http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ mirrored file For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== < Main Page Chapter 15 The Iron Age in Europe A great deal of work has been done during the last few years on the Iron Age both in terms of excavation and examination of the climatic and environmental changes that took place during it. It is impossible nowadays to study the period without taking into account these changes that began about 500BC. A deterioration in terms of increased rainfall brought about abandonment of much marginal land and pressure on the better land as more people sought to get a living from more restricted areas. This provoked political rearrangements which left their mark in the shape of evidence of more centrally directed societies. At the end of the Bronze Age many areas were still only feeding themselves without producing much in the way of a surplus but one of the innovations of the Iron Age is the development of commercial production of agricultural products that restored an economic balance which had been upset by the commercial production of metal artifacts that had begun during the Bronze Age. Society appears to have been strongly hierarchical in the sense that there were nobles and a peasant class. Caesar mentions a clientage system and in the folk-tale sources which originate during the Iron Age in Ireland, Wales and Brittany we can discern an arrangement by which the noble provided the client (the peasant) with cattle to tend and perhaps seed-corn to grow in exchange for loyalty and a tithe of the produce. One of the advantages, or in some instances, disadvantages, for the Iron Age archaeologist is that there are native and classical documentary sources for the latter part of the period which can reinforce or sometimes confuse the archaeological evidence. Ironworking makes its first appearance round about 1700BCE in both the Tatra mountains of Slovakia and the Caucasian mountains of Georgia; is evident in Greece during the fourteenth century BCE, and was used in the eleventh century in Italy and in eastern and central Europe by the ninth century BCE. Thereafter, the craft appeared in western Europe. An example, dare we say it, of diffusion? But it did not have the same effect on societies as the arrival of copper and bronze. Apart from the prestigious Hallstatt C long iron sword, an iron version of the Mindelheim bronze sword, there was no great aristocratic demand for the new metal. By about the mid-9^th century BCE problems had arisen in Europe in the supply of copper, bronze and lead-free tin and the deterioration in the quality of the alloy used to make weapons due to increasing lead concentrations in the bronze. As a result the use of iron became more common and the first swords made of it appear during the latter half of the 9^th century. By the early 8^th century bronze was abandoned completely as a material for the production of weapons and edged tools. The availability of iron was a significant factor in the changeover from bronze to iron and this may have influenced the cost of the artefacts. Tin and copper were found only in particular areas. Ironstones, on the other hand, were very common if not always very high in iron content, but, as long as a smith did not mind the hard work and the poor return, he could make iron objects for his community almost anywhere. Such objects were chiefly tools: carpenters' and farmers' utensils. The advantage of the iron tools over the stone versions, unlike the copper and bronze ones, is that if broken they can be reforged as new, a process that does not require a very advanced furnace or high technology as long as the smith had a pair of tongs and a good iron-headed hammer. Customary repair of broken artefacts belonging to ordinary people is probably the main reason why metal tools are comparatively rare in settlement contexts. Only in hoards do we find them in any quantity but, of course, iron corrodes more easily than bronze and only survives well in particular environmental conditions. It is important to stress the continuity from the late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age. The traditional archaeological evidence, the pottery types, shows little change, nor does the life-style. A good example of this is the Lausitz society of the north European plain, a people whose history can be traced from c1600 to c500BC. Basically, they were farmers rearing the usual range of domestic animals and growing wheat, barley, millet, flax, rye, peas and beans and they may also have been exploiting amber collected along the Baltic coast. This way of life remained uninterrupted over the centuries. Of course, the use of bronze continued for the production of decorative and prestige metal objects and in fact, in Europe, the finest pieces of the bronzefounders' art appear during the Iron Age but they were produced by superior artisans, those capable of the finest workmanship and the more plebeian colleagues who were catering for ordinary folk by mending their broken tools and supplying the new by remoulding scrap bronze gradually disappeared. During the period a series of fortified villages appear of which the best known is Biskupin in Poland of the seventh century BC consisting of around 100 timber-built houses ranged along twelve timber-paved streets. Most of the buildings measured nine by seven metres, divided into two rooms and the whole settlement was surrounded by a timber-faced rampart with imposing gateways. The Holy Cross mountains in Poland were exploited for their iron after the metal was introduced and continued to be a rich source after the Lausitz culture faded and was succeeded by the Pomeranian culture