La TÈNE funerary customs presenoldeb Course Web Site: Twitter: @celticUottawa 5/14/2015La TENE...

La TÈNE funerary customsLa TÈNE funerary customs

presenoldeb

Course Web Site:

www.courseweb.uottawa.ca/CLT3140

Twitter: @celticUottawa

04/18/23 La TENE Funerary Customs 1


Cemeteries are the key to the archaeology of the Celts and many of the greatest surviving LaTène treasures have come to us from graves and burial sites Burials and grave goods tell us a great deal about the Celts:Their belief in the immortality of the soul and progression to an afterlifeThe status of the deceased and his/her family or communityLavish burials advertise wealth and distinction on a grand scale.Vital information about the lives of the people and their trading and cultural contacts



The graves are all that remain of what must have been elaborate funeral ceremonies, clan gatherings, feasts, processions, and rites at the burial ground.

Even in areas with rich cemetery remains some intriguing anomalies exist. For example, infants and children are virtually absent or certainly underrepresented.

This may reflect that some classes of the community may have been excluded from formal burial.


Burial traditionsBurial traditions

The La Tène burial traditions continue earlier themes: extended east-west inhumation under barrows.

Grave goods generally include bronze fibulae (brooch, clasp), bracelets for women and iron short swords and spears for men.

Higher status graves (Reinheim, Germany) are set apart by gold jewellery, jet, amber, two-wheeled chariots, vessels for wine-drinking.


Burial traditionsBurial traditions

Cemeteries with rich burials are not associated with the known hill-forts.

Certain areas of France for instance have particular themes: the Champagne area had more chariots graves than elsewhere.

Women are buried with bronze torques. The earlier La Tene burials show greater

wealth in graves than later.


La TèNE funerary customsLa TèNE funerary customs

A 5th century vehicle grave from Châlons-sur-Marne, France


Waldalgesheim StyleWaldalgesheim Style04/18/23 La TENE Funerary Customs 7

Waldalgesheim StyleWaldalgesheim Style

Curvilinear motifsLate 4th to 3rd centuryFirst found in the Waldalgesheim grave

near Bonn, Germany


Burial traditions in early La TeneBurial traditions in early La Tene

The early La Tène in Champagne seems to have come to a sudden end. (Migration?)

The subsequent periods (200-100BC) revert to simpler inhumation cemeteries, with bodies extended with heads to the west, with weak social ranking, indicated by grave goods (personal ornaments and weapons).

Decapitated burials in both Hallstatt and La Tene.


Burial traditions Burial traditions

This hints at the complex cult of the decapitated head (tête coupée) and probable social and religious distinctions between members of the community.

Cremation appears in northern France c300BC and gradually spreads south and eastwards.

Throughout this period both square and rectangular barrows (burial mound) occur.



La Tene Mirrow


For drinkingIn the Otherworld

Feast


La Tene III swords from

graves

Burial traditions in later La TeneBurial traditions in later La Tene

The grave goods of such barrows has been widely accepted as evidence of a belief in a concrete Otherworld where the dead would need symbols of their life and status in this world.

Yet, the real complexity of funerary practices has been demonstrated in the discoveries at Gournay-sur-Aronde, in northern France.


GournayGournay

Gournay was a small ritual enclosure set within a large later iron age oppidum of the Bellovaci.

The earliest phase was at the end of the early la Tene period (La Tene I)- 4th century BC.

Gournay has provided an unprecedented wealth of information about Celtic ritual practises.


GournayGournay

The archaeology allows some sense of the belief system to be revealed.

This was a place of sacrifice and has revealed a cordon of sacrified animals (2000) around the central cultic area.

Some of the sacrifices are in fact human.The main archaeologist has stated that the

remains of the humans (outcasts, volunteers?) reveal belief in the long-standing cult of the head and ancestor cult.


Gournay and Ribemont-sur-AncreGournay and Ribemont-sur-Ancre

The retention of the bones seems to have been central to these cults.

The site in Ribemont is even more ghoulish. There human bones have been kept to construct a cultic space where certain rituals no doubt were held.

Deliberate dismemberment of hundreds of individuals.


Archaeology in FranceArchaeology in France

Evidently dynasties drew their political justification from a sense that power was wielded by permission of the Otherworld.

Chieftains derived their political and economic authority by being linked to the Otherworld and the gods through the medium of the burial rituals.


chieftainschieftains

Chiefs may therefore have held certain priestly authority in carrying out rituals on behalf of the larger society.

