In 1994, archaeologists found a bronze statue of the goddess Athena in a pit at Dornach, a Late Iron Age settlement dating to around 70 BC, 10 km east of Munich. The figure, on a small cylindrical base of sheet bronze, stands 16.4 cm high. She is clothed in a wrap-around garment called a chiton and wears a Corinthian-style helmet with a plume on the top and with a horn on either side. In her right hand she holds a bowl, in her left a cylindrical box called a pyxis. Figures of gods and goddesses from the Mediterranean world are unusual in temperate Europe before the time of the Roman conquest (in 15 BC in this region). This little Athena was found in the second layer down from the top of the pit, about a meter below the modern ground surface. It had been deposited intentionally, in a layer of soil that also contained a number of other objects that mark the deposit as very different from typical settlement debris. A leg bone of a newborn calf had been placed in the pit, as had part of the pelvis of a bear. Sherds of pottery vessels were also present, but no entire vessels. All of the evidence suggests that the figure of Athena as well the other items had been deposited as specially selected objects in a ritual offering.
The most important thing about the Athena statue is that this Mediterranean object had been integrated into local practices. The character of the associated objects in the pit indicate that the inhabitants of the settlement were in a sense welcoming Athena into their own ways of doing things, depositing her along with objects that they had been offering for centuries. This is just one particularly instructive piece of evidence that illustrates the extent to which communities in temperate Europe were becoming increasingly integrated into the larger world of the Mediterranean basin and beyond, and an example as well of how the process of integration worked. The fruits of that process would significantly impact the modes of visualization of temperate Europeans.
The two major changes in the visual structure and patterning of objects that I have highlighted in the preceding chapters, one in the fifth century BC and the other in the second century BC, took place in the context of major changes in the relationship between societies in temperate Europe and societies elsewhere, specifically in the Mediterranean basin, in Asia, and in Africa. The changes emerged internally, from within the societies of temperate Europe. They were in no sense “caused by” outside societies, nor by trade relations with outside societies. Instead, they came about as responses on the part of individuals and communities in temperate Europe to ideas and opportunities that became available to them through the widespread expansion of interaction throughout the eastern hemisphere from the sixth century BC on.
The responses of Europeans in the two periods of change were different, and they happened under different historical circumstances. The changes in the visual character of fifth-century-BC objects resulted principally from the expanded dissemination of ideas, embodied in new objects, styles, motifs, and designs. The changes in the second century BC resulted mainly from the expansion of commerce—of trade in goods.
The issue here recalls the perennial question that has dogged European archaeology since the early part of the twentieth century: How did the Early La Tène Style, or “Celtic Art,” originate? Paul Jacobsthal laid the groundwork for possible answers to this question in his great work of 1944, Early Celtic Art, and many distinguished researchers have pursued the matter since. They include Otto-Herman Frey, J.V.S. Megaw, Frank Schwappach, Martin Guggisberg, Felix Müller, Dirk Krausse, and Rudolf Echt. The problem with their approaches, I am going to argue, is that they have conceived the question much too narrowly. In Jacobsthal’s study, he mentions the possible importance of “influences” from other regions, but his focus, and that of his successors, is firmly on the Mediterranean world, in particular on Greece and Etruria. Most of the discussion about origins of the new style has focused on identifying motifs and elements in Greek and Etruscan art and connecting them with motifs in the Early La Tène style. Now that we possess a great deal more information about the archaeology of other regions of the world than was available to Jacobsthal, we can view the matter differently. But as my argument will show, what is critical is not only that we can see a wider diversity of possible “models” for the new style, but that we can also adopt a new approach to the question that will allow us to propose explanations for the emergence not only of a new style, but of a whole new way of seeing.
My argument is that the great change in the European mode of visualization came about as the result of the people in temperate Europe experiencing a range of new things, styles and motifs that derived not from Mediterranean societies alone, but from a much wider range of sources, and in the context of very specific historical circumstances. The exposure to new visual ideas alone would not be enough; only a specific set of cultural circumstances within which that exposure took place can account for the widespread adopting of new visual themes and motifs and the emergence of a whole new mode of visualization. I shall consider both of these matters in turn—first the direct evidence for exposure to new visual themes, and then the evidence for the particular circumstances in which these contacts took place.
It is now clear that changes in the style of ornament began well before the generally accepted starting date of “Early La Tène Art.” For example, S-curves on the dagger sheath from Salem show that the motif was known well before the full development of the new style. And recently reported gold ornaments from the Heuneburg are decorated with curvilinear lines and dots in a pattern not unlike Early La Tène examples. Curvilinear lines occur in other contexts, too, in Late Hallstatt associations. Curving lines in the form of garlands are a regular feature of Early Iron Age decoration on pottery, and it can be argued that the garlands on the ornate cups of the Late Bronze Age are precursors to this practice of applying curvilinear ornament to objects. Furthermore, a whole series of settlements that show occupation associated with materials attributed to both Late Hallstatt and Early La Tène have been reported from France and Germany, at Charmay “Le Haut des Marquettes,” Allaines Mervilliers, Remseck-Neckargröningen, and Erdwerk I at Niedererlbach, to name just four examples.