in which there was less evidence of villages and more of individual farmsteads. In northern Jutland early long-houses appear at Fragtrup with the houses (18m by 7m) divided into two for different activities. At one end was the living quarters and the other was used for craft working or for agricultural purposes. Excavations at Elp in Drenthe show that half of one long house was a byre, giving rise to the term byrehouse. The house-types in this region develop from Bronze Age types and the tradition of long houses, once established, continues for a very long time, right down to the modern era. During the Iron Age, which begins in Scandinavia about 500BC, a trend towards nuclearisation of settlements can be detected. At Grontoft a grouping together of farmsteads develops and at Hodde by the first century BC a true settlement has been established. Stalling of animals required the storage of winter feed so that ancillary buildings such as granaries appeared alongside the longhouses. The manure from the byres was transferred to the fields in exchange for the fodder. But the agricultural systems began to alter during the first millenium AD. An infield-outfield arrangement developed with crops grown on the land closest to the settlement and animals pastured furthest out. Farms became larger and separated from each other, different types of buildings were constructed including the small sunken-floor buildings used for craftwork that the German archaeologists call grubenhauser or grubenhutter according to whether the roofs had six or two supporting posts. And the farmer's household would now include the extended family and, perhaps, slaves. This change took place in Scandinavia between AD200 and AD300. It suggests either an intensification of agricultural work that required more hands or an elaboratyion of domestic tasks. By the eighth century BC similarities of pottery, metal artifacts and building styles began to be apparent over a large area of Central Europe. This bundle of cultural traits is the Hallstatt culture mentioned above. Hallstatt society was a hierarchical one in which the leaders were involved in trade and/or industry. Hillforts belonging to the aristocratic strata of society appeared close to sources of raw materials or on the main routeways of central Europe, that is, along the rivers Danube, Rhine and Doubs. Below these hillforts are the graves of the leading personalities and sometimes agglomerations of buildings belonging to those who were dependent on the hillfort. The best-known area of the time is that referred to as the Western Hallstatt region with the archaeological sites at Mount Lassois in Burgundy and the Heuneburg in Baden-Wurtemberg. Mount Lassois was a densely populated stronghold containing many timber-framed, wattle-and-daub buildings which was defended on the east by the River Seine and elsewhere by an encircling bank-and-ditch while the Heuneburg was a similar fortification near the headwaters of the Danube. Both have evidence of trade with the Mediterranean region. The area grows in importance in the C and D periods of Hallstatt tradition between 600-450BC. Waggon/chariot graves contain goods that had been traded along the Rivers Rhône and Saône from Massalia, the Greek colony founded on the site of the modern town of Marseilles. Imports of Greek and Etruscan manufacture including bronze wine vessel services (a sort of wine 'tea-set'), Greek pottery, amphorae and a variety of other bronze objects are found beside the ceramic pot sets which are characteristic of the Hallstatt burial tradition. Five 'princely' graves have been discovered in the neighbourhood, three of them chariot burials of which the most famous is the one at Vix just across the river from Mount Lassois. In a large wooden grave-pit under a tumulus lay a woman on a wheeled bier with a variety of costly grave-goods including a bronze, five-foot high, wine krater (cup) imported from the Mediterranean. The appetite, indeed greed, for wine exhibited by the Hallsttatt chieftains was commented on by classical writers but it might be thought that the Vix krater (capacity 1100 litres) was a little over the top. However, the stability of the barbarian society was dependent on the chieftain being able to reward his/her followers with regular gifts of 'goodies' like wine so perhaps we ought to regard the vessel as a sort of Father Christmas sack. On a hilltop above the Danube in Bavaria stands the Heuneberg hillfort. It is surrounded by a rampart that during the third Hallstatt period (Hallstatt C) was built in the style called kastenbau, consisting of a timber-framed box filled with material excavated from the exterior ditch. Houses, metal workshops and granaries have so far been identified inside the fortress. In a later phase the famous stretch of the perimeter built 'á la Grecque' appeared. Constructed of sun-dried brick with close-set projecting bastions, it is an extraordinary structure to find in temperate Europe but bears witness to connections with the Mediterranean via the Etruscan people of the Po valley in northern Italy. The use of mud-brick and indeed of stone had become relatively common in the region around the Greek colony of Massalia in southern France and was to be particularly characteristic of the La Tène period of the later Iron Age there. But, by that time, connections with the barbarian north of Europe had been broken off. Opposite the Heuneberg hillfort and 400 metres off at Talhau was a group of houses. In comparison with the buildings inside the hillfort they were palatial and were later buried beneath tumuli which suggest that they may have been the homes of aristocrats who were finally buried within them. Not far