Some elements of a cult of the ancestors may also have been involved.


La Tene burials in BritainLa Tene burials in Britain

Apart from some very specific areas (Yorkshire, the SW and SE of Britain), evidence for burial by inhumation or cremation is excessively rare.

One way to explain this is to suggest that normally bodies were disposed of in a different way.

Excarnation (exposure of the body) and then inhumation in graves or pits.


La Tene burials in BritainLa Tene burials in Britain

This implies a liminal period when the spirit was thought of as lingering, before departing. This also allowed the use of bones as relics. Or cremation.

Cunliffe suggests that excarnation platforms may have existed. Also, similar kinds of ritual existed in the Neolithic and Bronze ages in Britain.

Some bones of chieftains might have been used in fertility rituals.


La Tene burials in Britain.La Tene burials in Britain.

Several other traditions seem to have flourished in Britain however:

The Yorkshire Arras TraditionThe Aylesford-Swarling CremationsThe Pit tradition of Central Southern

England


The Yorkshire Arras Tradition (1)The Yorkshire Arras Tradition (1)

Sometime during the 3rd or 4th century BC a tradition of burial appears on the Yorkshire wolds (high, open moorland). They are very similar to those found in the Champagne-Marne area of France. (The Parisii).

It consists of burial beneath a barrow and surrounded by a square quarry ditch. There are barrow cemeteries.

Some of the burials are very ‘rich’ in the sense that the body is found with a chariot.


Arras CultureArras Culture04/18/23 La TENE Funerary Customs 29

Yorkshire Arras traditionYorkshire Arras tradition

Most of the bodies are crouched, a few extended.

Marnian burials slightly differently buried their dead in an extended position. 80% are buried on their left side.

The majority have grave goods. Joints of pig meat accompany many of the graves.

The carts/chariots were usually dismantled for burial.


Yorkshire Arras TraditionYorkshire Arras Tradition

Variation occurs in the direction they were buried, whether crouched or extended.

Some metal work in the La Tene II style appear in graves similar to those in the Marne area of France, but strangely in later (not the earliest) graves.

Family heirlooms from France??


Aylesford-Swarling Cremations (2)Aylesford-Swarling Cremations (2)

What seems to have been a commonly used rite was introduced or adopted in Kent (SE Britain) and north of today’s London in the 1st century BC.

Could this have been introduced by Belgic migration from northern Gaul?

The ‘rite’ involves cremation and the collection of the remains for burial usually in a ceramic pot, or pit or wooden or metal bucket.


CremationsCremations

The graves are clustered in cemeteries.The largest known is in today’s St Alban’s

(close to Verulamium). 472 burials.Some grave goods.The pots follow the style found in northern

France (Champagne-Ardennes). Hence the idea of invasion.

The main known cemetery contains 3 to 1 males.


The Pit Tradition (3)The Pit Tradition (3)

The so-called ‘pit- tradition’ is found in central southern England.

This involved the deposition of either whole or partialbodies in the grain-storage pits on chalk-hills and river gravels.

Whether this represented the ‘normative’ (ie most common) rite known in that part of Britain is difficult to ascertain.

Males and females are well represented.


The Pit TraditionThe Pit Tradition

Most of the bodies were are placed on the left hand side in a crouched position.

Significant sites are: Danebury (Hampshire), Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire.

The pits were also used as ritual disposal.The interpretation of the burials in the pit

tradition is by no means easy.It represents only a minority of the adult

population. Mainly adults.



The lack of real grave goods does not seem to indicate an elite group.

One suggestion is that they represent the victims of human sacrifice. (see Caesar, Strabo, Lucan, Tacitus).

Another possibility is that they represent outcast members of society. This would correspond to the associations with disposal pits.



If the Pit Burials represent ‘abnormal’ members of the community, who were these outcasts?

If they were buried on the left side does this mean that burial on the right was the norm?

They faced the NE, does that mean that another direction was seen as the norm. Perhaps the SW?



Since these burials might have represented individuals denied the normal mortuary rite, they would be prevented from following the normal after-death course, thus maintaining the purity of a society’s Otherworld.



The Cult of the Head



Celticists have speculated that the missing heads at Ribemont-sur-Ancre were likely offered to Taranis, one of the three principal divinities in Gaul and Britain who, as mythologists would have it, was partial to severed heads.

Alternatively, the severed heads may have been kept as personal trophies.



