Collecting Iron Age art (original) (raw)

CELTIC ART DURING THE FIRST CENTURY BC 25 Volume II

Archaeolingua, 2001

This revised edition of my 2001 Celtic Art in Transition during the First Century BC has been rewritten to include a grammar of the artistic techniques used to construct the abstract imagery on coins and on repousse sheet metal from a limited set of basic shapes. The most important new piece incorporated into this study is the Chiemsee cauldron. Although found by Jens Essig with a metal detector, with the top covered by 30 cm of muck at the bottom of the Chiemsee in 2001, the cauldron has been locked away in vaults ever since its initial discovery. It has never been exhibited for public inspection. This revised edition of my 2001 study is the only work which has attempted to study the Chiemsee motifs in comparison to those on the Gundestrup cauldron as well as in comparison to other items of north Gaulish production. The similarities between the art style of the motifs in the Chiemsee cauldron and those in the Gundestrup cauldron are so blatant, either the Chiemsee cauldron was made by ancient craftsmen working in the same style as those who created the Gundestrup cauldron, or it is a copy created after the discovery of the Gundestrup cauldron in Denmark in 1891. If the Chiemsee cauldron is not a recent copy, both it and the Gundestrup cauldron must have been produced in the same region during the same period. If the Chiemsee cauldron is real, then a determination of the find spot of the Gundestrup cauldron will determine that of the Chiemsee cauldron and vice-versa. The research for the original 2001 edition of this work utilized a high-resolution scanner and Adobe Photoshop to generate plates with arrays of motif-images rendered to the same size, enabling one easily to examine and compare, side-by-side, pieces of similar style and technique, no matter what the original scale of the image. Thus, images of the small-scale motifs on coins could be magnified and set side-by-side with images of the reduced largescale motifs on sheet-metalwork items, such as phalerae and cauldrons. A comparison of the motifs studied in this fashion demonstrates that the decorative imagery on both eastern and western European metalwork during the first-century BC, apart from Greece and Rome, was driven by coin art. The metalwork items were the productions of metalsmiths who were at the same time mint masters. Since the tribal coinages are generally localized in their find distributions, these coins enable one to determine the region in which a given motif was utilized in the artistic repertory. In this revised edition a detailed analysis of the artistic technique behind the Chiemsee cauldron has been added to that of the Gundestrup cauldron. This revised study of the art of the Celtic cauldrons, in relation to each other as well as to that on coins, utilized around 50 high-resolution 80-megabyte digitalized images of the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons to examine the artists techniques in greater detail. Furthermore, in 2003-4 the Danish National Museum conducted a detailed study of the techniques used to construct the Gundestrup cauldron, which was published in Acta Archeologica: 76 (Nielsen et al: 2005) and is now available on academia.edu. The conclusions of this study included the important result the Gundestrup-cauldron silver came from two sources: one used to mint north Gaulish quinars and the other to mint Armorican Coriosolite staters, demonstrating that the Gundestrup cauldron was made from western, not eastern, sources of silver. The results of this Danish-National-Museum study have been incorporated into the present work as well as into my other more recent studies of the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons published in academia.edu. After a cursory inspection, the National Museum in Munich decided not to accept the Chiemsee cauldron, suspecting that it might have been made of dental gold during WW2. This suspicion was based upon a vague similarity in the gold and silver percentages in dental gold to the percentages of these metals in the cauldron. This horrifying suggestion finally culminated in the National Geographic documentary: The Chiemsee Cauldron and the Nazi Temple of Doom. After being at the center of a fraud trial in Switzerland, ending in a bankruptcy sale in 2012, the cauldron made its way to a new vault in Houston, Texas. Again, the cauldron became the centerpiece of a lawsuit. Because of all of this negative publicity, aside from an analysis of the composition of the Chiemsee-cauldron metals, I seem to be the only scholar who has attempted a serious examination of the motifs on the cauldron. The low levels of 7 ppm of either platinum or palladium determined in 2007 by Peter Northover, compared to a minimum of 5000 ppm of each metal for dental gold, proves the fallacy