The seventh, sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E. saw the development and full flowering of the Greek city state; Greek Orientalizing, Archaic and Classical art; and the writing of Greek poetry, history and philosophy. Naturally, with Greek authors as our primary sources, our modern view of this period is strongly Helleno-, particularly Athenocentric. Later Latin authors and archaeological research provide information on divergent developments during the same period in Northern Italy, Etruria and Southern Italy. It is archaeological evidence alone that reveals to us the concurrent developments in western and central Europe, where the late Hallstatt period was succeeded by the Early La Tène in the fifth century B.C.E. The classical authors are largely silent about their northern neighbors, the early Celts (Keltoi/Celtae) -- surviving literary reports were written at great temporal and spatial removes, and are far from objective. This dissertation thus concentrates on the primary material evidence, uncovered through excavation, for the great stylistic change that took place in fifth century Celtic art, the highly complex and distinctive cultures that produced it, and their relationships with the Mediterranean.
Traditional art-historical practice has been to designate perceived distinct divisions within the vast complex generally termed "Celtic" either by a characteristic type of artifact or burial, such as the Hallstatt B-period Urnenfelder (Urnfield) culture, or by an important site. Thus, the cemetery excavations at Hallstatt in Austria brought to light a distinctive sequence of objects with shared stylistic characteristics. A relative chronology was set up based on this cemetery's finds, and tombs found elsewhere with similar characteristics could then be associated with it, and considered to be products of a shared "Hallstatt" culture. This culture is distinguished by inhumation in wood-lined chambers, gold jewelry with amber and coral, swords, articles of bronze and iron, distinctive banqueting utensils, imports and four-wheeled wagons in the more opulent tumulus burials. These products in turn acquired the label of Hallstatt style on the basis of similarity of contexts and of visual characteristics. The enigmatic pile-built site of La Tène on Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland is the eponymous site for the succeeding period with its new sword, wagon and fibula types and change in settlement/tumulus distribution.
The sites of Hallstatt and La Tène were excavated in the mid-nineteenth century; as a result of centuries of veneration and revival of classical naturalism, the response to the new abstract, non-illusionistic Celtic finds has been ambivalent. On the one hand, Celtic style has been considered primitive, weird, symbolic, irrational, and to quote Paul Jacobsthal, "dark and uncanny -- far from the lovable humanity and the transparence of Greek art" (Jacobsthal 1944/1969, 163). Naturally enough, Celtic art has been marginalized in the study of ancient art; only since the great Venice exhibition "The Celts, the Origins of Europe" and its monumental catalog (Moscati et al. 1991) have the Celts become the object of popular interest.
On the other hand, the desire to claim cultural descent from the Greeks has led to the search for a classical core in early Celtic art. The fact that Greek imports were found in Celtic tombs formed the basis of various explanations for cultural structure and change in Iron Age Europe as a result of Greek cultural imperialism, or at least colonization, met with acculturation as the Celtic response (e.g., Kimmig 1983). Underlying this model of "Hellenization" is the tenacious, while largely unexamined, assumption that the European Iron Age was peripheral to and dependent on the archaic and classical Mediterranean. The archaeological evidence, however, reveals a very different picture of Iron Age Europe.
(II) Hellenization and the European Context.
