Academic literature on the topic 'Tartessian culture; Late Bronze; Early Iron Age'

Th is study is the third book of the author’s series dedicated to the Scythian-like cultures in China. Th e book investigates China materials from the Mohuchahan cemetery belonging to the Chawuhu culture in the period of 9th–8th centuries BC. Th is cemetery is one of the earliest sites found in the Eastern Scythian world. Th e representative data on funeral rite and goods used by the Chawuhu population that had lived a century earlier than anticipated was fi rst obtained at this site containing 235 burials. Th e relative chronology of four burial groups identifi ed in the cemetery with the goo

The Late Bronze Age Urnfield Period in Central Europe (BA D, Ha A/B, c.1300 to 800 BC) is characterized by the dominance of cremation as a burial rite. The simple appearance of urn burials give an impression of simplicity, but they are the endpoint of a chain of actions and practices that constitute the funerary ritual, many of which may not be simple at all, but include a large number of people and resources. The washing, dressing, and furnishing of the body as it is laid out prior to cremation leave no traces. The funerary pyre, as spectacular as it may have looked, smelled, and felt during the cremation, preserves only under exceptional circumstances. The rituals and feasts associated with selecting the cremated remains from the funerary pyre and placing them in a suitable organic container or a ceramic urn prior to their deposition do not leave much evidence. The large-scale spread of cremation during the Late Bronze Age has traditionally been explained by the movements of peoples (e.g. Kraft 1926; Childe 1950), or a change in religious beliefs (e.g. Alexander 1979). More recently, a change in how the human body is ontologically understood and how it has to be transformed after death is seen as the more likely underlying cause (Harris et al. 2013; Robb and Harris 2013; Sørensen and Rebay-Salisbury in prep.), although a simple and single reason is rarely the driver of such pan-European developments. This chapter will be concerned with another transition, the change from cremation back to inhumation, several hundred years later during the Early Iron Age, and investigates its background and causes. In Central Europe, cremation is given up as the solitary funerary rite, and a range of different options, including inhumations in burial mounds, bi-ritual cemeteries, and new forms of cremation graves emerge. This change happens at a different pace in the various areas of the Hallstatt Culture and adjacent areas, which will be surveyed here. Despite doubts about the validity of the term ‘Hallstatt Culture’ as a cultural entity (e.g. Müller-Scheeßel 2000), it remains a convenient shorthand to the Early Iron Age in Central Europe, c.800–450 BC, in eastern France, southern Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, and parts of northern Italy.

Hillforts are conventionally regarded as a phenomenon of the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age of temperate Europe, with some sites being constructed or reoccupied in the post-Roman Iron Age or Early Medieval period. In broad chronological terms, 1000 BC to AD 1000 covers the two millennia of the ‘long Iron Age’ in which hillforts are a major field monument. The concept of enclosure nevertheless has a much longer ancestry, from at least the earliest Neolithic. Some enclosed sites of the Neolithic and earlier Bronze Age in central Europe may be located on elevated ground or on promontories and may involve palisades or earthworks around their perimeter, just like Iron Age hillforts, so that the question arises whether these should not qualify as hillforts. To argue that their topographic location, or the scale or layout of enclosure, is not indicative of a primarily defensive purpose will not do, because some Iron Age hillforts seem to be compromised on these criteria. Nevertheless, by not entirely rational convention, hillforts as a regular class of field monuments are generally recognized from the Late Bronze Age, when their appearance in central and western Europe coincides with an intensification in the quantity and number of types of weaponry and defensive armour associated especially with the Urnfield culture. There are a number of hillfort sites in Britain where there is underlying evidence of Neolithic occupation, including occupation that was originally defined by enclosing works of earth or stone. There is no question of claiming continuity of occupation from Neolithic to Iron Age, but since the earlier earthworks would almost certainly still have been visible—at Maiden Castle, for instance, where the earliest Iron Age hillfort follows almost exactly the extent of the Neolithic enclosure—there is every reason to suppose that the existence of earthworks that would have been recognized as ancient, even if they were not formally venerated as places of ancestors, may have encouraged choice of these sites. An alternative interpretation would be simply to assume that the same advantages of location that commended themselves to Neolithic communities coincidentally satisfied equally the requirements of their Iron Age successors. But in that event the earlier monuments, like the Hambledon Hill long barrow or the Foel Trigarn cairns (Plate 14b), would hardly have been accorded the respect by later occupants that their condition indicates they were.

