Iron Age Gaul (Archaeology) Research Papers (original) (raw)

This book forms the basis of a research project seeking
to revaluate the role of the Atlantic cultural domain
in the history of European Protohistoric societies. Its
role is often underestimated as the Atlantic domain has
always been considered with prejudice as being on the
periphery, or even as being backward in relation to
other European cultural entities (cf World system model
applied to Protohistory). I intend to take on this revaluation
based on material witnesses left by the elite of
Atlantic Gaul during the Late Bronze Age and the Early
Iron Age. In this context, the elite can be defined as the
dominant social group, conscious of its distinction and
with an objective of maintaining its prevalence. The
choice of studying the vestiges left by the elite illustrates
the need to sample plethoric information and the results
of the recent development of preventive archaeology in
a coherent manner. Besides the elite being an echo of
important historical evolution, they also generated
easily identifiable vestiges, which are better documented
than others. For the considered timescale, the vestiges
are mainly metallic objects from non funerary deposits,
as tombs are rare and high status settlements have yet
to be excavated.
The geographical area of our investigation, Atlantic
Gaul imposes itself for several reasons: the cultures are in
a pivotal situation within the framework of the Atlantic
cultural domain and therefore represent the said domain
in its entirety; the material is abundant and easily accessible,
but often underexploited or even unpublished
The unavoidable prologue to this research is to establish
a precise relative and absolute chronology for the
metalwork, founded on a detailed knowledge of morphotypology.
This entails not only knowing and situating
the evolution of Atlantic productions within the given
timescale, but above all to define the dynamics of each
element present in non funerary metal deposits. Before
advancing any further, a fundamental preoccupation
for the historian and the archaeologist is to evaluate how
characteristic the corpus is and to identify any fluctuations
in the data such as hiatuses or important contractions,
which could lead to misinterpretation. Until now
the metal deposits of Atlantic Gaul dating to the Late
Bronze Age and the beginning of the Early Iron Age
have been considered as implicitly forming a continuous
chronological sequence with a gradual rise in the
number and the size of deposits. The typo-chronological
history of metal objects would therefore be globally represented as a whole with the evident discontinuities being
attributed to functional, technical, morphological or
stylistic changes. These supposed fluctuations have given
rise to interpretations involving profound socio-economic
mutations or foreign influences mainly from central
Europe. These theories, rarely formulated as such, have
never been really discussed. The objective of this book is
to refine and to redefine the chronology of metal productions
observed for several decades in order to propose a
more pertinent interregional chronology, by comparing
a new typo-chronological system with other Atlantic
sequences from Andalusia to Scotland.
As the current relative chronology of the Late Bronze
Age and Early Iron Age is founded on complex layers
of research built up from the beginning of the 1960s,
I have firstly retraced the steps of this research in order
to underline that contrary to assertions made in many papers, the chronological systems developed by English
and German academics does not concord perfectly with
the chronology initiated in France by Jacques Briard.
This misunderstanding is particularly evident for the
beginning of the Late Bronze Age.
In order to refine the typo-chronology, I subsequently
relied on the most widespread of metal productions
and also the most sensitive to evolution. These include
weapons, in particular swords and their chapes, but spear
shafts and spearheads have also provided quality material.
The relative chronology of these Atlantic deposits
can be divided into four stages, themselves divided into
eight horizons, six for the Late Bronze Age and two for
the beginning of the Early Iron Age.
The two horizons (Saint-Just-en-Chaussée and
Chailloué) of the “Bronze final atlantique 1” (BF1a)
are difficult to define as the hoards are not very diversified
and are not well known, especially those for the
earliest horizon. Their correlation with the chronology
of British (Appleby and Penard horizons) and Ibero-
Atlantic (Isla de Cheta and Covaleda horizons) hoards
is possible, however parallels are difficult to establish
precisely with continental metalwork horizons.
The following horizons (Rédéné and Boutigny)
dating from the “Bronze final atlantique 2” (BFa2)
are not as problematic as they have been defined using
a larger range of metalwork productions. They can be
compared to the typo-chronological horizons defined by
the Nettleham and Wilburton hoards of the British Isles,
by the Huerta de Arriba and San Andrés de Hío hoards
of West Iberia and the Hallstatt A2 and Hallstatt B1
periods of Central Europe.
The “Bronze final atlantique 3” (BFa 3) is novel as
even though the older horizon of Longueville is not well
known in Atlantic Gaul, the following Vénat horizon
seems overrepresented. The Longueville horizon could
have been seen as artificial, if it wasn’t so well documented
elsewhere in the Atlantic domain with the Broadward
and Baiões hoards, being the most representative examples
from the British Isles and the Atlantic Iberian Peninsula.
Contrary to this, the Vénat horizon doesn’t seem as well
represented on the Iberian Peninsula (Carvalhal horizon)
or in the British Isles (excepting the Watford horizon in
the South East). These horizons are equivalent to the
continental Hallstatt B2 and B3 periods.
The first stage of the “1er âge du Fer atlantique »
(1er Fer a. 1) suffers from poor documentation as hoards
are rare and much less diversified. Little is known of
the older Verberie horizon in comparison to the better
documented Brandivy horizon. In this situation it
becomes difficult to establish parallels with the British
Isles (Ebberston and Llyn Fawr horizons) and notably
with the Iberian Peninsula. The diffusion of atlantic
swords and chapes in continental Europe does however
facilitate correlation with the Hallstatt C0 (Wehringen
horizon) and the Hallstatt C1-2.
With reliable radiocarbon dates relating to metal
objects from Atlantic Gaul being rare and in the absence
of dendrodates, I had no choice but to refer to the absolute
chronology from other regions -the British Isles and
Central Europe- to position my relative chronology
within the given timescale. The BFa 1 can thus be
approximately positioned between 1275 and 1125, the
BFa 2 between 1125 and 950, the BFa 3 between 950
and 800, the 1er Fer a. 1 between 800 and 625 BC.
In the light of this research, I undertook firstly to
map the metal hoards and then to statistically analyse
the documentation within this new chronological
framework. This entailed bringing together dispersed
documentation on metal hoards (comprising of at least
two objects, from a non funerary land context) documented
in Gaul since the 17th century. The 355 hoards
have provided 18779 elements, of which just over half
are preserved or illustrated.
We must of course take into consideration that the
metal hoards found in non-watery locations provide
only part of the evolutionary record of objects, not only
from one region to another but also on the scale of all of
Atlantic Gaul. The most significant hiatus corresponds to
the early BFa 3 (Longueville horizon) and to the early
1er Fer a. 1 (Verberie horizon). The early BFa 1 (Saint-
Just-en-Chaussée horizon) also indicates a contraction
in the documentation. The emphasis of these “phantom”
horizons in Gaul is based on the evolution of metal objects
in the Atlantic domain as a whole and would have been
impossible to define using only a quantitative approach
and the much used method of serializing coherent object
groups. These results highlight the desynchronization
of the process of how Atlantic hoards are constituted: a
chronological horizon extensively documented in Atlantic
Gaul can be rarely attested or even non-existent elsewhere
and vice-versa. The origin of the pulsations in the practise
of hoarding remains however a real problem that is not
down to just one simple cause or hypothesis.
To conclude, only observations on an international
scale can deliver the key to the chronology of the
Late Bronze Age and the beginning of the Early Iron
Age in the Atlantic domain and highlight the typochronological
horizons for which Atlantic Gaul has not
yet supplied sufficient metal hoards. It is essential to
take into consideration all of these aspects within the
perspective of a greater understanding of the dynamics
of how Atlantic elite material cultures were developed
and what they can cover from a historical aspect.