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La TÈNE funerary customs
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La TENE Funerary Customs
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Cemeteries are the key to the archaeology of the Celts
and many of the greatest surviving LaTène treasures
have come to us from graves and burial sites
Burials and grave goods tell us a great deal about the
Celts:
 Their belief in the immortality of the soul and
progression to an afterlife
 The status of the deceased and his/her family or
community
 Lavish burials advertise wealth and distinction on a
grand scale.
 Vital information about the lives of the people and
their trading and cultural contacts
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The graves are all that remain of what must have been
elaborate funeral ceremonies, clan gatherings, feasts,
processions, and rites at the burial ground.
Even in areas with rich cemetery remains some
intriguing anomalies exist. For example, infants and
children are virtually absent or certainly
underrepresented.
This may reflect that some classes of the community
may have been excluded from formal burial.
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The La Tène burial traditions continue
earlier themes: extended east-west
inhumation under barrows.
 Grave goods generally include bronze
fibulae (brooch, clasp), bracelets for
women and iron short swords and spears
for men.
 Higher status graves (Reinheim,
Germany) are set apart by gold jewellery,
jet, amber, two-wheeled chariots, vessels
for wine-drinking.

Burial traditions
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Cemeteries with rich burials are not
associated with the known hill-forts.
 Certain areas of France for instance have
particular themes: the Champagne area
had more chariots graves than elsewhere.
 Women are buried with bronze torques.
 The earlier La Tene burials show greater
wealth in graves than later.

Burial traditions
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A 5th century vehicle grave from Châlons-surMarne, France
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Waldalgesheim Style
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Curvilinear motifs
 Late 4th to 3rd century
 First found in the Waldalgesheim grave
near Bonn, Germany

Waldalgesheim Style
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The early La Tène in Champagne seems
to have come to a sudden end.
(Migration?)
 The subsequent periods (200-100BC)
revert to simpler inhumation cemeteries,
with bodies extended with heads to the
west, with weak social ranking, indicated
by grave goods (personal ornaments and
weapons).
 Decapitated burials in both Hallstatt and
La Tene.

Burial traditions in early La Tene
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This hints at the complex cult of the
decapitated head (tête coupée) and
probable social and religious distinctions
between members of the community.
 Cremation appears in northern France
c300BC and gradually spreads south and
eastwards.
 Throughout this period both square and
rectangular barrows (burial mound) occur.

Burial traditions
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La Tene Mirrow
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For drinking
In the Otherworld
Feast
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La Tene III
swords from
graves
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The grave goods of such barrows has
been widely accepted as evidence of a
belief in a concrete Otherworld where the
dead would need symbols of their life and
status in this world.
 Yet, the real complexity of funerary
practices has been demonstrated in the
discoveries at Gournay-sur-Aronde, in
northern France.

Burial traditions in later La Tene
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Gournay was a small ritual enclosure set
within a large later iron age oppidum of
the Bellovaci.
 The earliest phase was at the end of the
early la Tene period (La Tene I)- 4th
century BC.
 Gournay has provided an unprecedented
wealth of information about Celtic ritual
practises.

Gournay
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The archaeology allows some sense of the
belief system to be revealed.
 This was a place of sacrifice and has
revealed a cordon of sacrified animals
(2000) around the central cultic area.
 Some of the sacrifices are in fact human.
 The main archaeologist has stated that
the remains of the humans (outcasts,
volunteers?) reveal belief in the longstanding cult of the head and ancestor
cult.

Gournay
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The retention of the bones seems to have
been central to these cults.
 The site in Ribemont is even more
ghoulish. There human bones have been
kept to construct a cultic space where
certain rituals no doubt were held.
 Deliberate dismemberment of hundreds of
individuals.

Gournay and Ribemont-sur-Ancre
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Evidently dynasties drew their political
justification from a sense that power was
wielded by permission of the Otherworld.
 Chieftains derived their political and
economic authority by being linked to the
Otherworld and the gods through the
medium of the burial rituals.

Archaeology in France
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Chiefs may therefore have held certain
priestly authority in carrying out rituals on
behalf of the larger society.
 Some elements of a cult of the ancestors
may also have been involved.

chieftains
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Apart from some very specific areas
(Yorkshire, the SW and SE of Britain),
evidence for burial by inhumation or
cremation is excessively rare.
 One way to explain this is to suggest that
normally bodies were disposed of in a
different way.
 Excarnation (exposure of the body) and
then inhumation in graves or pits.