away, the Hochmichele mounds cover the plank-built grave pits of other notables. Their wealth may have been derived from slave-dealing and in part from industrial production within the hillfort where the potter's wheel was used to turn out large numbers of pots while fibulae (brooches with safety-pin fastenings) were being manufactured together with lignite bracelets and trinkets adorned with Baltic amber and the first Mediterranean coral in Europe. The coral came from the bay of Naples and its relative abundance as a decorative material after 480BC distinguishes the La Tène metalwork from that of preceding centuries. Coral was much admired in later Iron Age Europe and was simulated in parts of Gaul and in Britain where it was rarely seen by red enamel which was developed for the purpose. The Western Hallstatt chiefdoms collapsed during the fifth century BC. New chieftain graves appear in the Hunsruck-Eifel region (Rhineland Palatinate and Saarland) of Germany and neighbouring regions perhaps as a result of exploitation of rich iron ore deposits. This may have been influenced by Etruscan entrepreneurs from northern Italy for Etruscan beaked flagons become common in the area. Aristocratic metalwork begins to be decorated with a curvilinear abstract design, one of the major art-styles of the world, referred to as La Tène or Celtic Art. The widespread La Tène A culture succeeds that of the Hallstatt D3 and its successive phases run from c475BCE to C1BCE. Inhumation burial continues from the Hallstatt period but is replaced by the cremation rite during the third century BC. Again we are contemplating an hierarchical society with the leaders living in strongholds known as oppida situated near or on major trade routes or important natural deposits. Oppida were enormous enclosures incorporating up to 380 hectares delineated by dump ramparts reinforced with wooden structures very often with inturned rampart ends edging the entrances. Inside were activities found in earlier villages - farming and crafts - alongside religious sites and storage facilities. Excavated finds inside them can include small bronzes, glass bracelets and bone carvings together with pottery containers and trading artefacts like balances and coins. Some good examples are the strongholds at Stradonice (near iron ore deposits), Trísov (near graphite sources) and Nevrzce (near silver sand quarries) all in the Czech republic. Staré Hradisko in the same area is a typical example of an oppidum situated on a major trade route - in this instance, the amber route from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. Large numbers of amber beads manufactured in the settlements have been discovered in various excavations. From the south the rich inhabitants were importing Etruscan drinking and eating vessels of glass, bronze and fine pottery and have left behind them on the site splendid evidence for the minting of coins. By late-La Tène times oppida are found in a wide swathe stretching from the Danube to the English Channel. They can be defined as fortified native towns distinguished from hillforts by their combination of residential, industrial, market and administrative functions. So far, 170 have been identified, some very big, the largest yet known at Heidengraben enclosing 1500 hectares of the Schwabian Jura in Bavaria. The best quality metal products show a leaning towards military pomp: cuirasses, swords, helmets and horse-trappings that allow us to draw a mind-picture of a military aristocracy not far off in style from that of the knights of medieval Europe. An important development is the growing unilaterality from the rest of Gaul of the area we now call Provence. These southlands were becoming increasingly hellenized. Greek architecture, coinage, and the use of the alphabet to write Gaulish were adopted there. The main trade links between the barbarian north and the cultivated south were now the routes over the Alps and down into the north Italian plain to Etruria (modern Tuscany) whose craftsmen became the main suppliers of luxury goods to the northlands from the early fifth century BC onwards. Coins had been produced by barbarian chieftains since c300BC. At first they were copies of Macedonian staters that probably became familiar to European warriors who were serving as mercenaries in Greece but later on Roman coins were used as models and original barbarian designs also appeared. It was clearly a matter of pride as well as convenience for each trader-chieftain to produce his own coins. But as power was gradually accumulated in fewer hands, by the late second/early first century BC coins were being produced at fewer centres and low-denominational coins were being made for use in common trade. Typical minting centres would be large oppida like Stradonice where many coins have been found and Mont Beuvray (Burgogne), the capital of the Aedui tribe of eastern France. The stronghold at Manching in Bavaria is characteristic of the late 'oppida phenomenon'. Situated on a rich, agricultural plain by the River Paar and covering 380 hectares, its seven-kilometre defensive wall consisted of a timber-laced rampart in which the framework was fixed together with thousands of nails. This is the 'murus gallicus' described by Caesar in his book De Bello Gallico (7.23). One quarter of the town was occupied by metal-workers producing tools, household equipment, horse-trappings and wagons. Weaving, at which the Iron Age people were highly skilled, was practised in another quarter while, elsewhere in the town, amber working, pottery manufacture, glass making and the manufacture of stone bracelets and bone objects were the main activities. The pottery was the first mass-produced