At the Gorge Meillet and at Dtirrnberg Grave 44/2, the early La Tene chieftain was accompanied by an array of grave goods that illustrated transalpine contacts, as well as objects denoting princely or warrior status, including stout swords, spears, arrowheads and pointed helmets with attachments for chin-straps (Penninger 1972). Helmets are found in small numbers throughout the Celtic world, in some cases in distinct chronological or geographical groups. Was it because they were proud of their elaborate hairstyles that Celtic warriors did not generally wear helmets, or were there more fundamental religious reasons? Neither the Britons nor the Germans had helmets, writes Tacitus, but the Cimbri had helmets like the maws of frightful beasts or the heads of animals, with crests that made them look larger than they really were (Plutarch, Marius XXV.2). Only in Italy in the region of the Senones have helmets been found in great numbers, in a style named after the burial ground of Montefortino and characterized by a back peak to protect the neck and a top knob.
Richly ornamented helmets which show Italian influence in shape or decoration occur in France, including Amfreville (Eure) and Agris (Charente); both are magnificent artistic achievements of iron, bronze, gold and coral and date from the fourth century BC. From Canosa (Apulia) a helmet of iron, bronze and coral (of earlier fourth-century date) bears side mountings to allow the addition of a crest. The helmet from Agris has a finely wrought cheek-piece, while that from Amfreville has a decorative motif on the side of the cap that may originally have been mirrored by a cheek-piece that no longer survives. Excavations at Monte Bibele (Bologna) have uncovered several warrior burials that provide archaeological contexts for such helmets with decorated bronze cap decorations and cheek-pieces with triple rosettes, e. g. Grave 14 (Vitali 1985: 40-9; 1990: 202-6). A simpler helmet with a chin-strap and a top-knob was associated with a late fourth-century cremation burial from Varenna, Como, with sword and decorated scabbard and leech brooches (de Marinis 1977: 32, pi.2).
In Celtic areas in south-eastern Europe and on sculpture at Pergamon, in Asia Minor, a small class of helmets continues the pattern of a side decoration that mirrors a cheek-piece (Schaaff 1988: 300). The most spectacular example comes from Ciumesti in Rumania, in a grave excavated in 1961, in which a cremation deposit was accompanied by a helmet, a mail shirt with decorated bronze rosettes, and a spear (Rusu 1969). The helmet was surmounted by a bronze bird with hinged wings that would have flapped as the warrior rode to battle. Few other helmet mountings survive, but there are examples of bronze boars, and the Celtic helmets shown on the Arc de Triomphe at Orange have a wide variety of motifs including horns and wheels. The warriors on the Gundestrup Cauldron bear helmets with crests, horns, boars and a bird. Two carefully fashioned objects of sheet bronze from La Tene have sometimes been tentatively interpreted as helmet crests, but it is possible too that they formed part of the battle standards {militaria signa) described by classical writers (Vouga 1923: 63-4).
‘They wear bronze helmets with large projecting figures which give the wearer the appearance of enormous size. In some cases horns are attached so as to form one piece, in others the fore-parts of birds or quadrupeds worked in relief,’ recorded Diodorus Siculus {History V.30.2).
The flamboyant helmets of the first phases of La Tene are well known, but the practical weapons of Late La Tene are part of a warrior panoply that is less frequently described. Iron helmets, for example, from Port bei Nidau (Bern), Giubiasco (Ticino) and Novo mesto (Slovenia) (Schaaff 1974; 1980; 1988: 302-9) have stout neck protection and practical cheek-pieces. The weaponry of the warrior burial from Grave 169 at Novo mesto has been reconstructed by Andre Rapin (Figure 4.3), a researcher whose illustrations of Celtic warriors has done much to inform recent work in France; Rapin has kindly brought the illustrations up to date in the light of his research on sword-belts and using the evidence of the helmet from Smarjeta-Vinji (also in Slovenia). The cheek-pieces of such helmets, and doubtless the crests, retain some of the decorative ideals of earlier types, but there is no doubt that these are pieces of defensive armour appropriate to the grim reality of the battlefield. It is to the armourers’ credit that aspects of the design were adopted in the Roman legionary helmet of the first century AD.
The famous Waterloo Bridge helmet dredged from the Thames in 1868 demonstrates that pieces of parade gear still had a place in the first century BC in eastern England (Megaw 1970: 170). The bronze head-piece, decorated in repousse and applied roundels of red enamel or cupric glass, is a unique piece of flamboyant headgear like that from La Gorge Meillet, and it is unfortunate that it has found such a firm place in many popular reconstructions of British warriors. The helmeted heads on the bucket from Aylesford in Kent, however, surmounted with luxuriant crescentic crests, may serve to illustrate how illusory any search for the norm may be (Megaw 1970: 119-20).
World History