In an elegant passage, Andrew Sherratt argues that the impact of long-distance contacts was critical for human societies, suggesting that everyone involved was affected. Most directly relevant to our discussion here is his sentence: “The experience of contacts with a wider world was an integral part of the developmental history of all societies and civilizations, as communities defined their identity by reference to a widening circle of neighbors.” While there is evidence that manufactured goods from other regions of the world reached temperate Europe earlier, the quantity of crafted objects fashioned in other regions became much larger from the middle of the sixth century BC on. Examples from around that time include the Grächwil hydria and the Kappel jug, both bronze vessels from the Greek world made before the mid-sixth century BC. Made later in that century and also from the Greek world were the Hochdorf cauldron, the bronze tripod and the ivory and amber decorated couch from Grafenbühl, and the Vix krater. Attic pottery and western Greek transport amphorae dating to between 520 and 480 BC are well represented at a number of sites throughout the central and western regions of temperate Europe. During the fifth century BC, Etruscan bronze vessels arrived in substantial numbers, including bronze basins and, especially, beaked jugs (Schnabelkannen), and a number of Etruscan bronze figurines have been reported from different places as well. These imports have been familiar in the archaeological literature since the middle of the twentieth century, but the quantities of such finds and the number of sites at which they are represented have grown substantially in the past two decades.
Equally important are objects from other regions of the world. A whole series of sword hilts, including several from Hallstatt in Austria and specimens from Deisslingen and Kinding in southern Germany, dating from the seventh and sixth centuries BC, are crafted of elephant ivory, indicating a source connection with the Near East or Africa. A small bronze situla made in Syria was found in a fifth-century-BC grave at Straubing. Silk textiles, perhaps from the Mediterranean region, perhaps from further east, have been reported in graves of the late sixth and fifth centuries BC.
From the evidence currently available, it is apparent that surviving imports from the Mediterranean region are much more numerous than those from other, more distant, regions. But the fact that the majority of foreign objects in sixth- and fifth-century-BC contexts were Mediterranean in origin does not mean that those objects and the societies that produced them were necessarily the only or even the primary sources of the new visual themes and ideas. In fact, I argue here that in the past, researchers have been misled by the quantities of Greek and Etruscan imports and the similarities of style and motif exhibited by some European and Mediterranean products into drawing a causal connection. Large number of imports + some similarity in motif and style = source of influence, motifs, inspiration. This approach takes a much too narrow view. If we look at the larger world of the sixth and fifth centuries BC throughout Eurasia and Africa, we can understand the motifs and styles apparent in the products of both Mediterranean and European crafts-workers as resulting from a common pool of shared ideas and themes that were circulating throughout Eurasia. Taking this broader view also helps us to understand why and how the new types of design and ways of seeing developed in temperate Europe at just this time.
At the time when the new style developed in Europe, during the fifth century BC, curvilinear patterns—S-curves, spirals, formlines, and stylized, sometimes hybrid animals—can be found across much of temperate Eurasia. They are by no means limited to the Mediterranean basin and Europe. A few examples selected from a wide range of available objects will serve to make the point. A bronze belt buckle from Aul Tseia in the Causasus, dated between the seventh and fifth centuries BC, is decorated with an animal composed of S-curves, spirals, and formlines. A gold pectoral from Arzan in Tuva, southern Siberia, dated to the seventh century BC, is decorated with spirals and formlines. At Vani in the Republic of Georgia, mid-fifth-century-BC gold ornaments bear floral motifs, especially palmettes and blossoms, very like those that are found in Early La Tène art of the Rhineland. Other gold ornaments from the site bear striking resemblances in form and technique to gold jewelry from Grave 1 at the Glauberg. As far away as China, bronze figurines strikingly similar to those in temperate Europe occur on bronze vessels, as for example on a vessel from Nanshangen, Ningcheng that dates to the eighth or seventh century BC. A gold tiger fitting from Weijiaya, Chencang District, Baoji City, dating to the Warring States Period (475–221 BC), has decorative spirals on its haunches very much like many of the animals found in Early La Tène contexts—the dogs on the rim of the Basse-Yutz flagons and the hybrid creature on the lid of the jug in Grave 2 at the Glauberg, for example. In the region of Xinjiang in western China, ornamental objects from a number of sites bear spirals and S-curves very like those on Early La Tène figurines in Europe. A wooden box from a grave at Zagunluk dating to the eighth century BC has on its side a relief carving of a wolf with spirals on its haunches remarkably like those on figurines from Basse-Yutz and the Glauberg. Several sheet-gold objects from grave 30 at Alagou dating to the fifth or fourth century BC show similar spirals on the bodies of animals, in this case animals identified as tigers. From the same grave is a sheet-gold representation of a lion, the entire figure in the shape of an S-curve.
Gold bracelets from Pasargadae in Iran show S-curves and spirals, while gold bracelets in the Oxus Treasure show both high relief and hybrid animal forms reminiscent of those on Early La Tène gold rings.
Animal figurines that bear similarities to sixth- and early fifth-century examples from temperate Europe include a bronze horse from Gordion in Turkey, a bronze horse-and-rider figure from the northern Caucasus dating between the ninth and seventh centuries BC, and stags dating to the sixth or fifth centuries BC from Inner Mongolia (China) and from Mongolia. These are just a small number of examples to illustrate the point that bronze figurines of animals very similar in basic character to those of temperate Europe were made and used at the same time in many different regions of Eurasia, always with local variations in specific visual features.