La Tene burials in Britain
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This implies a liminal period when the
spirit was thought of as lingering, before
departing. This also allowed the use of
bones as relics. Or cremation.
 Cunliffe suggests that excarnation
platforms may have existed. Also, similar
kinds of ritual existed in the Neolithic and
Bronze ages in Britain.
 Some bones of chieftains might have been
used in fertility rituals.

La Tene burials in Britain
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
Several other traditions seem to have
flourished in Britain however:
The Yorkshire Arras Tradition
 The Aylesford-Swarling Cremations
 The Pit tradition of Central Southern
England

La Tene burials in Britain.
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Sometime during the 3rd or 4th century BC
a tradition of burial appears on the
Yorkshire wolds (high, open moorland).
They are very similar to those found in
the Champagne-Marne area of France.
(The Parisii).
 It consists of burial beneath a barrow and
surrounded by a square quarry ditch.
There are barrow cemeteries.
 Some of the burials are very ‘rich’ in the
sense that the body is found with a
chariot.
The
Yorkshire Arras Tradition (1)

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Arras Culture
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Most of the bodies are crouched, a few
extended.
 Marnian burials slightly differently buried
their dead in an extended position. 80%
are buried on their left side.
 The majority have grave goods. Joints of
pig meat accompany many of the graves.
 The carts/chariots were usually
dismantled for burial.

Yorkshire Arras tradition
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Variation occurs in the direction they were
buried, whether crouched or extended.
 Some metal work in the La Tene II style
appear in graves similar to those in the
Marne area of France, but strangely in
later (not the earliest) graves.
 Family heirlooms from France??

Yorkshire Arras Tradition
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What seems to have been a commonly
used rite was introduced or adopted in
Kent (SE Britain) and north of today’s
London in the 1st century BC.
 Could this have been introduced by Belgic
migration from northern Gaul?
 The ‘rite’ involves cremation and the
collection of the remains for burial usually
in a ceramic pot, or pit or wooden or
metal bucket.

Aylesford-Swarling Cremations (2)
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




The graves are clustered in cemeteries.
The largest known is in today’s St Alban’s
(close to Verulamium). 472 burials.
Some grave goods.
The pots follow the style found in northern
France (Champagne-Ardennes). Hence
the idea of invasion.
The main known cemetery contains
3
to 1 males.
Cremations
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The so-called ‘pit- tradition’ is found in
central southern England.
 This involved the deposition of either
whole or partialbodies in the grain-storage
pits on chalk-hills and river gravels.
 Whether this represented the ‘normative’
(ie most common) rite known in that part
of Britain is difficult to ascertain.
 Males and females are well represented.

The Pit Tradition (3)
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




Most of the bodies were are placed on the
left hand side in a crouched position.
Significant sites are: Danebury
(Hampshire), Stanton Harcourt in
Oxfordshire.
The pits were also used as ritual disposal.
The interpretation of the burials in the pit
tradition is by no means easy.
It represents only a minority of the adult
population. Mainly adults.
The Pit Tradition
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The lack of real grave goods does not
seem to indicate an elite group.
 One suggestion is that they represent the
victims of human sacrifice. (see Caesar,
Strabo, Lucan, Tacitus).
 Another possibility is that they represent
outcast members of society. This would
correspond to the associations with
disposal pits.

The Pit Tradition
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If the Pit Burials represent ‘abnormal’
members of the community, who were
these outcasts?
 If they were buried on the left side does
this mean that burial on the right was the
norm?
 They faced the NE, does that mean that
another direction was seen as the norm.
Perhaps the SW?

