La Tène Culture: The Art and Society of the Iron Age Celts

The La Tène culture is the later Iron Age culture of much of central and western Europe, lasting from about 450 BC until the Roman conquests of the first century BC. It takes its name from a site on Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland, where large numbers of weapons and ornaments were found in the nineteenth century. La Tène is closely linked with Celtic-speaking peoples and is famous for a flowing, curving art style that remains one of the great achievements of prehistoric Europe.

The site of La Tène

La Tène lies at the north-eastern end of Lake Neuchâtel, where the Thielle (Zihl) river leaves the lake. In 1857 the fisherman Hansli Kopp, searching for antiquities for the collector Colonel Friedrich Schwab, pulled iron swords and other objects from the shallow water.

Lake levels fell further after the Jura water correction, a large drainage project carried out between 1868 and 1891, exposing more of the site. The most systematic excavations were led by Paul Vouga from 1907 to 1917. The finds included well over a hundred swords, many of them still in their scabbards, along with spearheads, shield fittings, brooches, tools, wooden structures interpreted as bridges, and human and animal bones.

Why so much material ended up there is still discussed. Many archaeologists see the site as a place where weapons and other objects were deposited as offerings over a long period; others have argued for a destroyed bridge or a settlement struck by flooding.

Naming the later Iron Age

In 1872 the Swedish archaeologist Hans Hildebrand proposed dividing the European Iron Age into two phases, named after Hallstatt in Austria and La Tène in Switzerland. The scheme was widely adopted. In the 1880s Otto Tischler divided La Tène into early, middle and late stages, and later scholars such as Paul Reinecke refined the dating further.

The earlier Hallstatt culture had been centred on princely seats in eastern France and southern Germany. Around 450 BC new centres of wealth appeared further north, in the Marne region of France, the Moselle and the middle Rhine, where chariot burials and rich graves mark the beginning of La Tène.

La Tène art

La Tène art is the culture’s most recognisable feature. Craftsmen took plant motifs such as palmettes and lotus flowers from Greek and Etruscan art, along with animal and human heads from other sources, and transformed them into swirling, symmetrical and often ambiguous designs. A face can turn into a leaf, and a leaf into a spiral.

In his classic study Early Celtic Art (1944), Paul Jacobsthal defined several styles: an Early Style; the Waldalgesheim or Vegetal Style of the fourth century BC; the Plastic Style, with strongly three-dimensional ornament; and the Sword Style, engraved on scabbards. The decoration appears on bronze flagons, gold and bronze torcs (neck rings), helmets, shields and brooches.

In Britain and Ireland a distinctive Insular La Tène tradition continued into the Roman period and beyond. Objects such as the Battersea Shield are among its masterpieces.

Society, burial and religion

La Tène society was hierarchical. In the early period, the richest people were buried with two-wheeled chariots, weapons, gold ornaments and imported Greek or Etruscan drinking vessels, as in the Marne region of France and the Hunsrück-Eifel area of Germany. Later, in the third and second centuries BC, many communities buried their dead in flat cemeteries without mounds, and cremation became more common in some regions.

Religion is known partly from archaeology and partly from Greek and Roman writers, who mention druids as a priestly class in Gaul and Britain. Archaeologists have excavated sanctuaries such as Gournay-sur-Aronde and Ribemont-sur-Ancre in northern France, where weapons, animal bones and human remains were deposited in ritual enclosures. Water was another focus of offerings, which may explain the hoard at La Tène itself.

Most people were farmers. They grew wheat, barley and other crops, kept cattle, pigs and sheep, and lived in farmsteads and villages. Iron tools, rotary querns for grinding grain and wheel-thrown pottery spread during the period and helped to increase production.

Warriors, migrations and Rome

Greek and Roman writers describe the Celts, or Gauls, as formidable warriors, and La Tène graves often contain long iron swords, spears and shields. From around 400 BC groups crossed the Alps and settled in northern Italy. In about 390 or 387 BC a Gallic army defeated the Romans at the Allia and sacked Rome, an event described in the article on the Gallic sack of Rome.

Other groups moved east into the Danube basin and the Balkans. In 279 BC Celtic warriors attacked Delphi in Greece, and soon afterwards some crossed into Anatolia, where they became known as the Galatians. La Tène objects have been found from Spain to Ukraine, although not every region that adopted the style was necessarily settled by migrants.

Oppida, coins and trade

In the second and first centuries BC much of temperate Europe saw the rise of oppida, large fortified settlements often covering 100 hectares or more. Manching in Bavaria, Bibracte in Burgundy, Závist in Bohemia and the Heidengraben in south-west Germany are among the best known.

Oppida held workshops for iron, bronze, glass and pottery, and many minted coins, at first modelled on the gold staters of Philip II of Macedon. Amphorae show that large amounts of Italian wine were imported. Some historians describe these centres as the first towns north of the Alps.

The end of La Tène

The independent La Tène world came to an end with Roman expansion and with pressure from Germanic peoples to the north. Rome conquered southern Gaul in the 120s BC, and Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars between 58 and 50 BC brought the rest of Gaul under Roman control. Under Augustus the Alpine regions and the lands south of the Danube followed.

Many oppida were abandoned or turned into Roman towns. In Ireland and parts of Britain beyond Roman control, La Tène art continued to influence metalwork, and some of its spirals and curves later reappeared in early medieval Irish and British art.

Myths and facts

A common idea is that the Celts were a single nation with one language and one culture stretching across Europe. In reality La Tène was a shared art style and set of customs adopted by many different peoples, with strong regional differences. Another myth is that the Celts left no written records; in fact some inscriptions in Gaulish, Lepontic and Celtiberian survive, written in Greek, Latin, Etruscan-derived or Iberian scripts, although no long literary texts exist.

Timeline

• c. 450 BC: La Tène art and burial customs emerge in the Marne, Moselle and Rhine regions.
• c. 390 or 387 BC: Gauls defeat Rome at the Allia and sack the city.
• 279 BC: Celtic armies invade Greece and attack Delphi.
• c. 200-100 BC: Oppida spread across central and western Europe.
• 58-50 BC: Julius Caesar conquers Gaul.
• 1857: Swords are recovered from the lake at La Tène.
• 1872: Hans Hildebrand names the Hallstatt and La Tène periods.
• 1907-1917: Paul Vouga excavates La Tène systematically.

Why it matters

La Tène gives a material face to the peoples Greek and Roman authors called Celts and Gauls. Its art is among the most original in European history, and its oppida laid the groundwork for later towns. The culture’s legacy also shapes modern ideas of Celtic identity, even as archaeologists stress how varied and regional it really was.