Humans and animals represented in horizontal rows in friezes, as in the Situla Art of the eastern and southeastern Alpine region of Europe and on the scabbard from Grave 994 at Hallstatt, occur in remarkably similar form in Georgia in the Caucasus. Correspondences in detail are striking, with horseback riders, stags, birds, and hunters represented in both sets.
Another strong indicator of contact and interactions across Eurasia during the Early Iron Age is the distribution of bronze mirrors. They become common in burial contexts, as at Reinheim and Hochheim, at about the same date—the fifth century BC—as temperate European modes of visualization underwent the many changes that we have outlined. And it was at approximately this same time that mirrors came into fashion in the Scythian regions of Eastern Europe and Western Asia, and further east in China and all the way to Japan.
I am not suggesting a direct connection between any of these individual objects from Asia and those of Early La Tène Europe. But the similarities in style, motif, and execution are striking, as is the fact that the practice of making and using mirrors began in so many far-flung areas within the same period. Since these developments are all roughly contemporaneous, it is fair to say that a whole package of interrelated decorative elements was shared across Eurasia during the fifth century BC, from Iberia in the west to China in the east.
Rather than seeing Greek and Etruscan arts as the sources for the new elements and combinations in temperate Europe, we should consider Greece and Italy as regions that shared in a much larger, pan-Eurasian development of motifs, styles, and decorative elements during this time, with communities in some regions emphasizing certain features of the package, while other communities emphasized others.
The model that derives “Early Celtic Art” from Greek and Etruscan sources (with possible influences from Scythian and Persian regions) belongs to an earlier era in research history, before investigators appreciated the extent of contacts, interactions, and influences over great distances that already existed by the Bronze Age. Now that archaeologists have investigated regions of Western and Central Asia much more extensively than before, and now that results of excavations in China and neighboring regions are becoming more available in the West, is it becoming ever clearer that there were long-distance contacts across Eurasia from at least the beginning of the Bronze Age, and also that these contacts had very real effects in introducing peoples all along the routes to new visual styles, motifs, and ideas. Sometimes people responded to the new ideas, sometimes they did not. The outcome of experiences with new themes and ideas depended upon specific circumstances at any given time.
In past discussions, the question of the origins of the Early La Tène style has been seen as related to the material culture of the elites within European society. Many of the most striking objects in the new style were of gold and were recovered in richly equipped burials, as at Reinheim, the Glauberg, and Weiskirchen. Thus, much of the discussion has revolved around the notion that the elites were commissioning items in the new style in the context of social competition and other elite concerns.
This viewpoint also requires rethinking. As more of the imported items are being recovered archaeologically, an ever-larger proportion of them are seen to derive from non-elite contexts—from what appear to be typical settlements and not-particularly-rich burials. It seems that early objects in the new style were much more widely distributed across society than was at first believed. As there is a trend today to see burials as community representations rather than as statements about the deceased, objects such as the ornate gold-ring jewelry and fibulae from these burials are increasingly being understood as belonging to community groups rather than to individuals. With this shift in our orientation, it becomes much easier to understand the new style as one part of a large-scale change in ways of seeing than as the prerogative of a narrow elite.
Results of recent research show that interaction between peoples across sometimes great distances was much more extensive in the past than most interpretations have suggested. During the Bronze Age, there is evidence of contacts between the central regions of Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, as well as between communities of western and eastern Asia. Throughout the Early Iron Age, from the eighth century to the fifth century BC, raw materials such as elephant ivory and coral, as well as finished goods including silk, textile dyes, Greek bronze vessels, and Etruscan figurines attest to goods reaching temperate Europe from distant lands.
For the latter part of the Early Iron Age and from the Middle Iron Age, a variety of different mechanisms are likely to have been involved in these interactions, which brought with them not only goods but also ideas from other regions. Trade, in the sense of an exchange of goods, was surely involved. From Greek texts, we learn of the need in Greek cities for a wide range of things that were available in or via temperate Europe, including furs, pitch and tar, honey, timber, amber from the Baltic Sea shores, and perhaps grain, preserved meat, metals, and other substances as well. Diplomatic relations between elites in temperate Europe and societies of the Mediterranean basin also played a part. The Vix krater most likely arrived as a diplomatic gift of some kind, as the nature of the object and a passage in Herodotus suggest. Other unusual imports, such as the cauldron in the Hochdorf grave and the furniture in the Grafenbühl burial, are also likely to have changed hands in the context of political relationships.
Especially during the latter part of the fifth and start of the fourth century BC, movements of peoples brought Europeans into contact with others. The evidence, both textual and archaeological, for the migration of peoples from temperate Europe into Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor during the fourth century BC is the subject of much debate, but whether we understand the evidence as indicating large-scale migrations of populations or movements of small bands of people, these movements in any case involved interaction between peoples who had inhabited different parts of Europe and Western Asia. David Anthony has shown that migratory movements are ordinarily accompanied by return migrations, as people very often move back to the place from which they originally came. The archaeological evidence in Italy during the fourth and third centuries BC indicates that groups in northern Italy maintained regular relations with regions north of the Alps in eastern France and Germany.