pottery in Europe, made both in the form of coarseware cooking pots and painted fineware in an off-white fabric. Manching shared this production with a number of other manufacturing centres located as far apart as southern France and eastern Europe. Beef, pork and mutton figured on the inhabitants' menus and they bred horses and hunting dogs. Iron Age domestic animals were smaller than modern breeds. Horses were the size of a modern pony and some were harnessed in pairs to draw chariots. But larger animals were occasionally available after the oriental horse was imported into Europe while the Romans could supply a heavier breed of cattle. Domestic hens first appear during the Iron Age but were probably scrawnier birds than we are accustomed to. When contemplating these oppida, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that their owners were something grander than the local chieftains who lived in the hillforts. May they not have been the first state rulers in Europe? Certainly, these potentates, as we already know, minted their own coins and were involved in the long-distance trade for which there is evidence at La Tène in Switzerland. How far along the trade-routes did their rule extend? Could they have been ruling over extensive areas? Manching, for example, was a crossroads for trade in many directions. One of these routes was through Dürrnberg, a salt-mining centre as important as Hallstatt, to the Sopron-Krautacker settlement, (Gyõr-Moson-Sopron), Hungary, which lay on the ancient amber route running south from the Baltic Sea. In northern and eastern Europe, neither oppida nor hillforts are found, the peasant settlements remaining much as they had been since the Neolithic period with the characteristic long houses housing both humans and beasts whose milk sustained their owners and whose manure sustained the soil. The site of La Tène gives its name to the period of the later Iron Age in Europe. Despite numerous sporadic excavations for over a century, archaeologists are still uncertain as to what the site was but the fact is that enormous numbers of objects, mainly of metal, have been found in the ancient bed of the river Thielle in Switzerland. There were 3000 iron weapons alone. Similar finds came from Cornaux, some three kilometres downstream, where a bridge collapsed during the last century BC. On this occasion some unfortunate travellers were trapped underneath the oak planks together with swords in sheaths and other weapons. Apart from metal, the site yielded a large number of wooden objects: bridge beams over twelve metres long, dugout canoes, chariots, yokes, pack-saddles, turned wooden vessels, and buckets amongst a great number of other smaller everyday items and this great variety testifies to the skills and ubiquity of the carpenter of the time. We tend to forget him because his products rarely survive but it must be that he was present and just as versatile a producer in all the prehistoric periods and not just the Iron Age. In northern Italy the earliest Iron Age culture is the Villanovan that later, after the eighth century BC, gives birth to the Etruscan civilisation. Villanovan cemeteries, in which the burials were mainly cremations, have been found not only in Tuscany but as far south as Capua and it is clear from the grave-goods that the Villanovan craftsmen were clever workers in bronze, being responsible for the development of both fibulae (brooches) and situlae (decorative buckets), this aptitude enabling them to supply the tribes across the Alps with prestige metal goods. Their cremated dead were buried in urnfields, sometimes in urns crowned with a soldier's helmet or a pottery copy of one. As the Villanovan settlements spread south, the grave-goods become more varied and richer and include bronze armour and horse equipment. Inhumation began to be adopted and graves developed into chamber tombs. South of the Villanovan area was Latium inhabited by people who were influenced both by the Villanovans and the people to their south whose way of life is described as the Fossa culture. Despite these influences, the Latins developed a way of life that was undoubtedly their own. The people were pastoral folk living in scattered villages, one of which was on the site of the Forum in Rome and another on the Palatine hill. Like the Villanovans, at first they buried the ashes of their dead in clay urns shaped like the huts in which they lived. Further east, across the Apennines, were the Peceni tribe, living between the Foglia and Tronto rivers, an area nowadays known as Le Marche. Their dead were both cremated or buried in trenches accompanied by bronze fibulae, painted pottery and little animal and human pendants. It is possible that trade was factor in their culture for Baltic amber has been found in their area. Greek colonies were being established around the Italian coasts and the influence of their trade goods like the painted vases, copies of which are of high quality and difficult to distinguish from the originals, are found in these native areas. At the same time, the Latin tribes in the area known as Latium had formed a confederacy of which the town of Rome became the leading power, traditionally some time after 753BCE and later on the expansion of the power of this city based on an efficient army was the beginning of the Roman Empire. During this early period the Etruscans were dominant in Latium and between 616 and 510BCE a Tuscan dynasty of Etruscans held sway there. These Tuscan kings, the Tarquins, were responsible for the Cloaca Maxima in Rome, the famous drain that transformed the swampy plain of the Forum as part of a building programme which included a wall around the seven