The Hallstatt culture of the eastern Alps, named for the Austrian salt-mining town whose cemeteries gave the period its name, was the first phase of European prehistory in which a recognizably Celtic society can be identified in the archaeological record. Flourishing from roughly 800 to 450 BCE, the Hallstatt world produced the salt trade that made its ruling elite rich, the contact with Greek and Etruscan Mediterranean cultures that transformed its material life, and the social hierarchy of warrior chiefs and dependent laborers that would shape Celtic political organization for the next thousand years. The transition from the Hallstatt to the La Tène culture around 450 BCE was not a clean break but a gradual evolution, and many of the patterns of life established in the Hallstatt period persisted into the classical Celtic world. To understand the origins and emergence of the Celts is in large part to understand the Hallstatt world, as part of the broader history of the Celtic civilization.
The Salt-Mining Communities
The foundation of Hallstatt wealth was salt. The Salzkammergut region of modern Austria, in which the town of Hallstatt lies, contains some of the richest salt deposits in Europe, and the mining of salt in the area goes back to the Neolithic. The Iron Age mines, of which the most famous is the prehistoric salt mine at Hallstatt itself, were worked by teams of miners who dug horizontal shafts into the mountainside, extracted the salt-bearing rock, and dissolved it in water to produce brine that was then evaporated to yield the finished salt. The mines were dangerous places, and the skeletons of many miners, with their characteristic deformities and tool marks, have been preserved in the dry conditions underground.
The wealth produced by the salt trade supported a remarkably elaborate society. The Hallstatt cemeteries contain thousands of burials, many of them accompanied by rich grave goods, and the variation in the quality of burial between the wealthiest and the poorest is striking. At the top of the social pyramid were the chiefs, whose graves contained weapons, feasting equipment, and imported Mediterranean luxuries. Below them were the warriors, craftsmen, and farmers, and at the bottom were the slaves and the dependent laborers who worked the mines. The social hierarchy of the Hallstatt world, with its sharp divisions between a wealthy aristocracy and a mass of commoners, would remain characteristic of Celtic society for centuries to come.
The Princely Burials of the Late Hallstatt
The high point of the Hallstatt period is the phase that archaeologists call Hallstatt C and D, from roughly 800 to 450 BCE, and especially the late Hallstatt D phase from about 600 to 450 BCE. This is the period of the great “princely burials,” enormous tumulus graves that contained the bodies of individuals buried with an astonishing display of wealth. The most famous of these burials include the Hochdorf princely grave in southwestern Germany, the Vix burial in Burgundy, the Heuneburg cemetery on the upper Danube, and the Magny-Lambert cemetery in the same region of France.
The Hochdorf burial, excavated in 1978-1979, is one of the best-preserved examples. The dead man was buried on a bronze couch decorated with scenes of warriors and chariots. Around him were placed nine finely decorated bronze drinking horns, a large bronze cauldron, a set of gold fittings for his belt and clothing, a sword with a decorated scabbard, and a wagon with four wheels, all covered by a great mound of stones some 60 meters in diameter. The grave has been dated to around 530 BCE, and the labor required to construct the mound and to produce the grave goods must have been enormous. The chief buried at Hochdorf was clearly a man of great power, and the social and economic system that produced him was already recognizably Celtic.
Trade with the Mediterranean
One of the most striking features of the late Hallstatt world is the extent of its trade with the Mediterranean. The Greek colony of Massalia, founded by Phocaean Greeks around 600 BCE on the site of modern Marseille, was the most important point of contact between the Hallstatt world and the Mediterranean, but Etruscan traders from central Italy were also active in the region. The Hallstatt world exported salt, iron, copper, tin, gold, amber, furs, leather, and skilled slaves, and it imported wine, olive oil, fine pottery, decorated bronze vessels, and a range of luxury goods.
The contact with the Mediterranean had a profound effect on Hallstatt art, which incorporated Mediterranean motifs and techniques into the older Central European decorative tradition, and on Hallstatt society, in which the possession of Mediterranean luxuries became a mark of aristocratic status. The aristocratic families of the late Hallstatt period used Mediterranean goods to display their wealth and to mark themselves off from the common people, and the feasts at which these goods were used became important occasions of political and religious life.
The Transition to La Tène
The transition from the Hallstatt to the La Tène culture, around 450 BCE, is one of the most studied problems in European archaeology. The traditional view was that the transition was a clean break, marked by the abandonment of the Hallstatt cemeteries and the rise of a new cultural horizon centered on the middle Rhine and the Swiss plateau. Modern scholarship has tended to qualify this view, recognizing that the transition was gradual, that many Hallstatt sites continued in use into the La Tène period, and that the cultural change was more a matter of emphasis than of wholesale replacement.
The most visible change in the transition is in the decorative art. The Hallstatt style, with its geometric and stylized animal motifs, gave way to the curvilinear, plant-inspired vocabulary of the La Tène style, with its flowing tendrils, palmettes, and abstract masks. The new style emerged first in the middle Rhine region, in the territory of the late Hallstatt elite, and spread rapidly from there to the rest of the Celtic world. The reasons for the change are debated, but they probably include the disruption of the Hallstatt salt trade, the political decline of the old Hallstatt elite, and the rise of new centers of power further west.
The Hallstatt World and Celtic Identity
The relationship between the Hallstatt culture and the Celts as a linguistic and ethnic group has been debated for over a century. Some nineteenth-century scholars, working in the tradition of the Celtic revival, identified the Hallstatt culture as the original homeland of the Celtic peoples, and traced the subsequent expansion of the Celts from there to the rest of Europe. More recent scholarship has tended to qualify this view, recognizing that the Hallstatt world was probably multilingual and that the Celtic-speaking population of central Europe coexisted with other Indo-European and possibly pre-Indo-European linguistic groups.
The place names of central Europe, especially the river names, preserve a layer of very old Indo-European vocabulary that is often identified as Celtic on the basis of its phonological features. The names of the major rivers of the Hallstatt heartland, including the Danube, the Rhine, the Main, the Inn, and the Mur, are usually considered to be of Celtic origin, suggesting that Celtic languages were spoken in the region long before the development of the La Tène style. The combination of linguistic and archaeological evidence suggests that the Hallstatt world was, in cultural and linguistic terms, already recognizably Celtic, even if the political and ethnic identities of its inhabitants were more varied than the term “Celtic” would suggest.
The Legacy of Hallstatt
The Hallstatt world left a deep mark on the later Celtic civilization. The social hierarchy of a wealthy warrior aristocracy ruling over a mass of dependent laborers, the central role of feasting and gift-giving in political life, the importance of long-distance trade, the incorporation of Mediterranean motifs into Celtic art, and the use of hilltop sites for ceremonial and political purposes are all features of the Hallstatt world that persisted into the La Tène period and beyond. The transition from Hallstatt to La Tène was not a rupture but a transformation, and the La Tène world that emerged around 450 BCE was in many ways a continuation of the Hallstatt world in a new form.
The Hallstatt cemeteries themselves, with their thousands of graves and their rich material record, remain one of the most important sources of evidence for the early Celtic world. The ongoing research at Hallstatt and at the many other Hallstatt sites of central Europe continues to refine our understanding of the period, and the questions raised by the Hallstatt evidence remain central to the archaeology of the early Celtic world.