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Objects found in all these regions share common traits, and together form a culture. Hallstatt has become a “type site” and has given its name to a much wider culture that incorporates many other Celtic sites in what is now Austria, southern Germany, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia. Dating to 800 B.C., the Hallstatt graves provide detailed evidence of an Iron Age community whose economy was based on nearby salt mines. The burial sites were first discovered in 1846 by mining engineer Johann Georg Ramsauer, who went on to uncover over 900 burials (in total, the remains of 2,000 individuals have been found there). Historians are also drawn to the town to study an ancient cemetery that lies alongside it. Set against a backdrop of mountains plunging into a lake, the tiny town of Hallstatt in Austria is a major tourist attraction today. The objects found there served as key pieces with which scholars could start to put together the Celtic jigsaw. Scholars were able to identify these artefacts as Celtic, thanks to the excavation of a spectacular site in Austria a few years before.
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In the 1870s archaeologists were hugely excited to dig up items in northern Italy that were clearly Celtic in design and corroborated classical authors’ accounts of the Celts invading Italy from the north around 450 B.C. Renaissance French and English scholars became interested in establishing facts about the pre-Roman peoples that once inhabited their lands. conquest of Gaul, Julius Caesar wrote: “We call them Gauls, though in their own language they are called Celts.”Īlthough the Roman imperial period ended Celtic military power, its presence lingered on in Europe’s collective memory. Roman generals would later seek glory in subduing them: In his first-century B.C. Roman writers, such as Livy, drew on the works of earlier Greek authors to describe how hordes of Celts had poured down through the Alps into the Italian Peninsula in the fifth century B.C. In the fourth century B.C., Pytheas, a geographer from Massilia, chronicled a sea voyage up the Atlantic coast of Europe and described how the Celtic people could be found in Armorica (Brittany, in northwestern France).Īt first the Celts were noted for their trading habits, and later for their warlike nature.
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Trade up and down the Rhône Valley informed them of the presence of Celts in central Europe. Greek authors were aware of the scope of the Celtic world. The Celts of central Europe of this period are protohistoric: Aside from a few inscriptions, they did not fully develop a writing system, but modern historians have relied on accounts of them left by their neighbours, notably the Greeks and Romans. In this spirit, historians now regard Celtic culture not in terms of a unified people, but as a bundle of shared linguistic and cultural traits distributed among various Iron Age peoples who profoundly shaped pre-Roman Europe. Many historians, however, concur with Barry Cunliffe, emeritus professor of European archaeology at Oxford, who believes that the Celts can be understood as a culture with shared belief systems and a common language, versions of which are still spoken in western Europe, especially in Ireland and Scotland. A few historians argue that the term “Celt” is almost historically meaningless.