The service of mercenaries from temperate Europe in armies in Greece and other lands of the eastern Mediterranean is well documented in Greek textual sources during the fourth and third centuries BC. Archaeological evidence seems to support the textual sources to some extent, but it is more complex and ambiguous.
Thus from the sixth through the third century BC, a series of mechanisms were in operation that brought together people from temperate Europe and the Mediterranean basin. Whether Europeans went farther east and south is not clear from the available evidence. Elephant ivory and silk may well have come into Europe via trade centers in the Mediterranean, but there is no reason why Europeans could not have reached Africa and Central, Southern, and Eastern Asia. In any case, it is clear from the evidence in Europe during the fifth and succeeding centuries that Europeans were open to new materials, objects, and visual designs coming from distant lands.
Given that Europeans, as well as peoples in many parts of Asia, experienced a great widening of interactions with other regions during the sixth and fifth centuries BC that exposed many of them to new sights and ideas, we might ask what it was that made them internalize those experiences in such a way that a whole new style of ornament, and way of looking at the world, emerged. I want to suggest three main ways of approaching this question.
First, the adoption and intensive application of S-curves, spirals, and animal ornament was a way of expressing, through material culture, new feelings of cosmopolitanism, of belonging to a larger world of which Europeans were becoming increasingly aware through the mechanisms discussed above. By adopting and integrating into their own pottery, fibulae, scabbards, and other objects motifs that were common in parts of the Mediterranean basin, Western Asia, and elsewhere in the wider world, they could feel that they belonged to this vast commonality. This feeling may explain why we find floral ornamental motifs over such great expanses of space—from central France to the Caucasus, for example.
Second, while borrowing design elements and ideas from beyond their own regions, they at the same time transformed them and made them distinctively European. Though S-curves and spirals were shared by peoples from Iran to western France, the peoples of each region used them somewhat differently. This part of my argument does not contradict the first, though it may seem to. On the one hand, Europeans wanted to share in the larger style; but at the same time, they wanted also to mark themselves as distinct. To this end, they applied the style in a manner uniquely characteristic of their part in the world. The addition of the gold foil palmettes to the Kleinaspergle cups is a striking example of this process. We should also note that none of the other design traditions that shared the S-curve, the spiral, the floral ornament, or the animal style created hybrid animals in the way that the peoples of temperate Europe did. That was a distinctive visual feature of the region.
Third, the phatic character of much of Early La Tène ornament is one of its most distinctive features. As I have argued above, much of the design of fifth-century-BC fibulae, rings, scabbards, and other objects was executed in such a way as to attract notice, much more so than objects made earlier or later. Craftsworkers motivated by this goal incorporated in their work many of the attention-catching devices described in Chapter 2. We need to explain why it should have been so important at this particular time to create objects whose first purpose was to demand attention.
The answer lies in the particular historical situation of the time. The broadening horizons of Europeans, elite and otherwise, during the late sixth and fifth centuries BC created a frame of mind different from those of earlier times. With the possibilities opened up by migrations and other kinds of travel, both regional and long-distance, social and political structures in temperate Europe became less rigid, more open to change. In this dynamic context, new elites could emerge through competition for influence and power. The new styles of decoration that were applied to fibulae, scabbards, and other objects worn by individuals were designed in large part to serve in this competition, by exploiting the attention-getting devices discussed above in Chapter 2.
The extensive new use of animal subjects, both in three dimensions on fibulae and rings and in two dimensions on pottery and, especially, on scabbards, can be also understood in this context of rivalry. Lotte Hedeager has argued that the animal representations on early medieval fibulae were symbols or totems of specific groups competing for prominence in the power vacuum left by the collapse of the Roman Empire. I would suggest that in our earlier context of Middle Iron Age temperate Europe, the animals, including hybrids, served a similar symbolic function in the contention for authority in a newly expanding world. They may well have represented creatures from myth and thus have religious significance as well, as Mircea Eliade might argue. But it is no accident that the hybrid animals had a short span of use, usually no more than two or three generations. Their limited currency supports the idea that they were created for a specific historical purpose.
The situation of the Dornach Athena, placed in the pit with other apparent offerings, gives it a special resonance—it is not just an interesting foreign object, but an accepted and fully integrated element in the performance of local ritual, not a foreign intruder to be looked upon as exotic and (possibly) melted down. The style of the figurine certainly must have had visual impact on the people who handled and deposited it. But more important than this one striking object are the thousands of others that were transported from the shores of the Mediterranean Sea and beyond into temperate Europe during these two centuries.
Most abundant are ceramic amphorae that the societies of the Mediterranean world used as containers in which to transport wine, olive oil, and garum. The sixth- and fifth-century-BC trade in wine from the Mediterranean to the regions north of the Alps has already been mentioned (Chapter 5). The evidence of the ceramic amphorae indicates that this trade grew vastly larger in scale during the second and first centuries BC. Now it was not only the wine that was valued, but amphorae themselves, as visual objects, played special roles.
