Collecting Iron Age art (original) (raw)
Related papers
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
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 IV
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.
FORGOTTEN ARTIFACTS. CELTIC OBJECTS IN THE COLLECTIONS OF THE GHERLA HISTORY MUSEUM
Journal of Ancient History and Archaeology (JAHA), 2019
The present paper wants to bring to the attention of researchers, who have as subject of study the material remains of the Iron Age communities from Transylvania, some objects kept in the collections of the Gherla History Museum (Cluj County). Therefore, in the centre of this paper are three objects-a bent sword, a slashing knife and a horse bit-that were part of the museum's permanent exhibition, but they did not attract so far the attention of any researcher. In the present state of research, no details are known regarding the date, the exact location and the context of discovery. The Register of Inventory only records the fact that the pieces were discovered in the area of the city of Gherla. The biggest concern about these objects is whether they were discovered together or are coming from two or three different contexts.
Brit-art: Celtic Art in Roman Britain and on its Frontiers
In Celtic Art in Europe: Making Connections (eds) C. Gosden, S. Crawford & K. Ulmschneider, 315-324. Oxbow Books, Oxford., 2014
As is amply demonstrated in the Megaw’s extremely useful book Celtic Art, first published in 1989 and reprinted in 2001, designs recognisable as Iron Age or Celtic in character persist in Roman Britain, particularly in the north and the west where flourishing new regional art styles develop. Objects include horse-gear, as well as new varieties of other well-known Iron Age object types such as torcs. Recent surveys reveal that these objects are in fact more numerous than art made before the conquest (Gosden and Hill 2008, 2; Garrow et al. 2009). The influence of Rome can be seen especially in the use of enamels of multiple colours arranged in geometric patterns and brass, a Roman metal. However, although this paper is situated within a wider discourse of Romanisation, it is from the perspective not of how pre-Roman peoples became Roman but rather the role of art in the construction and renegotiation of identity. Building on recent research by Fraser Hunter (2006a; 2006b; 2008a; 2008b; 2010; 2012) and Mary Davis and Adam Gwilt (2008), which highlight regionality and diversity, it is argued that this art is not an historical fossil. Rather, through the making and wearing of these objects, people were actively working out how to live in the Roman world, or on its frontiers.
In J. Farley & F. Hunter (eds), Celts: art and identity, pp. 36-51. London: British Museum Press. To our eyes Celtic art can look strange, unnatural, yet entrancing. Its meanings are mostly lost to us, but we can appreciate its power and complexity, even if it seems to come from a different world. In fact there is no single Celtic art. Instead a range of different 'Celtic arts' may be observed over a period of around 1,500 years through the Iron Age, Roman and early medieval periods, their influence continuing to the present day.
History Scotland 15:2 (March/April 2015), 2015
This paper examines the work of the Victoria and Albert Museum's Circulation Department in the late 19th century, to explore the reasons behind a growth in the production of plaster casts of early medieval sculpture. The focus is collections created for display in Scotland in 1901, 1904 and 1905 at Glasgow, Dundee and Aberdeen. The paper is a popular version of an academic article published in the Journal of the History of Collections 27:1, available online since April 2014 (DOI:10.1093/jhc/fhu008).