Dating Celtic Art: a Major Radiocarbon Dating Programme of Iron Age and Early Roman Metalwork in Britain

Abstract

This paper presents the first substantial set of radiocarbon determinations for the later Iron Age decorated metalwork known as Celtic art in Britain. Hitherto this material has been dated relatively on the basis of changes in decoration and form, which were then linked to materials with some absolute date. The latter process has tended to give relatively late dates, as most of the material with a firm date stems from the last century BC or after. This has meant that British Celtic art appears to be rather later than that on the Continent. Our results provide some tentative support for an earlier dating for at least some British material, more closely aligned to that on the Continent. Stead, building on earlier work, has developed a series of Stages or Styles for the decorations of Celtic art and we shall review these here. We also look at particular classes of artefacts and forms of deposition in the light of our new results. We conclude by drawing some contrasts between Bronze Age metalwork and that of Celtic art, reflecting on how far assumptions of a sequential series of changes, key to all forms of typology, are useful in the case of the latter.

The impact of Bayesian chronologies on the British Iron Age

“…BC (68 per cent probability). These results are similar to those obtained by Garrow et al (2009), who discuss the earlier dating indicated for some of the burials. A comparison of modelled probability density functions for the chariot burials is given in Figure 9.…”

“…BC (Nowakowski and Quinnell 2011, 141-5, 163-85), both earlier than was thought before the advent of radiocarbon dating. Our ongoing work in the Danebury area suggests that Bury Hill hillfort was occupied in the second rather than the first century BC, confirming the earlier dating for decorated horse and chariot equipment deposited in the interior indicated by the Celtic Art project (Garrow et al 2009). Lastly, at Conderton Camp the modelling provided an earlier than expected date for the building of the hillfort and strongly suggests that in places the relative order of structures suggested from the pottery may be incorrect (Thomas 2005, 237-45).…”

“…7) have, through stretching their chronology, been dated too late to fill the gap between the prototypes and the advent of new types in the first century BC (Jay et al 2012). Consequently, the study has opened up another gap in a different type of metalwork, corresponding to the earlier part of the hiatus identified by Garrow et al (2009) and broadly equating to La Tène D1 in . Most of the dates were obtained by Jay and Richards (2006) for a study of diet and did not seek to exploit the burial chains that exist at Wetwang; a study targeting these is likely to result in a significant further gain in precision.…”

“…Using forty-seven radiocarbon determinations on thirty-six contexts with metalwork, Garrow et al (2009) developed three Bayesian models (Fig. 6).…”

“…The 'Dating Celtic Art' project (Garrow et al 2009) was conceived to explore the chronology of the six Iron Age decorative metalwork styles recognized in Britain (Stages I-VI; see Stead 1996). A primary aim was to redress shortcomings identified with the chronological linking of the British metalwork to La Tène art in continental Europe, notably the lack in the insular sequence of securely dated objects from the fourth to second centuries BC.…”