Matthieu Poux’s distribution map of Roman amphorae in Gaul provides a striking view into the huge quantities of these vessels that were transported into the interior of Gaul and ended up in different kinds of deposits during the second and first centuries BC. As we have seen in Chapter 5, Roman amphorae were visually very different from any objects that had circulated previously in temperate Europe. They are taller than most ceramic vessels of the region, and, as Poux has argued, they can be viewed as approximating the shape of a person, with narrow base, a broad “waist,” shoulders, handles as “arms,” and the rim as the “head.”
The ways that communities used these imported vessels tells us that they were much more important to them than simple containers. Poux shows that amphorae were carefully set into the enclosing ditches of many “sanctuary” sites of this period, in quantities and arrangements that seem very much to have been intentional, meant to be seen by people participating in activities in the enclosed spaces. Among the sites at which people arranged amphorae in ways to be visible to those within the enclosures are the French sites of Ribemont-sur-Ancre, Braine, Balloy, Fontenay-le-Comte, Corent, and Cleppé. While this practice is especially well documented in France, similar depositions of amphorae are known elsewhere as well, for example at the Viereckschanze at Nordheim in southwest Germany.
Some performances involving these imported objects were more complex than the simple business of arranging them in the frame of enclosures. Poux documents also the practice of “killing” amphorae—chopping off their “heads” with swords and depositing the parts.
Finally, Roman amphorae were frequently placed in wealthy burials of the final two centuries BC. If we think about this from the perspective of our lives in the twenty-first century, it seems strange. In the Roman world, ceramic amphorae were utilitarian transport containers—cheap vessels for shipping wine, olive oil, fish sauce, and other commodities. It would seem peculiar to us to place a cardboard box or an olive oil tin in a burial. The fact that amphorae were set into burials indicates that they had other, less pedestrian meanings for the people of temperate Europe. We find amphorae prominently arranged, often set against the wall of the burial chamber, as at Boiroux (Figure 11) and Fléré la-Rivière in France, at Clemency in Luxembourg, and at Welwyn Garden City north of London in Britain (Figure 36), for example.
All of these uses and practices indicate that imported ceramic amphorae had a significant visual presence in the second and first centuries BC. Not only was their size and shape different from all forms of local pottery, but their finish—their color and texture—also distinguished them. The shapes, colors, and textures of some local Late La Tène pottery is likely to have been influenced by the character of the Roman wine amphorae. Elegant tulip-shaped vessels with wide open mouths and gently curving sides are very similar in form to amphorae with their necks broken off (which were often put to use in that very state), and the formal similarity suggests that local potters borrowed the idea of the form from such altered amphorae. Some of the pottery in graves dating to the final century BC is of the same color as the Roman amphorae and has a similar surface finish. A connection seems likely, but more research will be required to confirm that the high value accorded imported amphorae stimulated local potters to borrow some of the features of those amphorae and incorporate them into their own wares.
Other objects from the Mediterranean world, and especially from Roman Italy, are also regularly recovered from settlement sites and from graves and other deposits. While not as abundant as the amphorae, they attest to the broadly based interactions that brought goods, and ideas, from the shores of the Mediterranean to communities in Late Iron Age Europe. Among the major categories are bronze jugs and pans, Campanian pottery, glass vessels, coins, fibulae, writing equipment, and medical tools. As noted above in regard to the Dornach Athena and Roman amphorae, imported objects were used, or consumed, in ways that integrated them into local beliefs and practices.
In the preceding chapters, I have drawn attention to second-century-BC changes in the visual characteristics of pottery, fibulae, scabbards, and other objects. These changes were contemporaneous with other major transformations that affected the visual world of Europeans, including the establishment of the oppida with their enormous walls and relatively dense concentrations of population, the decline in the practice of subsurface burial, and the adoption of the new mass technologies for the production of pottery, ornaments, and iron tools. All of these changes north of the Alps happened in concert with the commercial expansion of Rome and other centers during the second century BC (Figure 46).
Trade both within and beyond the Roman world expanded rapidly during the second century BC, with its direct effects being felt north of the Alps and elsewhere. The large-scale production in Italy of wine for export was a phenomenon of this century, made visible to us in the form of the ceramic amphorae found throughout temperate Europe and elsewhere. Rome’s political and military presence in southern Gaul expanded as well, resulting in a much strengthened Roman presence in this region, with major impact northward in the form of trade and the dissemination of the practices of writing and coinage.
FIGURE 46. Map showing some of the commercial centers of the second and first centuries BC in Eurasia and Africa, and sites near the Black Sea mentioned in the text.
As Steven Sidebotham points out, it has long been customary in studies of economies of this period to view the Mediterranean region as the dominant center. One consequence has been the tendency for European archaeologists to examine Late La Tène developments in terms of interactions with the Roman world, without looking further afield at the larger picture. As the results of recent archaeological studies in Africa and in Central, South, and East Asia are published, it is becoming increasingly clear that Rome and the Mediterranean basin were only parts of much larger systems of commerce that were expanding at this time.
At the end of the second century BC, Polybius (Histories I.3) wrote: “Previously, the doing of the world had been, so to say, dispersed, as they were held together by no unity of initiative, results, or locality; but ever since this date history has been an organic whole, and the affairs of Italy and Libya have been interlinked with those of Greece and Asia, all leading up to one end.” The archaeological evidence, as well as the historical records of the great empires from the Roman Empire in the west to Han China in the east, attest to this interconnectedness.