hills that made a city of the place that soon rivalled in size the major Etruscan cities further north. The Etruscans were a cultured people whose way of life is best seen pictured, ironically, in the paintings and decorations of their tombs where they are shown as enjoying a happy and fulfilled existence. Much influenced by Greek colonists, they adopted an alphabet based on the Greek and a pantheon of gods from the same source. Also influenced by Grecian models was their architecture and sculpture and methods of divination. Their wealth came both from agriculture and their active trading links with the Greek colonies, North Africa and Spain. It was the Etruscans who, although eventually conquered by the Romans, were the single most important formative influence on Roman culture. In the Iberian peninsula, the first kingdom of Tartessos was established, perhaps as early as the ninth century BCE, in the south east perhaps under the influence of Phoenician traders from the eastern Mediterranean who were anxious to acquire the copper and gold that were available in the hinterland. From then on southern Spain played an important part in the history of prehistoric Southern Europe not only as a source of metals but also as the recipient of both Carthaginian and Greek and, later, Roman colonisation. An expansion into Italy over the Alps by northern warriors began during the mid-fifth century, reaching its apogee with the sack of Rome in 386BC. This migration was accompanied by a fall in the population of parts of transalpine La Tène Europe like the Marne area of France where the phenomenon is observable about 400BC. Most archaeologists see cause and effect in these happenings. By about 200BC the southward movement was at an end. The religion of the Iron Age was a Europe-wide phenomenon. Two important traits that are apparent in many different parts of Europe were the obsessions with the severed human head and with water. Apart from a few exceptions shrines were placed in sacred locations in the countryside unmarked by any buildings. Sometimes at these places votive deposits are found consisting of sacrificial offerings buried in the ground, thrown down wells or placed in streams or springs. Very expensive gold and copper objects were deposited in this way as was the Battersea shield recovered from the River Thames or, a common find across northern Europe, sacrificed human beings whose bodies were preserved in peat bogs in sphagnum moss that creates cold, acid and oxygen-free conditions which immobilise bacteria and preserves individuals almost intact. A more easily-identifiable type of sanctuary in Europe is the Viereckschanzen, a slightly raised, rectangular enclosure covering an area of about one hectare and surrounded by a bank and ditch. A well-known example of a sacred site is Sequana at the source of the Seine (Burgundy) in France. Here a deposit consisted of wooden statuettes of deformed human beings that were presumably placed at the shrine to draw the attention of the goddess to the afflictions in the hope of cures. Many of these curative rural shrines existed. Examples are, in France, Les Fontaines Salées, the saline springs near Vézelay in Burgundy and, in England, the hot spring at Bath. In due course, both these places were institutionalised by the Romans so thoroughly that even the petitioners' requests to the deity were written in Latin. Wells were also utilised for this purpose throughout the later prehistoric and Roman periods and continued to be resorted to after being Christianised. An example in Wales is Flynnon Rhedy near Llanllyfni. But Iron Age physicians were not averse to involving themselves directly in medical treatments as finds of surgical instruments from graves and settlements and trephined skulls found in central Europe demonstrate. Other sites, perhaps not so strictly medical in character, also allowed communication with the deity. A number have been excavated in England. In the north is the sanctuary of Coventina near Hadrian's Wall and in the south the site at Uley in Gloucestershire. Votive hoards deposited at sacred places where nowadays there is no longer any trace of a shrine are at Llyn Cerrig Bach in north Wales, at Tiefenau in Switzerland and at Gundestrup in Denmark which yielded the famous silver bowl decorated with severed heads and mounted warriors. Artificial shafts dug down 30 metres or so into the ground are known from this period. Presumably they were a way of communicating with the underworld. At the bottom wooden posts and traces of organic matter might suggest a particularly revolting sacrificial rite. A good example is at Holzhausen in Bavaria. Ditched enclosures, some rectangular, as at Fin d'Ecury (Marne) or round, like Frilford in Berkshire, have been occasionally excavated and apparently served as religious centres. In Britain these date only from the second half of the Iron Age. During the earlier period, square structures in settlement sites like Danebury (Hants), Heathrow and Stansted (both Middlesex) have been claimed as shrines. The only stone constructions which can be described as temples are two in the Hellenized south of France, at Roquepertuse and Entremont, with stone-carved severed heads and human skulls. One way in which the sites of Iron Age shrines can sometimes be located is by the use of the place-name element nemeton which appears in various guises in place names all over Europe. In Burgundy it characterises the village of Vermenton, in the south of France, Nemeton (Vaucluse), in Spain, Nemtobriga (Galicia) and in England, Vernemeton (Notts). The original Iron Age word meant a sacred grove. Growing Wealth [LINK] main page [LINK] The Iron Age in Britain [LINK]