The Pit Tradition
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
Since these burials might have
represented individuals denied the normal
mortuary rite, they would be prevented
from following the normal after-death
course, thus maintaining the purity of a
society’s Otherworld.
The Pit Tradition
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The Cult of the Head
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Celticists have speculated that the missing
heads at Ribemont-sur-Ancre were likely
offered to Taranis, one of the three principal
divinities in Gaul and Britain who, as
mythologists would have it, was partial to
severed heads.
Alternatively, the severed heads may have
been kept as personal trophies.
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Taranis
Like some other deities, Taranis was
propitiated with human sacrifice but unlike
for example the Scythian Diana, the cult of
Taranis was crueller than most. Victims
could be burned alive in wooden vessels.
Taranis is the embodiment of the natural
force of thunder.
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Some examples related to the Cult of the Head:
 c.200
AD, the skull of a teenage boy was found in
Britain. It had been de-fleshed, and obviously
displayed on a post in a temple at St. Albans before
being buried in a ritual pit.
 The
stone structures at the Saluvian shrine of
Roquepertuse shows an interesting blend of Greek
and Gaulish symbolism. The uprights and lintels echo
the Greek shrines at Massalia while the skull niches
and carved vulture reflect the treatment of human
remains among the southern Gauls.
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Celts wanted to appease their gods as well
as appeal for good harvests, fortune,
freedom from disease, and the redress of
wrongs suffered. They procured these
favours by a wide variety of ceremonies
including deposition of votive offerings and
sacrifice. But the precise purposes of
human sacrifices are, at best, conjectural.
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Other aspects of the Cult of the Head and
sacrificing victims were:
 Death
by head injuries, garrotting, throat cutting
 Sometimes
human victims were sacrificed for the
purpose of divination, so that their entrails could
be examined for signs and portents (more on
this when we get to the Druids)
 The
sacrifice of prisoners of war was quite
common
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Despite official prohibitions under Roman rule,
human sacrifice and the head cult continued to
be practiced publicly almost to the end of
Roman rule.
Food for Thought: Were the remains found at
Ribemont and Gournay the result of funerary
practices or do they indicate ritual slaugher?
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Dating back to the late Bronze Age,
cauldrons were used both as sacred vessels
and prestige items.
Strabo describes how prisoners of war were
sacrified by having their throats cut over a
cauldron; cauldrons have also been found
in water offerings.
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Cauldrons of Plenty is a recurring Celtic motif
from both the perspectives of archaeological
finds and the literary sources.
The Gundestrup cauldron, one of the most
spectacular of the LaTène artefacts was found in
a peat bog in Denmark. Of unknown
provenance, it was nevertheless certainly
heavily influenced by LaTène art and culture.
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The Gundestrup Cauldron
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The Gundestrup Cauldron is a gilded, silver
cauldron found dismantled on the surface
of a peat bog near Gudestrup in northern
Jutland in 1891. Some of the iconography
is clearly Celtic however, stylisticallly the
cauldron would appear to suggest a
partially non-Celtic origin (Thracian).
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What had survived of the cauldron was 5
internal plaques, 7 out of 8 square external
plates, and a basal disc. The base plate
depicts a bull, possibly in its death agonies,
with a huntsman and two hounds, possibly
Celtic of an early zoomorphic design
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The Base Plate
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Some of the clearly Celtic iconography includes
the torc-wearing, cross-legged, antlered god
with another twisted torc in his hand,
sometimes identified as Cernunnos.
Cernunnos or the Horned One was a god of the
Continental Celts; a lord of nature, animals,
crops, and prosperity. He is usually portrayed
as having the body of a man and the horns of
a stag, in a squatting position wearning or
carrying the torc.
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Other Celtic depictions on the cauldron
include warriors with jockey-cap helmets
(the conical Celtic helmet) with crests of
boars or birds of prey, animal-headed war
trumpets, circular harness mounts and
shield bosses of late LaTène types.
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Inner plates of the Gundestrup cauldron
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Inner plate of the
Gundestrup cauldron
Outer plate of the
Gundestrup cauldron
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Although the god depicted appears to be
Cernunnos, most attempts to identify the
cross-legged god as well as the other male
and female torc-wearing heads as specific
Celtic deities can only ever be conjectural
at best. Particularly so, as the cauldron also
bears non-Celtic iconography.
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There are other elements of the cauldron
however that suggest a non-Celtic origin .
The ivy-leaf fill-ins, punch-dotting and
ridging of human clothing and animal pelts
have Pontic overtones and is also
reminiscent of the metal work of the
Dacians and Thracians in Romania, Bulgaria
and eastern Hungary. These were all
Hellenistic styles developed in the 4th
century BC.
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 Another
aspect of the cauldron that
suggests some non-Celtic input is the use
of silver which was rarely used by the
Celts except for coins but was commonly
employed to the east of the Celtic zones
(a possible exception would be the Picts
but are they Celtic?)
 Some have suggested that different plates
were made by different hands of differing
ethnic origins.
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One of the identifying features of Celtic
Human Sacrifice is overkill, such as the
triple death at which Lindow Man met his
demise.
The triple death is corroborated by early
Celtic literature where the theme of the
triple death occurs.
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