Excavations carried out in 1978 at Tillya-Tepe in Bactria (now northern Afghanistan), uncovered six richly outfitted burials. Among the thousands of objects in the graves were a gold coin of the Roman Emperor Tiberius, minted at Lyon, a gold coin of the Parthian king Mithradates the Second, a coin and an ivory comb from India, two bronze mirrors from China, gold clasps that show Greek and Central Asian features, gold plaques of a style deriving from Scythian and Sarmatian traditions, and two glass vessels from the Mediterranean world. The graves date to the years just before and after the birth of Christ. A similarly rich assemblage of objects from diverse places of origin was recovered in two sealed rooms at the site of Begram, also in Afghanistan. This find has been interpreted as either a stored treasure or a warehouse full of luxury trade goods, including objects from China, India, and the Roman world, as well as items from the surrounding region, most dating to around the middle of the first century AD. The extraordinary diversity of origins represented at these two sites attests to widespread and very active contacts across Eurasia.
Christopher Ehret speaks of a “Commercial Revolution” during the first millennium BC that affected much of Africa and Eurasia. He argues that during this millennium, a major change took place in the organization of long-distance trade in the Mediterranean region, the Near East, and Africa. The dynamic moved from systems that revolved around the desires of kings and other potentates for luxury goods to a merchant-based system in which individual merchants were concerned with maximizing their profits rather than serving a king. W. V. Harris supports this idea by noting that names identified on objects in ships’ cargoes of the time are those of individual merchants, not of government officials. This change, Ehret argues, led to expansion of commercial systems, greater competition between merchants, and the development of urban centers, the primary purpose of which was to foster trade.
In his study of the trade port of Berenike on the Red Sea, Sidebotham identifies five different commercial networks along which goods circulated in the latter part of the first millennium BC. One was from China overland across Central Asia to the Mediterranean. Lothar von Falkenhausen refers to this system as the “Silk Routes,” emphasizing the complexity and variability of the specific tracks that different caravans followed at different times. A second linked ports in both the Persian Gulf region and on the coast of the eastern Mediterranean Sea with the southern part of Arabia. A third was a sea route from South and East Asia to Arabia and Africa. A fourth route ran between sub-Saharan Africa in the south to the Mediterranean Sea in the north. And a fifth was the “Amber Route” across temperate Europe to the shores of the Baltic Sea. When we think about these different systems and look at the publications coming out with new data from the many different regions along these routes, we get a very different perspective on Roman trade in the Mediterranean.
Direct archaeological evidence for these far-flung commercial connections consists in Roman imports found in graves at Meroë in Sudan (ancient Nubia), at many locations throughout India, and further eastward in China.
The regularity and intensity of these commercial transactions across Eurasia and Africa is indicated by the existence of the Periplus Maris Erythraei, a guide for merchants traversing the seas between India and Africa. Lionel Casson places the date of this text, which has been a matter of some dispute, in middle of the first century AD. The archaeological evidence clearly indicates that the commercial conditions to which it attests had developed centuries earlier.
Beginning in the latter part of the third century BC, the visual mode in Europe underwent another gradual change. As we have seen in the preceding chapters, pottery was increasingly shaped on the fast-turning wheel, fibulae were produced serially rather than individually crafted, and scabbards tended to have less ornament. Iron smelting and forging proliferated, and a wide range of tools were being manufactured, the great majority of them serially produced with minimal ornament or elaboration. Coins were minted, and their numbers increased greatly in the latter half of the second and first centuries BC. The overall pattern was one of increased levels of manufacture of many different kinds of goods, and a sharp reduction in handcrafting and in decoration. Objects became much simpler in their visual aspects than they had been. The elements calculated to excite visual attraction that we have discussed above—the S-curve, the spiral, and texturing effects—were much less often applied to objects.
These fundamental changes in design and decoration can be understood in terms of basic changes in attitudes and desires on the part of Europeans during the final three centuries BC. Communities in temperate Europe were increasingly engaged in a “world system” of expanding commercial activity and the increasing consumption associated with it. Susanne Sievers describes some of the evidence for participation in the now extensive commercial systems derived from excavations at Manching, the most thoroughly explored oppidum site in Europe. Fibulae from all over the continent are represented, as are coins from all directions. Roman amphorae attest to the wine trade. Among trade goods shipped from Manching and other centers in Europe southward to the Mediterranean basin, slaves, iron implements, woolen products, pitch, and honey are mentioned. Several chains for the securing of humans have been recovered at the site, perhaps direct physical evidence of the slave trade. Similar evidence has been recovered at other oppida across Europe.
All of the evidence thus suggests that in this final period of the prehistoric Iron Age, communities were concerned more with producing goods for commerce, in order to participate in the consumption of goods available through trade, than with fashioning objects and setting arrangements for visual display. From the start of the sixth century BC on, the placing of Greek bronze vessels in graves and the outfitting of sword handles with gold and ivory ornaments marked the beginning of a phase during which the display of connections with the outside world was important. From the start of the fifth century BC, visual aspects of material culture no longer focused solely on the display of connections with the larger world so much as on demonstrating participation in that larger world. From the late third century BC, the emphasis turned increasingly to the efficient production of goods as the cost for participation in the growing “international” commercial system. The crafting of complex, individually fashioned and elaborately decorated objects was deemphasized.
