Gold and silver and their alloys are metals just as bronze and iron are. The way in which they are worked will reflect the general level of metallurgical knowledge and skill attained by a society’s craftsmen, and the habitual technical style. Their work will also be influenced by the specific properties of gold and silver alloys, in particular their ductility and colour as well as their potential for being formed into complex shapes and textured surfaces.
Our appreciation of the place of gold and silver in Celtic art and of the way in which their properties were adapted to the Celtic aesthetic is inevitably coloured by a small number of spectacular finds, such as the Snettisham treasure (Clarke 1954; Stead 1991), the Vix collar (Joffroy 1979; Chaume et al. 1987; Eluere 1987a: 114-18), the Broighter boat (Raftery 1984: 181-91), or the gold in the Hochdorf tomb (Biel 1987; Hartmann 1987). There is a natural tendency to assume that these master-works are at the summit of a pyramid of lesser, plainer objects. In many ways this is not the case and these finds often do represent the whole achievement of Celtic goldworking. Even when there is evidence of a hierarchy of gold or silver alloy pieces from the elaborate to the simple, as at Snettisham, then their context itself makes them highly distinctive. The question of context forms one of two major themes in this section of the chapter, as might be expected over a period of time as long as a millennium, there were several radical shifts in the social and economic position of gold and silver. The second derives from the metals themselves: their sources, the ways in which the alloys were made and used and the special skills of the goldsmiths and how these skills influenced their artistic ambitions. Any discussion of gold and silver in the Celtic world should also look at these points in relation to the coinage (Voute 1985; Cowell 1992; Northover 1992). This discussion also confines itself to the period before the end of the first century AD when Celtic art in Britain was finally being overlaid by Roman styles; late iron age and early Christian gold and silverwork in the Celtic west is another story.
World History
