to inscriptions. The earliest of these are in what is called a Lepontic script and dates to about 600 b.c. There is, in fact, much uncertainty as to whether there is, for example, any real evidence for the introduction of Celtic into the British Isles before the sixth century b.c., and there is absolutely no evidence of where or when Celtic speakers first reached Ireland.

Another problem concerns the traces of what have been claimed to be the Celtic or, following Pliny, the Celt-Iberian culture of central Spain. Arguments are divided between a settlement of the region from, and a much more complex admixture of various introduced elements with, the autochthonous population of the high Mesetas. Clearly, the Greek colonial settlements from the mid-first millennium played an important role, as can be seen in both metal types and pottery, although it is noticeable that objects typical of the late Hallstatt and la tène phases in central and western Europe are almost totally absent. By the third century, the Celt-Iberians had developed their own script.

In Continental Europe, pioneering Celtic studies were very much the product of the emerging democracies that accompanied the American and French Revolutions in the last quarter of the eighteenth century when there was a universal search for national roots. Rediscovery of the Celts, archaeologically speaking, took place at the time of the creation of romanticism, which was itself a child of new nationalisms. The Europe formerly divided by class changed to a Europe divided by ethnic solidarity and focused on the nation state while making obeisance to the rights of the masses. Among these romantic manifestations were the “translations” in 1762–1763 by James Macpherson of poems attributed to a completely fictitious third-century-b.c. poet, Ossian, which took Europe by storm. This bogus mythology was welcomed as the true “Celtic twilight” by painters such as Angelika Kaufmann and Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, who in 1812–1813 painted the Dream of Ossian. A little earlier, in 1802, Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy Triosson, in his massive work presented to Emperor Napoleon, depicted Ossian welcoming into Valhalla the dead French heroes of the war of liberty against the Prussians.

Muddled mythologies apart, the beginning of a serious interest in folk music reflected in the number of “Scottish” compositions by composers such as Haydn, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn also point to the re-creation of the Scottish Celts as a symbol of the new Europe of “the age of the democratic revolution.” Within Britain, the rediscovery of this mythical Celtic past coincided with the destruction of the Scottish highlands after the 1745 Jacobite rebellion and its brutal repression by the Duke of Cumberland—and the end at that time of Scottish aspirations to independence. “Celts” or “Scots” could be enclosed between book covers or presented in genteel concert halls just as nature, no longer a threat in a period of urbanization and industrialization, could be domesticated and hung on walls as landscape painting.

In 1816, Danish archaeologist christian jürgensen thomsen published his three-age system of stone, bronze, and iron, and between 1846 and 1865, Johann Georg Ramsauer, surveyor of the imperial salt mines at Hallstatt in upper Austria, discovered a rich cemetery of about 1,000 graves associated with one phase of the prehistoric mines, dating from the seventh to fifth centuries b.c. Ramsauer claimed that the graves were Celtic, a matter still disputed although Hallstatt became the name generally applied to temperate Europe until the first half of the Iron Age. Because of the preservative effects of salt, much fabric, leather, and worked wood were also found in Hallstatt’s three major areas of prehistoric mining. The mining techniques seem to have been borrowed from those used much earlier in mining the copper of the eastern Alps, with shafts extending up to 350 meters below the surface, and it was clearly a hazardous occupation. Although much of this material was discovered accidentally in the course of more recent mining activities, a major examination of the ancient mining system has been carried out by Fritz Eckart Barth, and Roy Hodson has applied modern statistical analyses to the contents of the cemetery.

Old Wealth, Modern Discoveries

The Hallstatt Iron Age is generally distinguished by its rich barrow burials, usually comprising