TaranisLike some other deities, Taranis was propitiated with human sacrifice but unlike for example the Scythian Diana, the cult of Taranis was crueller than most. Victims could be burned alive in wooden vessels. Taranis is the embodiment of the natural force of thunder.



Some examples related to the Cult of the Head:

c.200 AD, the skull of a teenage boy was found in Britain. It had been de-fleshed, and obviously displayed on a post in a temple at St. Albans before being buried in a ritual pit. The stone structures at the Saluvian shrine of Roquepertuse shows an interesting blend of Greek and Gaulish symbolism. The uprights and lintels echo the Greek shrines at Massalia while the skull niches and carved vulture reflect the treatment of human remains among the southern Gauls.


La TèNE funerary customsLa TèNE funerary customs04/18/23 La TENE Funerary Customs 46


Celts wanted to appease their gods as well as appeal for good harvests, fortune, freedom from disease, and the redress of wrongs suffered. They procured these favours by a wide variety of ceremonies including deposition of votive offerings and sacrifice. But the precise purposes of human sacrifices are, at best, conjectural.



Other aspects of the Cult of the Head and sacrificing victims were:

Death by head injuries, garrotting, throat cutting Sometimes human victims were sacrificed for the purpose of divination, so that their entrails could be examined for signs and portents (more on this when we get to the Druids) The sacrifice of prisoners of war was quite common



Despite official prohibitions under Roman rule, human sacrifice and the head cult continued to be practiced publicly almost to the end of Roman rule.

Food for Thought: Were the remains found at Ribemont and Gournay the result of funerary practices or do they indicate ritual slaugher?



Dating back to the late Bronze Age, cauldrons were used both as sacred vessels and prestige items.

Strabo describes how prisoners of war were sacrified by having their throats cut over a cauldron; cauldrons have also been found in water offerings.



Cauldrons of Plenty is a recurring Celtic motif from both the perspectives of archaeological finds and the literary sources.The Gundestrup cauldron, one of the most spectacular of the LaTène artefacts was found in a peat bog in Denmark. Of unknown provenance, it was nevertheless certainly heavily influenced by LaTène art and culture.



The Gundestrup Cauldron



The Gundestrup Cauldron is a gilded, silver cauldron found dismantled on the surface of a peat bog near Gudestrup in northern Jutland in 1891. Some of the iconography is clearly Celtic however, stylisticallly the cauldron would appear to suggest a partially non-Celtic origin (Thracian).



What had survived of the cauldron was 5 internal plaques, 7 out of 8 square external plates, and a basal disc. The base plate depicts a bull, possibly in its death agonies, with a huntsman and two hounds, possibly Celtic of an early zoomorphic design



The Base Plate



Some of the clearly Celtic iconography includes the torc-wearing, cross-legged, antlered god with another twisted torc in his hand, sometimes identified as Cernunnos.

Cernunnos or the Horned One was a god of the Continental Celts; a lord of nature, animals, crops, and prosperity. He is usually portrayed as having the body of a man and the horns of a stag, in a squatting position wearning or carrying the torc.



Other Celtic depictions on the cauldron include warriors with jockey-cap helmets (the conical Celtic helmet) with crests of boars or birds of prey, animal-headed war trumpets, circular harness mounts and shield bosses of late LaTène types.



Inner plates of the Gundestrup cauldron



Inner plate of the Gundestrup cauldron

Outer plate of the Gundestrup cauldron



Although the god depicted appears to be Cernunnos, most attempts to identify the cross-legged god as well as the other male and female torc-wearing heads as specific Celtic deities can only ever be conjectural at best. Particularly so, as the cauldron also bears non-Celtic iconography.



There are other elements of the cauldron however that suggest a non-Celtic origin . The ivy-leaf fill-ins, punch-dotting and ridging of human clothing and animal pelts have Pontic overtones and is also reminiscent of the metal work of the Dacians and Thracians in Romania, Bulgaria and eastern Hungary. These were all Hellenistic styles developed in the 4th century BC.



Another aspect of the cauldron that suggests some non-Celtic input is the use of silver which was rarely used by the Celts except for coins but was commonly employed to the east of the Celtic zones (a possible exception would be the Picts but are they Celtic?)

Some have suggested that different plates were made by different hands of differing ethnic origins.



One of the identifying features of Celtic Human Sacrifice is overkill, such as the triple death at which Lindow Man met his demise.

The triple death is corroborated by early Celtic literature where the theme of the triple death occurs.


La TÈNE funerary customs presenoldeb Course Web Site: Twitter: @celticUottawa 5/14/2015La TENE...

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