LATE BRONZE AGE

The use of gold in the first cultures we specifically label ‘Celtic’, those of the princes of ‘Hallstatt’ central Europe from the seventh into the fifth centuries BC, is radically different from what went before. We must therefore start this review of the goldwork with that of the preceding centuries of the Late Bronze Age in Europe. From the latter part of the second millennium BC the centre of gravity of gold and goldworking in western Europe is in the lands adjoining the Atlantic and the North Sea. Three major provinces within this large area have extensive gold industries, each with a highly distinctive range of products: Spain (e. g. Gonzalo 1989; Ruiz-Galvez 1989), the Highland and Island regions of the British Isles together with Brittany (Taylor 1980; Eluere 1982), and Denmark (e. g. Hartmann 1982). The first two of these had sufficient gold reserves of their own to provide for the probable level of production. Denmark, on the other hand, was dependent entirely on imported metal, as it was for bronze, but nevertheless stamped its own style on the gold objects made there.

In the British Isles one of the most prominent and characteristic forms of gold artefact is the flange-twisted gold torque and its lighter, wire-twisted cousins (Eogan 1983b; Northover 1989). Although superficially flamboyant, the metalworking skills they employ are straightforward and require only a few specialist tools. On the other hand they do display a good knowledge of the properties of the gold alloys used and an eye for accuracy and regularity in their shape and dimensions. They were probably made and used from the thirteenth to the eleventh centuries BC, a time when the British Isles and other parts of western Europe experienced a rapid development of wrought-metal techniques with the Introduction of sheet-metal armour and vessels and, possibly, the development of wire drawing. Some of the small hoards of gold torques and bracelets that survive suggest that the users of the gold had some notion of its having an intrinsic value: often the weights of the objects in a hoard show a simple relationship with each other. For example, in hoards with a pair of torques one is generally twice the weight of the other; on occasion these weight relationships can be very exact. For some examples there is also a strong ritual element in their deposition.

Because of the great importance of gold in Ireland through much of the Bronze Age it was thought that these torques, too, were typical of Ireland. In fact they are distributed fairly widely across England, Wales and north-western France but are almost absent from Scotland. In the succeeding century, the beginning of the Late Bronze Age in Britain, there is something of a hiatus and the amount of goldwork surviving is very small (Needham 1990). At the same time there is a marked change in the character of the finest quality bronzeworking, from wrought products to elaborate castings, and the skills which formed the torques might well have been in abeyance. After that, through the main span of the Late Bronze Age in Britain, the quantity of gold, both by weight and number of objects, is very small in relation to the amount of copper and copper alloys in circulation. In contrast, in Ireland there was a great increase in the number of gold objects produced in the Late Bronze Age although we have no absolute dating for the start of this process. Some of the gold hoards were very large, such as that from Mooghaun, Co. Clare, with 146 gold objects (Logan 1983a: esp. 69-72). Reflecting the relative simplicity of contemporary bronze types, many of the gold ornaments are very simple combinations of casting and forging. A small proportion, such as ‘lock-rings’, gorgets and boxes, are fabricated from sheet with stamped, engraved or chased decoration; however, the technology is still simple with all joints being mechanical. A greater degree of metallurgical complexity is seen in the ‘ring-money’, some of which has striped decoration formed from precious alloys of contrasting colours formed round a base-metal core; the methods by which the patterns were created have still to be determined (Green 1988).

Developments in the British Isles have been described in some detail to give an idea of the major changes which could have taken place in both the use of gold and the craft techniques involved in shaping it during the half-millennium of the later Bronze Age. The other regional industries had their own distinct identities. For example, the Danish tradition is very much associated with gold wire and gold vessels, while in Iberia the goldsmiths were by this time coming under the influence of the Mediterranean civilizations, initially that of the Phoenicians (Almagro Gorbea 1989).