of this dental-gold surmise, removing a lot of the stigma associated with the cauldron. The 1.3 ppm lead in the cauldron also demonstrates that it cannot have been made from an amalgam of electrolytic gold (as Northover then suggested). Aside from the 70-80% gold, the cauldron also contains 20-25% silver. If the gold came from electrolytic gold, electrolytic silver would then be the purest source of silver which could have been added to create the amalgam. However, such an amalgam would still contain a minimum of at least 50 ppm lead, since electrolytic silver contains 250 ppm lead. Gold/silver nuggets from Cornwall show a similar composition to the Chiemsee cauldron amalgam in gold and silver as well as similar trace elements of lead and platinum, and they are the likely source for the metal used to construct the cauldron. The zinc, which Northover found in the solder to fasten the cauldron plates, could have come from cementation-produced brass, which was being created in north Gaul as early as 80 BC, twenty years before the probable construction-date of the Chiemsee cauldron. The presence of zinc in the solder cannot be used to deny the ancient origin of the cauldron. The ancient nature of the Chiemsee cauldron then rests upon an examination of the motifs portrayed on it. In 2019 the then-owner requested that I examine the Chiemsee cauldron. After an initial study of the photos and Northover’s metallurgical analysis of the cauldron, the late Ralph Rowlett and I concluded that the cauldron might indeed be late Iron Age in date. The likely genuine nature of the cauldron was confirmed by a careful inspection of the piece in Houston. Three years of research and writing about the cauldron have followed that initial inspection. It is my firm belief that there is no possibility whatsoever that the Chiemsee cauldron is fake. Ralph Rowlett and I presented our initial findings in a joint lecture to the Archaeological Institute of America in St Louis (“Tale of Two Kettles”, November 11, 2019). Earlier, I had presented these findings to the Celtic Congress in Bangor, Wales (July, 2019). In 1995 a mint-master metalsmith’s workshop was uncovered in Swabia. However, the finds were not published until 2011. The finds include a hammer for finishing small objects, files, chisels, eight iron piece-punches with different faces: a fine line, two sorts of dots, an oval, a fine curve and a broader curve. The find also included the iron dies for silver quinarii produced by these punches (Ziegaus 2011: 289-294). We now know the exact techniques used to produce the coin images. The analysis of Gaulish coins also has been revised to incorporate the conclusions of John Sills’s 2003 study Gaulish and Early British Gold Coinage as well as Philip de Jersey’s series published in academia.edu on the Câtillon-II hoard. This work, which includes a detailed analysis of the art style of the Chiemsee cauldron (as well as that of the Gundestrup and Rynkeby cauldrons), thus, completes three years of research and writing on all aspects of the Chiemsee cauldron. This work also completes fifty years of research and writing about all aspects of the Gundestrup cauldron. Other works on the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons published by me on academia.edu as a result of this research include: Celtic Gods who Control Rejuvenation, Rebirth, and the Island where the Sun Sets (2021a); The Armorican Origins of the Silver and Gold Celtic Cauldrons from Gundestrup and the Chiemsee (2021b); A History of the Chiemsee Cauldron (2021d), and The Myths Portrayed on the Chiemsee Cauldron (2022). A revised edition of my earlier work on the gods and myths portrayed on the Gundestrup cauldron is also available on academia.edu: The Gods of the Celts and the Indo-Europeans (1992-2019). One may also find on academia.edu all my works of the Coligny calendar. The original research, conducted in 1999-2000, begun after viewing, for comparison with western European items, the important pieces of Thracian silverwork housed in Romanian and Bulgarian museums. The research required the computer-generation of around 1500 four-megabyte images of the motifs under study to be projected onto 142 plates. The original study was made available in a joint publication of Archaeolingua and Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft. By combining plates from the original edition and eliminating those which were of lesser importance, I have limited the number of plates in this addition to 82. Where plates have been eliminated from the current edition, I have provided references to the earlier edition. By transforming the images for this addition from 300 dpi to 72 dpi, I was able to divide the work into four sections, each containing around twenty 450-kilobyte plates (with 10 to 12 comparable items per plate), keeping each section under 10 megabytes for ease of downloading.