Although at this same time the practice of subsurface burial and hence the arrangements of objects in funerary displays declined, a small number of graves were constructed and outfitted to display wealth in objects and participation in feasting practice. These included the chamber graves at Clemency in Luxembourg and Welwyn Garden City in Britain. These were not altogether unlike earlier burials such as Hochdorf and Vix, although the placement of objects in the graves in the two periods was distinctly different (Chapter 8). But now, at the end of the Iron Age, the objects placed in graves were no longer the intricately decorated items that appear in those earlier graves. At the very end of the Iron Age, in a final effort to create visually distinctive objects, a new “baroque” fashion was created with openwork ornament that can be seen on a few special fibulae and scabbard attachments.
The visual world of the Late Iron Age was strikingly similar to that of Rome at this time, marked by quantities of mass-produced goods and a dearth of individually crafted objects. The increasing use of writing, however limited in temperate Europe, was already having a powerful effect as its use in communicating information decreased the need for communication via complexly shaped and decorated objects.
It remains to draw together the connections between the changing visual nature of material culture, ceremonial practice displayed in burial and arranged deposits, and the mass consumption of the final century and a half BC. (I use “mass consumption” in a relative sense here. Compared to the production and use of objects before 200 BC, the quantities of pottery and iron manufactured and consumed after the middle of the second century BC were vast. But compared to the mass consumption of our modern industrial societies, the levels were quite modest.)
In the course of the second century BC, oppida—walled settlements larger, in many cases much larger, than any that had existed before—were established across the whole of the central regions of temperate Europe (Figure 47). These were the first settlements in that region that can arguably be designated “cities,” though there is much debate about whether or not they meet the criteria of urban centers. Population estimates are difficult to make because of the lack of substantial cemeteries associated with them, but an educated guess puts the population of the larger oppida at between three and five thousand. Excavations at many, such as Bibracte in France, Manching in Germany, Stradonice in Bohemia, and Staré Hradisko in Moravia, reveal densely built-up central areas with remains indicative of all of the functions of major central places in the landscape. These functions include the mass production of commodities such as pottery and iron tools and the on-site minting of coins. All of the substantially excavated oppida yield evidence for the interregional and intercontinental commerce noted above. Another indication of the urban and cosmopolitan character of these centers is the prevalence, for the first time in temperate Europe, of door locks and keys, suggesting that these communities were so large and complex that people no longer felt comfortable leaving their houses unsecured.
The visual character of objects changed as new and much larger communities formed, interregional and intercontinental interactions increased, and techniques of mass production replaced handcrafting. These changes took place in concert, and they reinforced one another.
Most pottery came to be produced on the potter’s wheel for the first time in temperate Europe. Forms became simpler than they had been, with a decline in the distinctive S-shaped profiles of the Middle Iron Age. In contrast to the storage jars of earlier periods, such as the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, storage jars now bore no added ornament, and nothing distinguished one from another. As I argue above, some of the new shapes and colors of the pottery may have been borrowed from the visual characteristics of Roman amphorae. The most important change from earlier periods is the sharp decline in special visual features that distinguish one vessel from another, such as fingertip impressions on rims or on ridges at the shoulders of vessels. The visual aspects of pottery that had frequently distinguished the products of one village from those of another disappeared, as pottery became a commodity rather than a craft product. There is little difference between the character of individual pieces produced at the various oppida or at the smaller settlements.
FIGURE 47. Map showing the locations of some of the oppida in temperate Europe.
With fibulae the situation is similar. The most significant change was the sharp decline in complex and unique objects with the advent of mass production. It was the need to produce fibulae in great quantities that dictated the kinds that were manufactured, and the result was a limited repertoire of types, with most of the fibulae in each category looking just like all the others.
With scabbards, too, the trend was toward much less decoration, and what decoration was applied came from a limited repertoire of themes. As with pottery and fibulae, visual distinctiveness was given up in favor of more efficient production.
Coins and imported amphorae were consonant with this trend. Within the limited range of coin types, every individual coin is like every other. Amphorae made to transport wine, oil, and other commodities, were of a single, undistinctive shape.
Thus, people who grew up in this world of mass-produced pottery, fibulae, and coins experienced a visual environment very different from that of their Bronze Age and earlier Iron Age predecessors. When they made and arranged objects themselves, they did so in the visual mode to which they became accustomed in these new circumstances.
This new and different visual world is also apparent in the bronze figurines of animals that are relatively common at oppidum sites of this period. The stylized figurines characteristic of Early La Tène were replaced for the most part by more realistic, and always more easily identifiable (for us) representations of animals, including especially bulls, horses, rams, and stags.
Changing patterns of visual perception and behavior are apparent not only in the character of objects, but also in ceremonial practices.
