Increasingly archaeologists have the technical ability to reconstruct the environment of the Celtic world, but there remains the more difficult, and largely unaddressed, question of how the Celtic communities perceived their environment and how and why they reacted to aspects of its changing nature. Their reaction was not to the environment which we can reconstruct, with more or less accuracy, from the palaeoenvironmental record. They were reacting to the perceived environment, itself reflecting their own lived world of experience. Our own perception inevitably impinges; do we see the Celtic world as the beginning of an essentially familiar Europe, as implied by the 1991 Venice exhibition entitled ‘The Celts, the Origins of Europe’ (Moscati et al. 1991)? In support of this view we can point to the emergence of an increasingly familiar agricultural landscape. On the other hand, a conflicting view is put by Hill (1989), who contends that it was ‘a very different past from the one which our common sense expects or allows’. Particular aspects of the environment do seem to have been perceived in what, to us, are unfamiliar ways. Bog bodies are an example. Many are ritual killings. Some were inserted into remaining natural places within an increasingly controlled cultural landscape. Lindow Man was deposited in a shallow bog pool at the beginning of a phase which, on the neighbouring dry ground, was marked by forest disturbance and cereal cultivation (Stead et al. 1986). There is a great deal of other evidence for ritual iron age and Romano-Gallic deposition in bogs, lakes and rivers, for example the deposition of weaponry at La Tene (Dunning 1991) and the numerous wooden figures of people and animals from the Sources de la Seine (Deyts 1983). Such ritual deposition does seem to be a unifying theme across much of Celtic Europe and north into Germania. An example is the Gundestrup Cauldron from Denmark (Bergquist and Taylor 1987), the decoration on which includes Celtic motifs. It was deposited in a dismantled state on the relatively dry surface of a small bog. Glimpses of the particular significance of some aspects of the botanical world are provided by classical references to the significance of oak trees for the druids and the excavation of a model tree at Manching (Maier 1991).
Evidence of ritual deposition involving human and articulated animal bone occurs in up to a quarter of pits on some British sites (Hill 1989). At Danebury the animals forming special deposits are all domestic, with the exception of a significant association with ravens (Grant 1984), birds which feature in Celtic iconography (Green 1992). A recent survey of the French evidence (Meniel 1987) indicates that bone assemblages from shrines are overwhelmingly of domesticates in comparable proportions to those which occur on domestic sites. That boars were of particular ritual significance is suggested by bronze figurines, occurring widely across the Celtic world (Foster 1977), as well as bones in sacrificial deposits and burials, although there is sometimes uncertainty as to their wild or domestic status (Meniel 1987; Bokdnyi 1991).
At a wider environmental scale Parker Pearson (forthcoming) argues that the layout and orientation of iron age enclosures and huts may reflect the cosmology of the groups concerned, thus providing important clues to their relationship with the natural world. The most obvious aspect of this is the easterly orientation of most roundhouses and enclosures, which could reflect the sunrise and daily rebirth of light.
Celtic ritual activity seems to have been particularly concerned with wild places: bogs, lakes, springs and groves. These may have assumed particular significance at a time when the environmental evidence shows that the landscape was being quite dramatically transformed by cultural activity. Such an hypothesis echoes current emphasis on the opposition between wild and domestic in earlier prehistory (e. g. Hodder 1990). Probably, however, the relationship between people and nature in the Celtic world was much more complex than is suggested by simple binary oppositions, for instance. In the animal world domesticates account for most ritual deposits in Britain and France. The full complexity of the Celtic perception of the natural world may gradually be clarified as archaeologists give greater emphasis to issues such as perception, the spatial organization of sites, associations of material in contexts, and the relationship between archaeological and palaeoenvironmental evidence.
World History
