Sciency Thoughts: Celts

Showing posts with label Celts. Show all posts

Wednesday, 1 November 2023

Pre-Roman British coin discovered in Hampshire, England.

A pre-Roman coin discovered by metal-detectorist Lewis Fudge in the Test Valley, Hampshire, England, in March 2023 was sold by auction house Spink on 28 September, for £20 400. The coin is made of gold and thought to date from between 50 BC and 30 BC, and bears the name of a little-known ruler called 'Esunertos'. The coin features a seven spoked wheel and three rows of interlocked, outward-facing crescents as well as the name Esunertos on one side, while on the other is what appears to be a stylised horse, with a mandible-like jaw and three tails, as well as another wheel.

A pre-Roman British coin sold by auction house Spink on 28 September 2023. Spink.

Little is known about Esunertos (or Iisuniirtos), other than that he is thought to have ruled an area west of the Thames in the second half of the first century BC. Three previous coins with the inscription have been found at Danebury Hill Fort, also in Hampshire, about 19 km to the northwest of Winchester, which may have served as a seat to this ruler. The name 'Esunertos' appears to mean 'mighty as Esos' or 'strength of Esos', and is known to have been used in Roman Britain and Gaul. The Celtic god Esos is thought to have been worshipped across what is now southern Britain, northern France, and western Germany. There are two known images of Esos, in both of which he is cutting branches from a tree with an axe in wetland scenes, suggesting that he was associated with this environment. The Roman poet Lucan claimed that Human sacrifices to Esos were tied to trees and flogged to death, but this may have been propaganda.

An image of the Celtic god Esos, from the 'Pilar of the Boatmen', a monumental Roman column erected in Lutetia (modern Paris) in the first century AD, and now in the collection of the Musée National du Moyen Age. Wikimedia Commons.

Wednesday, 26 July 2023

A La Tène period glassworks from central Moravia; the oldest glassworks in Europe north of the Alps.

The Amber Road was an ancient trade route connecting the Baltic to northen Italy via what is now Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Austria. The Němčice archaeological site, discovered in 2002, lies on this route between the ancient settlements of Roseldorf in Lower Austria and Nowa Cerekwia in Lower Silesia. Surface surveys at the site have yielded more than 2000 Celtic coins, as well as glass bracelets and beads, and bronze artefacts, including amulets and anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figurines associated with the La Tène culture (a widespread Celtic culture which appeared in Gaul around 500 BC and spread across northern Europe as far as England, Slovakia, central Italy, the Balkan Peninsula, and Ukraine. Subsequent excavations have discovered several sunken huts connected by corridors, three square features interpreted as sanctuaries, and site for the production of tools and materials.

In a paper published in the journal Antiquity on 29 June 2023, Ivan Čižmář of the Institute of Archaeological Heritage Brno, and Jana Čižmárová of the Moravian Museum, provide a description of the Central Agglomeration Nĕmčice nad Hanou: Interdisciplinary Research of a Key Site of the La Tène Period in Moravia Project, which aims to achieve a better understanding of this site, and its importance within Central Europe in the second and third centuries BC.

(A) Location of Nĕmčice in the Central Danube region; (B) aerial view of the site from the south-east. Ivan Čižmář in Čižmář & Čižmárová (2023).

Excavations at the Nĕmčice site in 2021 and 2022 appear to have progressed as far as is likely to be possible using non-destructive techniques, and future work should concentrate on analysis of the material collected.

The most important find at Nĕmčice is the glass workshop, the oldest known such site in Europe north of the Alps; the La Tène people were known for their glass working skills, but this is the first time that a La Tène glass workshop has been found this far north. The initial surface surveys suggested that there might be a glass workshop in the northern part of the Nĕmčice site, where numerous apparently rejected glass beads and part-finished glass items were found within an area about 40 m in diameter. This unusual concentration of this material had led archaeologists to suspect that glass was being manufactured at Nĕmčice, but until now direct evidence had been missing.

Evidence of glass production and secondary processing from Nĕmčice. Ivan Čižmář in Čižmář & Čižmárová (2023).

By targeting excavations on the centre of this area, and carrying out non-destructive analysis of glass items from the site, it has been possible to locate the site of the workshop, determine the methods being used, and compare the glass to other La Tène glassware from across Europe.

Two of the sunken hut structures at the site were investigated, yielding a number of La Tène ceramic items interpretted as coming from stage LT C2; a morphometric and qualitative analysis of these items should enable comparison to ceramics from Staré Hradisko, a La Tène site in Moravia which has produced LT C2-D1 ceramics dating from roughly 150-50 BC, enabling a better understanding of ceramic development over this time, and the establishment of a better ceramics based dating system for the La Tène culture, which could be applied to other sites.

Aerial photograph of the excavation in 2021, with sunken hut. Ivan Čižmář in Čižmář & Čižmárová (2023).

The gathering and study of environmental samples, such as bone, plant fragments, charcoal, and pollen, should also allow comparison to other La Tène sites in Moravia, with the aim of building up a dataset for La Tène sites in the region,

Further study of the site intends not just to understand the site as part of a broader European La Tène culture, but also as a space used by the people who lived there. The three large square structures found within the site were clearly important to these people. Similar large square enclosures have also been found at Roseldorf in Lower Austria, where they have been interpreted as being ritual spaces. If this interpretation if correct, then the Nĕmčice site was not just a centre of trade and manufacturing, but also a seat of power and ritual centre.

Aerial photograph of uncovered sanctuary. Ivan Čižmář in Čižmář & Čižmárová (2023).

Čižmář and Čižmárová envisage the Nĕmčice site as having been part of a well-organized trade network along the Amber Road. The existence of such a network shows that this part of Europe was undergoing somewhat of an economic boom during this period, probably driven at least in part by increasing contact with the prosperous states of the Mediterranean Basin, but also by indigenous Central European advances.