One of the most extraordinary snapshots of princely Celtic weaponry is that offered by the excavation report of the chariot burial of La Gorge Meillet, in the French department of Marne, discovered in 1876 (see Figure 4.2); it is partly the economical presentation of the illustrations, laying out, as they do, the results of a nineteenth-century excavation with a beguiling simplicity that readily allows the reader to reconstruct the panoply of the buried warrior (Fourdringier 1878). The grave pit, measuring 3.2 m by 2.4 m, had been dug into the chalk subsoil to a depth of some 1.7 m; the floor of the pit was stepped, with a lower portion with two deeper slots to receive the wheels of a chariot, and a rather higher ledge at one end, on which the
Figure 4.1 Gaulish chieftains, as evoked in nineteenth-century France.
Yoke and harness rested. The body of a warrior had been laid on the floor of the chariot with the legs on either side of the pole; a series of weapons had been laid ceremoniously to accompany the body, four spears with iron heads and butts, a long iron knife, and a magnificent bronze helmet. The clothing did not survive, apart from a bronze brooch and four bronze buttons decorated with rosettes, to which slight traces of a woven woollen garment still adhered. Nor did the organic parts of the chariot survive, but the iron tyres and the bronze axle bands and hub caps still remained to indicate that the diameter of the tyres was about i m and that they were set about 1.3 m apart. The horse harness comprised bronze bits and chains inlaid with coral. The burial was accompanied by joints of pork, fowl and eggs, as well as by a bronze wine flagon of Etruscan manufacture, the latter providing the dating evidence for the burial within the later fifth century BC. In the upper part of the filling of the grave pit a second burial had been inserted, that of a man accompanied by a sword. The principal burial suggests the armament of a warrior leader, the practical weapons of sword and spears as well as a resplendent bronze helmet, tall and pointed, but offering only limited protection to the head. The function of the helmet is for parade and display, to show that its bearer is a person apart. In shape and decoration, however, the helmet is part of a scattered group with examples in the Marne, Diirrnberg in the Austrian Alps, and in Slovakia; the decorative palmettes on the helmet from Berru (Marne) point to Italy as one source of inspiration (Schaaff 1973; 1988: 315; Megaw and Megaw 1989: 63-4; Duval 1989: 45-6, 51).
A burial comparable to that of La Gorge Meillet, excavated at Somme-Bionne in 1873, also illustrates the careful layout of objects round a chariot including a long sword in an engraved bronze scabbard and a red-figure Greek pottery cup dating to about 420 BC (Stead 1991a). Jacobsthal, in evoking the princely nature of such deposits, dubbed the burial that of Monsieur le Comte de Somme-Bionne. Such burials represent on the one hand the potential for reconstruction of a warrior fully armed - helmet, sword suspended from a chain at the waist, spears at the ready, as well as the two-wheel chariot, doubtless with wicker sides, and the richly decorated harness for the two horses; on the other hand such burials are found only in distinct groups and at discrete periods within the Celtic world. There are, for example, some 250 burials in the Champagne area of France which date to the La Tene period. Another distinct group has been found in the Rhineland with that from Bescheid Tumulus 6, for example, containing the two wheels from a dismantled vehicle, a sword with an anthropoid handle, a coral-decorated suspension chain, three spearheads, three arrowheads, a knife and a drinking horn with a gold mouthpiece (Haffner and Joachim 1984: 78, fig. 7).
In eastern Yorkshire there is another discrete group of burials with chariots, or less grandly, carts. Evaluation of the finds from the last century has been refined as further burials are revealed, largely in advance of gravel extraction (Stead 1984; 1991b: 58-61). In some cases the vehicle had been dismantled before deposition, whereas in others the vehicle was laid over the body. The Yorkshire burials seem to represent a distinctive religious tradition rather than being in every case the burial of a warrior, for there are few associated weapons. However, at Kirkburn, a burial with a two-wheel vehicle was accompanied by a shirt of mail, which may be reconstructed in a style that finds parallels elsewhere in Europe (Stead 1991b: 54-6).
ST -
Figure 4.1 La Gorge Meillet, Marne; cxcavaced in 1876. (Fourdringier 1878.)
The evidence from many excavations of chariot burials, coupled with that from depictions on coins and notably on a stele from Padua (Frey 1968; Harbison 1969), has allowed the reconstruction of Celtic chariots to be undertaken both as models and as full-size artefacts (e. g. Furger-Gunti 1991); the recent reconstruction by the Schweizerisches Landesmuseum incorporated longitudinal suspension, without which it would have been virtually impossible to throw a spear from a moving chariot with any accuracy.
World History