CELTIC ART DURING THE FIRST CENTURY BC 25 Volume III

Archaeolingua, 2001

CELTIC ART DURING THE FIRST CENTURY BC 25 Volume IV

Archaeolingua, 2001

Antiquity: (Re)discovering the Gaulcross hoard

Modern excavations can sometimes provide surprising new insights on antiquarian finds of metalwork. The Pictish silver hoard from Gaulcross in northeastern Scotland provides an excellent example. Recent fieldwork, including metal-detecting, has clarified the size and composition of the hoard, and uncovered 100 new silver items, including coins, fragments of brooches and bracelets, ingots and parcels of cut, bent and broken silver known as Hacksilber. Comparisons with other hoards and with Pictish symbol stones illustrate the circumstances and date of deposition, the origin of the silver and the forms of society emerging in Scotland in the post-Roman period.

Portrayals on Celtic Coins and Cauldrons Created in Armorica, ICCS Utrecht 2023 November

Academia, 2023

Here is a revised version with the 18 color plates embedded in the text, so one can examine the plates while reading the description. In 2001 Jens Essig and Stefan Lohmann discovered deep in the muck at the bottom of the Chiemsee the 10.89-kilogram Chiemsee cauldron (Plates 1-2). Half a kilo heavier than the mask of Tutankhamun, it initially was seen as the greatest treasure ever to survive from ancient Europe, but soon it would be seen as the greatest treasure never. However, similarities between the Chiemsee cauldron and the Gundestrup cauldron are not, as was soon suggested, the result of the Chiemsee cauldron’s being a recent copy inspired by the Gundestrup cauldron. Rather, both are products of the same pre-Roman Armorican culture. Independent attributes on both cauldrons converge on northwest Gaul during the first century BC, which must be where these cauldrons were made. This convergence is unlikely to have been contrived by a twentieth-century forger. At the end of this talk I will reconstruct plot outlines of the myths current in the region defined by the Atlantic Iron Age culture [1], a region which includes Armorican Gaul, Ireland, and Wales. The primary bases for these reconstructions are the following: (one) the discovery (which I made fifty years ago [2]) that the narrative portrayals on the inner plates of the silver Gundestrup cauldron align with the major episodes of the seventh-century poetic versions of the Irish Táin bó Cuailgne; (two) the discovery (which I made four years ago) that the narrative portrayals on the outer plates of the gold Chiemsee cauldron align with major episodes of the ninth-century Irish Fled Bricrend; and (three) the discovery (also four years ago) that the Chiemsee inner plates align with important episodes of the eighth-to-eleventh-century poetic descriptions of the events of Tóruigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne (TDG), a romantic epic which survives in the Early Modern Irish of the sixteenth century. Since the imagery and art-style of the Gundestrup and Chiemsee cauldrons also align with Armorican coins datable to 75-55 BC, the cauldron-portrayals demonstrate that mythic versions of these later euhemerized tales were current in Armorica during the decades before Caesar’s conquest.

Arts and Crafts in Iron Age East Yorkshire: A holistic approach to pattern and purpose, c. 400BC-AD100

BAR Publishing, 2021

This volume presents a new approach to decorative practices in Iron Age Britain and beyond. It aims to collapse the historic distinction between art and craft during the period 400BC-AD100 by examining the purposeful nature of decoration on varied Iron Age objects, not just those traditionally considered art. A case study from East Yorkshire (UK), a region well known for its elaborate Iron Age metalwork, is presented. This study takes a holistic approach to the finds from a sample of 30 sites, comparing pattern and plainness on objects of a wide range of materials. The analysis focuses on the factors that led makers to decorate certain objects in certain ways and the uses of different patterns in different social contexts. A concentrated study on evidence for use-wear, damage, repair and modification then draws on primary research and uses assemblage theory to better understand the uses and functions of decorated objects and the ways these developed over time.

Variations on a theme? Examining the repetition of patterns on British Iron Age art

Toby Martin (ed.), Barbaric Splendour: The use of image before and after Rome, pp. 34-46, 2020

The subject of this chapter is the art of the British Iron Age, more commonly known as Celtic or early Celtic art (e.g. Megaw and Megaw 2001; Stead 1996). These objects were made from around 400 BC to AD 100, with the majority dating to the later Iron Age and the early Roman period (Garrow 2008: 30; Garrow et al. 2009). The art is characterised by curvilinear motifs often arranged into intricate designs. Depictions of people and animals are rare in Iron Age art but, where they do appear, they are highly stylised. Curvilinear motifs like those utilised in the Iron Age were also used to decorate some early medieval artefacts. It is difficult to assess the potential continuity of these designs because they are separated in time by the Roman period, but they were made in very different social contexts, with early medieval art distilling influences from the Germanic and classical worlds as well as Christianity (Goldberg 2015a; 2015b; Joy 2015: 43; Laing 2010). For example, items such as the Hilton of Cadboll crossslab combine curvilinear motifs with Christian imagery, demonstrating how curvilinear motifs with a possible Iron Age origin were repurposed to transmit a Christian message (Goldberg 2015b: 201).