, to define a range of indigenous
cultures and their economic development at the local scale (Duval 1990).
The establishment of absolute chronology is the main difficulty facing the archae-
ologist working on these regions. The rarity of Mediterranean imports and the
absence of large cemeteries with rich artefactual assemblages hinder the definition of
the precise sequencing that is feasible in eastern France. In Armorica, M.-Y. Daire's
research allows us to classify different ceramic traditions: graphite pottery; vases
with stamped decoration; pot with red-painted decoration; and vases with internally
channelled rims (Daire 1987). But the types of pottery thus defined are restricted to
a few hundred items and the available typologies only indicate general trends.
R. Boudet has put forward a chronology for Aquitaine which identifies five horizons
between the sixth and first centuries BC (Boudet 1987). His scheme takes into
account information from both settlements and tombs, the two stratified sites at La
Ude du Gurp and Lacoste (both Gironde) providing stratigraphic controls.
Although drawing attention to the fragility of this chronological scheme, which relies
heavily on data from Languedoc, T. Lejars used it as the basis for his analysis of the
western territories as a whole (Lejars 1987).
Our knowledge of the cultures of Armorica has made considerable progress
during the past twenty years, thanks to very active research teams which have bene-
fited from the examination of sites revealed as crop marks by successive years of
drought or identified through the requirements of rescue operations. The picture that