Northernmost Evidence of Trade
In an exciting discovery that invites images of long trading caravans carrying massive bronze and fragile ceramic goods from the Mediterranean to the north of France, the caved-in burial tumulus mound of a fifth century Hallstatt Culture prince in Lavau, France, revealed his chariot, his elaborately decorated Etruscan-Greek bronze wine cauldron, his black figured oniochoe and his sheathed long war knife.
Archaeological sites like this, the largest and most northerly of its kind, reveal important information about communities, cultures and history. The Prince of Hallstatt tumulus reveals important information about the Iron Age Hallstatt Lavau community, their cultural lifestyle, the interactions between theirs and the Etruscan-Greek cultures, and about their historical importance to Iron Age trade.
What Was Found
To the delight of a team of archaeologists working since October 2014 for France’s Institut national de recherches archeologiques preventives, or Inrap, a central tumulus, or Celtic burial mound, dating to the Late Iron Age was found surrounded by ancient grave mounds dating to the Late Bronze Age and to the Early Iron Age. These more ancient burial sites were connected to the prince’s tumulus through a network of trenches. Celtic burials followed developmental patterns beginning with cremations and evolving to what archeologists call chariot burials because the warrior’s chariot is buried with him, and this joint site, with burials from Bronze through Iron Ages, chronicles these developments in one well preserved site.
In the center of the prince’s tumulus was found his chariot. Celts preferred four-wheeled chariots that may proffer a link to the earlier Corded Ware Culture and Yamnaya horsemen and wheeled vehicle inventors of the Pontic-Caspian steppe. Also at the center was found a massive bronze wine cauldron with a bucket-like bronze inset in the middle. The cauldron is decorated with four intricately wrought deity heads that top the four large carrying rings. Around its rim, or edge, as though peeking out from the depths of wine, are eight lioness heads of a smaller size than the four god’s heads.
In the wine cauldron was found a black-figure oenochoe pot. The black figures on deep ocher background mark this wine pot as ceramic ware made by either Etruscans or Greeks. It is an intricately made pot, with “meanderings” styling the top, the rim and foot of which are gilded with gold. The gently swelling curves of the full-shaped central section boasts the black-figure design of the Greek god Dionysus who is shown lounging under a vine, symbolic of wine and revelry. He is facing a lounging female, symbolic of pleasure. This deity banqueting iconography is a recurrent Greek theme. In a corner were found other prestigious items, but the warrior prince’s sword is particularly of great interest. His sword is a slim long dagger with sheath. In the Early Iron Age, Celts used iron broad swords in battle but, by the Late Iron Age, the fashion had switched to slim, long dagger-like iron blades with equally valued sheaths, and his is an important find.
Prince of Hallstatt Community
This site provides important information about the life of the community at Lavau in northwestern France, which the artifacts prove was not an isolated community. The elite leaders of the village had costly, sumptuously elegant imported goods. The other people of the village would have had access to imported goods as well, although of a lesser kind. This community had an admiration for cultures outside of their own and, perhaps more interestingly, they had peaceful relations with other cultures because of their shared interest in trade (sounds similar to today’s call for peaceful relations between disparate cultures through fair and free trade zones).
Lavau Celts’ Cultural Lifestyle
The area in which the prince’s tumulus was found provides significant information about their cultural lifestyle. Not only do they honor their dead in their burial of them, but they keep and demonstrate a continuing reverence for far distant, ancient elite ancestors. The fact that graves of honored warriors from the Bronze to the Iron Ages, marked by items of fashion such as broad sword and dagger, are all gathered in a common area and that the epochal layers are united by decorative trenches to the prince’s tumulus shows this continuing reverence and hints at the development of Celtic principality epoch during which princes rose up as ruling elites.
Interactions Between Different Cultures
During the Early Iron Age, Etruscan and Greek city-states experienced economic growth that included an expansion of extensive trading. The Greeks and the Etruscans, whose ceramics bore resemblances to that of the Greeks, both had commerce with northern Celtic groups trading ceramic and other crafted goods, like the black-figure oenochoe ceramic wine pot and the elaborately wrought wine cauldron. In trade, they took slaves and raw metals from mining iron, tin, silver, lead and gold and precious goods like amber, a gem valued by elite Etruscan and Greek women who wore amber jewelry for adornment.
The decorations found on the items in the price’s tumulus mark them distinctively as Etruscan and Greek. Again, note that the Etruscans, though an ancient culture that was thriving vigorously during what is known as the Greek Dark Ages, borrowed heavily from the Greeks as a consequence of their encounter in Italy after the Greeks reached their Golden Age that began around 800 BCE. The large, heavy bronze wine cauldron, more than three feet in diameter, with its eight lioness heads and four bronze ring handles honors the bearded Greek river deity Achelous.
The four deity heads topping the four carrying rings depict him with a long wavy tapered beard, thick horns, bull’s ears and a triple-terraced mustache flipped up at each of the three layers. The decided presence of deities from Etruscan and Greek cultures suggests reciprocally beneficial and courteous interactions and relationships between these different (and to some degree dominating or competing) cultures.
History of Iron Age Trade Routes and Celtic Principalities
European trade routes
During the Iron Age, during which the prince’s Hallstatt Celtic Culture was a dominant force, there was a robust trade that followed river and inter-fluvial routes (land routes between rivers) in Western Europe. The items in the prince’s tumulus attest to great wealth and luxury, so trade with Mediterranean Etruscan and Greek city-states, especially in Marseille, was profitable and lucrative on both sides of the trade.
The Hallstatt Culture of the Lavau area controlled the trade routes comprised of both river transport and inter-fluvial pathways between rivers in the Loire-Seine-Saône-Rhine-Danube inter-fluvial river zone. Evidence of extensive land pathways crossing the inter-fluvial zone indicate the robust nature of cooperative trade between Celts and the Etruscan and Greek city-states. The Etruscan-Greek goods honored with the prince at his burial attest to the prestige he accumulated through robust Iron Age European trade.
Celtic principalities phenomenon
The burial area is a complex of burials sites, dating from the Bronze to Late Iron Ages, encircled and demarcated, or delimited, by an exterior trench that protects the three epochs of burials. The most ancient burials are cremation tombs from the Late Bronze Age, c. 1300 to 800 BCE. To the interior of these are burial mounds, in which the individual is not cremated, dating from the Early Iron Age, c. 800 to 600 BCE. The Early Iron Age marks the beginning of the Celtic principalities phenomenon during the progress of which the community elite were replaced by community princes. Two in the burial mounds are a warrior and a woman, he with his iron broad sword and she with her heavy bronze bracelets. At the center of this complex of funerary sites lays the prince’s tumulus mound dating from the Late Iron Age, about 500 BCE. The ancient elite and princes of Hallstatt Lavau were honored by individual burial monuments, then untied in a common memorial monument by way of the interconnecting trenches. This suggests an historical continuity of reverence from age to age.
These trenches, close to 10 feet deep, were dug c. 500 BCE to group the Bronze Age cremation tombs and the Early Iron Age burial mounds with the Late Iron Age tumulus of the prince, thus creating one unified funerary monument. At the center of the monument, in a tumulus having a diameter of about 131 feet and covering an inner chamber with a diameter of more than 46 feet, lay the prince, his chariot, his wine cauldron, his long sheathed knife and his black-figure ceramic pot. The memorial monument ensemble, constructed over hundreds of years, provides a previously unglimpsed understanding of the development of the principalities phenomenon that began in the Early Iron Age among Celts in Western Europe.
