La Tène culture
The La Tène culture was a European Iron Age culture. It developed and flourished during the late Iron Age, succeeding the early Iron Age Hallstatt culture without any definite cultural break, under considerable Mediterranean influence from the Greeks in pre-Roman Gaul, the Etruscans, and the Golasecca culture, but whose artistic style nevertheless did not depend on those Mediterranean influences.
La Tène culture's territorial extent corresponded to what is now France, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, England, Southern Germany, the Czech Republic, Northern Italy and Central Italy, Slovenia, Hungary and Liechtenstein, as well as adjacent parts of the Netherlands, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia, Transylvania, and Transcarpathia. The Celtiberians of western Iberia shared many aspects of the culture, though not generally the artistic style. To the north extended the contemporary Pre-Roman Iron Age of Northern Europe, including the Jastorf culture of Northern Germany and Denmark and all the way to Galatia in Asia Minor.
Centered on ancient Gaul, the culture became very widespread, and encompasses a wide variety of local differences. It is often distinguished from earlier and neighbouring cultures mainly by the La Tène style of Celtic art, characterized by curving "swirly" decoration, especially of metalwork.
It is named after the type site of La Tène on the north side of Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland, where thousands of objects had been deposited in the lake, as was discovered after the water level dropped in 1857.
In the popular understanding, La Tène describes the culture and art of the ancient Celts, a term that is firmly entrenched in the popular understanding, but it is considered controversial by modern scholarship.
Periodization
Extensive contacts through trade are recognized in foreign objects deposited in elite burials; stylistic influences on La Tène material culture can be recognized in Etruscan, Italic, Greek, Dacian and Scythian sources. Datable Greek pottery and analysis employing scientific techniques such as dendrochronology and thermoluminescence help provide date ranges for an absolute chronology at some La Tène sites.La Tène history was originally divided into "early", "middle" and "late" stages based on the typology of the metal finds, with the Roman occupation greatly disrupting the culture, although many elements remain in Gallo-Roman and Romano-British culture. A broad cultural unity was not paralleled by overarching social-political unifying structures, and the extent to which the material culture can be linguistically linked is debated. The art history of La Tène culture has various schemes of periodization.
The archaeological period is now mostly divided into four sub-periods, following Paul Reinecke.
| Tischler | Reinecke | Date |
| La Tène I | La Tène A | 450–380 BC |
| La Tène I | La Tène B | 380–250 BC |
| La Tène II | La Tène C | 250–150 BC |
| La Tène III | La Tène D | 150–1 BC |
History
The preceding final phase of the Hallstatt culture, HaD, c. 650-450 BC, was also widespread across Central Europe, and the transition over this area was gradual, being mainly detected through La Tène style elite artefacts, which first appear on the western edge of the old Hallstatt region.Though there is no agreement on the precise region in which La Tène culture first developed, there is a broad consensus that the centre of the culture lay on the northwest edges of Hallstatt culture, north of the Alps, within the region between in the West the valleys of the Marne and Moselle, and the part of the Rhineland nearby. In the east the western end of the old Hallstatt core area in modern Bavaria, the Czech Republic, Austria and Switzerland formed a somewhat separate "eastern style Province" in the early La Tène, joining with the western area in Alsace. In 1994 a prototypical ensemble of elite grave sites of the early 5th century BCE was excavated at Glauberg in Hesse, northeast of Frankfurt-am-Main, in a region that had formerly been considered peripheral to the La Tène sphere. The site at La Tène itself was therefore near the southern edge of the original "core" area.
The establishment of a Greek colony, soon very successful, at Massalia on the Mediterranean coast of France led to great trade with the Hallstatt areas up the Rhône and Saône river systems, and early La Tène elite burials like the Vix Grave in Burgundy contain imported luxury goods along with artifacts produced locally. Most areas were probably controlled by tribal chiefs living in hilltop forts, while the bulk of the population lived in small villages or farmsteads in the countryside.
By 500 BCE the Etruscans expanded to border Celts in north Italy, and trade across the Alps began to overhaul trade with the Greeks, and the Rhône route declined. Booming areas included the middle Rhine, with large iron ore deposits, the Marne and Champagne regions, and also Bohemia, although here trade with the Mediterranean area was much less important. Trading connections and wealth no doubt played a part in the origin of the La Tène style, though how large a part remains much discussed; specific Mediterranean-derived motifs are evident, but the new style does not depend on them.
