The Archaeology of Celtic Art

LATER BRONZE AGE AND HALLSTATT ORIGINSwhich permitted hollow casting by the use of plugs within the mould. Alloys too wereincreasingly deployed in a more sophisticated fashion depending upon the method ofconstruction or the requirements of different parts of the artefact in question; so, forexample, the body, base and handles of a bronze bucket might require the use of alloysof different composition. The use of sheet bronze was an important innovation. Usedvariously for the different components of the feasting or drinking service, buckets formixing drink, strainers and cups for serving and consuming it, beaten bronze was alsoused for high-status parade armour, including breast armour and greaves by the laterBronze Age. Embossing techniques not only added ornament and doubtless symbolismto these prestigious possessions, but lent strength to the sheet bronze construction.Specialist techniques, like the use of rivets to link panels of sheet bronze or wiredrawingto reinforce the rims of beaten bronze vessels, were the natural concomitant ofthese developments. But the crucial point about these innovations for the understandingof the cultural milieu that saw the genesis of early Celtic art is that these technicalskills were deployed for the aristocratic pursuits of feasting and drinking and theconflict of arms, or the ceremonial and symbolic associated with these activities.It is not simply the extension of technical capacity and therefore of the range of typesthat makes the late Bronze Age a period of dynamic change, it is also the scale ofproduction. Hoards of the period are not infrequently substantial in quantity, promptingquestions regarding the reasons for their burial and non-recovery. Ritual depositionand the conspicuous destruction of wealth as a demonstration of social status have bothbeen invoked as possible motives for hoards, but the probability must also be consideredthat there was some serious disruption of the political and social order inCentral and South-Eastern Europe, perhaps not unrelated to the apparent collapse ofMycenaean civilization at the end of Late Helladic IIIB in the thirteenth century.Climatic deterioration is sometimes suggested as a cause for economic and politicalturmoil, bringing pressures upon land marginal for settlement and agriculture, andprompting strife between advantaged and displaced communities. At the same timeindustrial production on this scale itself requires a degree of political stability, not leastbecause the sources of supply, the twin mineral deposits of copper and tin, are widelydispersed, and stable political relationships would be required to ensure a continuingsupply of raw material across the trade routes of north-alpine Europe.Sources of raw materials for metal-workers in the Bronze Age were doubtless alreadythose that were later to be exploited by Iron Age bronze-workers and their patrons.Copper was available in plentiful supply in the eastern Alps, in the Balkans, theCarpathians and in Ireland; tin was not so widely available, but Cornish and Breton tinwas doubtless in demand, together with supplies from Spain, Italy and the OreMountains of Eastern Europe. Gold had been exploited from the early Bronze Age,with Irish and Carpathian sources being worked from an early period. The industrialinfrastructure plainly involved long-distance connections, and affords one obviousmechanism for the transmission of foreign fashions in artefact types and ornamentalstyles.Funerary practice and ritualThe most fundamental change in burial practice represented in the late Bronze Age inEurope is the widespread adoption of cremation as the funerary rite. The north-alpine18