In much of temperate Europe, the practice of burying the dead declined at the same time that the oppida developed and European communities became more involved in the intercontinental commercial systems discussed above, that is during the second century BC. Between the middle Rhine and the English Channel and in southern Britain, the old practices of subsurface burial continued, but west of the upper Rhine, throughout southern Germany, Bohemia, Moravia, Austria, and in other lands to the east, there are none of the large cemeteries that we would expect at settlements as large as the oppida. Instead, other practices of disposing of the dead developed. The quantities of human bones that have been recovered on settlement surfaces (see above, Chapter 8) have been interpreted as the remains of some kind of ritual involving the bodies of the dead that replaced the former practice of burial in graves. As I have emphasized (Chapter 8), burying an individual in a grave, often with quantities of objects placed in the burial space, was a visual event of community-wide importance. The scattered nature of the finds of human bones at Late Iron Age settlements suggests that whatever ritual was practiced, it was not one that called special attention to the individual in the way that a grave did.
In those parts of Europe where burial was retained, we can distinguish significant changes in the associated ceremonies. In wealthy burials such as those at Mailleraye, Clemency, Welwyn Garden City, and Goeblingen-Nospelt, the floor space of the grave pit or chamber was filled with objects, in contrast to the practice in the earlier graves, such as those at Hochdorf and Vix. In those earlier instances, buried objects, including the corpse, were arranged around an open space in the center—an affordance—which must have played an important part in the visual performance of the ceremony of arranging the grave. Now, in this later period, that visual space was not left open, but was filled with objects. Perhaps in a visual world in which most pottery and personal ornaments were mass-produced commodities rather than individually crafted objects, participants did not feel the need for an open space that would afford them a close view of each object, since few objects had any special visual features that would be meaningful to viewers. The general character of the objects could be perceived even when they were packed together covering the entire floor space.
Another departure from earlier practice was the arranging of the largest and visually most obvious imports as part of the frame of the grave. At Clemency, the amphorae were placed in two corners of the burial chamber, two in one, eight in the other. At Welwyn Garden City, the five amphorae were arranged along the east wall of the burial chamber, and the bronze sieve-bowl and an imported plate were set on their rims to form part of the western edge. At Boiroux, the three amphorae were arranged in a row to frame the grave chamber at its lower end. The importance of this practice is that it shows the very significant role that those objects that represented the new cosmopolitanism played in the visual aspects of the burial ritual. In earlier contexts, such as Hochdorf, Vix, and Reinheim, the imported pottery, amphorae, and bronze vessels were never used to form part of the frame of the grave.
The character of deposits of valued objects also changed in the world of mass consumption at the end of the Iron Age. Whereas in earlier times, bronze weapons and vessels, fibulae, and iron weapons were the dominant categories of objects that were purposely deposited in water or in pits in the ground, now deposits were dominated by coins and iron tools. Both of these were commodities. Individual coins and individual iron tools were indistinguishable from others of the same type.
Finally, we see similar changes at the enclosed “ritual” sites that are characteristic of the Middle and Late Iron Age in France. At Middle Iron Age sites such as Gournay and Ribemont, weapons were the dominant category of object deposited in the ditches, especially swords and scabbards. At Late Iron Age sites, imported Roman amphorae dominated. At sites such as Braine and Lyon Verbe Incarné, there are ditches lined with amphorae, most of them fragmentary, arranged in such a way as to be visible from inside the enclosed space. The situation seems similar to that of the graves in which imported amphorae formed the frame. At these enclosure sites, the imports formed the very visible frame around the space created for the performance.
The formation of the oppida, the beginning of mass production, and a growing entanglement in the expanding commercial world of Eurasia and Africa—factors that were themselves closely interrelated—resulted in the development of a new kind of society in temperate Europe, a changing visual world, and of course a new way of seeing things. People became accustomed to seeing objects that looked very much like other objects. Things became less distinctive; they spoke less of where they were made, by whom they were made, and for whom they were made. According to extended mind theory, these changes in the character of the objects that people saw and used every day meant profound changes in how they saw and how they thought, in their experience and perception of the world in which they lived. The character of the decoration on a Middle Bronze Age storage jar provided visual reminders of your connections to your family and community, and perhaps to past social experiences of meals; and the details of the stylized representation of a figure on an Early La Tène fibula encoded kinship connections with individuals in neighboring communities. But what kind of information could be conveyed by a Late Iron Age wheelmade jar that looks exactly like hundreds of others in use in the settlement? If the Nauheim fibula that you are wearing looks just like those that five hundred other people are wearing, how much information does that fibula convey? These changes in the basic character of material culture during the final two centuries BC point to profound changes in visual signaling and visual experience that resulted from the gradual shift to a political economy that emphasized ever larger-scale production to satisfy both local needs and desires and to generate goods for exchange in expanding commercial networks. The visual properties of objects were now those of mass-produced goods, not of unique handcrafted items. This shift was consistent with a deemphasis in society on kinship and social relationships, for which the earlier individually designed objects were more important, and a growing emphasis on urban life and the manufacturing and trade systems that fostered it.
All of these changes took place in an overall context of increasing prosperity as the result of mass production and expanding commerce. The best evidence for a general increase in wealth in society is the widespread distribution of even the finest pottery—thin-walled painted jars and graphite-clay cooking pots—not only at the large population centers but also at small settlements. Coins are also recovered in substantial quantities at the smaller settlements, and the iron tools to which those communities had access were the same kinds of tools as those produced and used at the oppida.
The world of the final two centuries BC was a very different place economically, socially, and visually, from that of the Bronze and early Iron Ages.