Barry Cunliffe notes localization of La Tène culture during the 5th century BCE when there arose "two zones of power and innovation: a Marne – Moselle zone in the west with trading links to the Po Valley via the central Alpine passes and the Golasecca culture, and a Bohemian zone in the east with separate links to the Adriatic via the eastern Alpine routes and the Venetic culture".
From their homeland, La Tène culture expanded in the 4th century BCE to more of modern France, Germany, and Central Europe, and beyond to Hispania, northern and central Italy, the Balkans, and even as far as Asia Minor, in the course of several major migrations. La Tène style artefacts start to appear in Britain around the same time, and Ireland rather later. The style of "Insular La Tène" art is somewhat different and the artefacts are initially found in some parts of the islands but not others. Migratory movements seem at best only partly responsible for the diffusion of La Tène culture there, and perhaps other parts of Europe.
By about 400 BCE, the evidence for Mediterranean trade becomes sparse; this may be because the expanding Celtic populations began to migrate south and west, coming into violent conflict with the established populations, including the Etruscans and Romans. The settled life in much of the La Tène homelands also seems to have become much more unstable and prone to wars. In about 387 BCE, the Celts under Brennus defeated the Romans and then sacked Rome, establishing themselves as the most prominent threats to the Roman homeland, a status they would retain through a series of Roman-Gallic wars until Julius Caesar's final conquest of Gaul in 58–50 BCE. The Romans prevented the Celts from reaching very far south of Rome, but on the other side of the Adriatic Sea groups passed through the Balkans to reach Greece, where Delphi was attacked and sacked in 279 BCE, and Asia, where Galatia was established as a Celtic area of Anatolia. By this time, the La Tène style was spreading to the British Isles, though apparently without any significant movements in population.
After about 275 BCE, Roman expansion into the La Tène area began with the conquest of Gallia Cisalpina. The conquest of Gallia Celtica followed in 121 BCE and was complete with the Gallic Wars of the 50s BCE. Gaulish culture quickly assimilated to Roman culture, giving rise to the hybrid Gallo-Roman culture of Roman Gaul.
Ethnology
The bearers of the La Tène culture were the people known as Celts or Gauls to ancient ethnographers. Ancient Celtic culture had no written literature of its own, but rare examples of epigraphy in the Greek or Latin alphabets exist allowing the fragmentary reconstruction of Continental Celtic.Current knowledge of this cultural area is derived from three sources comprising archaeological evidence, Greek and Latin literary records, and ethnographical evidence suggesting some La Tène artistic and cultural survivals in traditionally Celtic regions of far western Europe. Some of the societies that are archaeologically identified with La Tène material culture were identified by Greek and Roman authors from the 5th century onwards as Keltoi and Galli. Herodotus correctly placed Keltoi at the source of the Ister/Danube, in the heartland of La Tène material culture: "The Ister flows right across Europe, rising in the country of the Celts".
Whether the usage of classical sources means that the whole of La Tène culture can be attributed to a unified Celtic people is difficult to assess; archaeologists have repeatedly concluded that language, material culture, and political affiliation do not necessarily run parallel. Frey notes that in the 5th century, "burial customs in the Celtic world were not uniform; rather, localised groups had their own beliefs, which, in consequence, also gave rise to distinct artistic expressions".
The archaeologist Miranda Aldhouse-Green describes the material culture of the La Tène period as "the floruit of Celtic civilisation". Ancient literary sources, archaeological evidence and language, all combine to present "a picture of a Celtic world which, in its heyday, stretched from Ireland and Spain in the west and Scotland in the north to Czechoslovakia in the east and northern Italy in the south, and even beyond Europe to Asia Minor."
Artefacts typical of the La Tène culture have been discovered in stray finds as far afield as Scandinavia, Northern Germany, Poland and in the Balkans. It is therefore common to also talk of the "La Tène period" in the context of those regions even though they were never part of the La Tène culture proper, but connected to its core area via trade.