Rethinking Celtic Art

The decorated metalwork from the later Iron Age and Roman periods has long been acknowledged as an important body of material, but has been mainly analysed in terms of its styles and continental links. It has often been known as 'Celtic art' and both of these terms are ripe for reconstruction. The term 'Celtic' has been much discussed, with the notion of 'art' relatively ignored. This volume focuses on this latter term. Given the interests current in archaeology in the material nature of objects and their social effects, there are now many new possibilities for analysis both of the metalwork itself and its place within Iron Age and Romano-British cultural forms. The twelve papers in this volume bring together a variety of insights into production, art syles, dating and social significances by specialists in those fields. The authors argue that British early Celtic art is distinctively different from that found in other parts of Europe (though not a sign of isolated development), that we should move away from a notion of art towards a notion of aesthetics and how objects relate to people's senses and relations with each other, and that decorated metalwork, in spite of its rarity, can shed light on the social world of the time, and the strangeness of British society at the very end of prehistory.