Several years of excavations at the site of Virje–Volarski Breg/Sušine uncovered the remains of a settlement from the Late Bronze and Late Iron Ages. The finds of a bronze pin and potsherds from the Late Bronze Age enabled the dating of the settlement to the early and late phases of the Urnfield culture, with the settlement at Volarski Breg being older than the one at Sušine. The excavations revealed parts of La Tène settlement infrastructure, which indicated that it was a prominent lowland settlement from the Middle and Late La Tène. They included the exceptional discovery of a pit with the remains of a loom. Both for the organization of the La Tène culture settlement and for its pottery finds, there are parallels in the known settlements from the middle Drava valley and the neighbouring areas of north-eastern Slovenia and south-western Hungary. These settlements are considered to have a rural character and to be the result of the life needs of small agricultural communities integrated in the landscape. The explored parts of the infrastructure of these settlements show that they were organized around single households. The intensive habitation of the middle Drava valley in the Late Bronze and Late Iron Ages is not at all surprising, since the area was crossed by an important communication route between the south-eastern Alpine region and the Danube region.

The use of copper was first established in the western Alps during the late fifth/ early fourth millennia BC. There were several metal-using groups in what is now modern Switzerland during the fourth millennium, including the Cortaillod and Pfyn cultures, followed in the third millennium BC by groups of the Saône-Rhône culture (Strahm 1994). The first direct evidence of copper production, however, only dates from the Late Bronze Age. This is based on the dating of smelting slag heaps in the valley of Oberhalbstein in the canton of Graubünden (Fasnacht 2004). These slags derive from the smelting of chalcopyrite ore derived from pillow lavas of the ophiolite geology in that area (Geiger 1984). The ability to smelt iron-rich copper ore involved a furnace technology that seems to have been first developed in the eastern Alps (see Chapter 7). No prehistoric mines are known; however, their existence may be inferred from the smelting of local ore at Late Bronze Age sites such as Savognin-Padnal and Marmorera-Stausees in the Oberhalbstein valley. Potential mining sites have been identified (see Schaer 2003), however, these have yet to be investigated in any detail. There are numerous deposits of copper mineralization in many parts of France. These occur in Brittany, the Pyrenees, the Corbières, on the margins of the Massif Central, the Maures, and the Alps. Research over the past 30 years has identified prehistoric copper mines in several of these areas. Further discoveries are possible in the difficult terrain of the Alps and Pyrenees, and also in areas where early copper mines have not been discovered, such as Brittany where deposits of steam tin and gold are also known. The oldest metal objects in France are recorded in the Paris Basin, where a small number of sheet copper beads date to the second half of the fourth millennium BC. These include the burial at Vignely (Seine-et-Marne) where a necklace of nine such beads was found with the burial of a five-year old child dated to 3499–3123 BC (Allard et al. 1998).

The impact of contact with the eastern Mediterranean was felt in very different ways within what we now call Italy. Greek culture seeped more slowly into the everyday life of the native peoples of Sicily – Sikans, Sikels and Elymians – than into the life of the peoples of Tuscany and Latium. In Sicily, both the Greeks and the Carthaginians kept themselves largely apart from the native population. Sardinia, rich in minerals, had for centuries been the seat of a lively civilization characterized by the stone towers known as nuraghi, of which many thousands still dot the island; they were surrounded by what seem to have been prosperous villages, firmly rooted in the rich agricultural resources of the island. They began to be built around 1400 BC, but new nuraghi were still being constructed well into the Iron Age. In the Mycenaean era, there had been some contact with the outside world, as eastern Mediterranean traders arrived in search of copper. The wealth of the native elite as far back as the second millennium BC can be measured from the tombs of Anghelu Ruju, near Alghero in north-western Sardinia; these are among the richest to have been unearthed in late Neolithic and early Bronze Age western Europe, and they indicate contact with Spain, southern France and the eastern Mediterranean. The Spanish influence can be traced in the bell beaker jars found at this site. Another Spanish connection was linguistic. The Sardinians left no written records, whether because they did not use writing or because they used friable materials that have failed to survive. But place-names, many in current use, provide suggestive evidence, as does the Sard language, a distinctive form of late vulgar Latin that incorporates a number of pre-Latin words within its many dialects. It appears that the nuraghic peoples spoke a language or languages related to the non-Indo-European language Basque. Thus a Sard word for a young lamb, bitti, is very similar to a Basque term for a young goat, bitin.