multiple burials around one central grave, which is generally within a wooden funeral chamber. In the later Hallstatt period, the funerary goods enclosed in the chamber often included a four-wheeled wagon, personal ornaments of sheet gold, and imported Greek and Etruscan goods associated with the funerary feast, which included vessels for wine mixing and drinking and, in the case of males, antenna-hilted iron swords. The first early–Iron Age “princely” tombs located in France are in Burgundy, where the site of Magny-Lambert (seventh century b.c.) was excavated in 1872 by the Commission for the Topography of the Gauls, and Apremont was discovered in 1879. The most spectacular site is the grave of the thirty-seven-year-old “princess” of Vix (ca. 500 b.c.), which was discovered in 1953 on the banks of the River Seine below the contemporary fortified hilltop settlement of Mont Lassois. This grave contained the largest known Greek-made bronze krater, or wine-mixing vessel, 1.64 meters high and weighing 208.6 kilograms, as well as a gold neck ring, possibly from Iberia. Even more recently, a settlement has been found close to the grave, with several fragmentary statues of draped figures, but although claimed as contemporary, these may be later than the grave.

Baden-Württemberg in southwestern Germany, on the other side of the Alps from upper Austria, contains another concentration of rich Hallstatt burials. These include the huge (originally ten meters high), Magdalenenberg-bei-Vilsingen, Inzighofen-Vilsingen (seventh century b.c.), Böblingen (seventh–fifth centuries b.c.), and the barrows at Heiligenbuck and Bad Cannstatt (later sixth century b.c.). There are also sites in Alsace and Switzerland. Of the German princely graves found, that of the Hohen Asperg is in the shadow of a fortified hilltop settlement.

The easy visibility and rich grave goods of these tombs made them of major interest to nineteenth-century excavators, just as they had been to tomb robbers over the previous centuries, and most princely tombs were also near settlements. Perhaps the best excavated is at Eberdingen-Hochdorf, which was excavated in 1978–1979. This rich late Hallstatt tomb contained a unique bronze couch with caryatid castors decorated in a style that reflects the so-called situla art of the eastern Alps and the area around the head of the Adriatic. As well as the usual drinking vessels, there were nine drinking horns, a massive Greek bronze cauldron with a capacity of some 500 liters, and a quiver full of arrows. There was a considerable quantity of gold work, including shoe covers as well as a neck ring made specifically for the burial (punches for the decoration were found in the covering mound). Careful laboratory work was also able to establish that the cauldron had contained mead and that the body had been kept for several months before being interred. Excavation of the nearby settlement has revealed a princely residence, which continued in use until the early La Tène period, whereas most other Hallstatt sites in the region seem to have been abandoned earlier.

One of the most important centers in the region is the nearby settlement of Heuneburg near the headwaters of the Danube River, which was intensively excavated from 1950 to 1979. First constructed about 650 b.c., the defenses went through a number of rebuilding stages over their 200-year history, the fourth comprising a three-meter-thick enclosing mud-brick wall, which reflects eastern Mediterranean construction methods if not actual Mediterranean builders. A number of destruction periods finally resulted in the burning and final abandonment of the site in the earlier sixth century, presaging a new phase in the Iron Age of the region. In close proximity to Heuneburg was an area of open settlement and a group of large burial mounds, the largest of which, the Hohmichele, originally had a diameter of some eighty meters and a height of about fifteen meters. Although the main central burial chamber had been robbed in antiquity, one of the outer satellite graves contained the remains of a man and a woman together with a four-wheeled wagon and associated fittings.

All of these early–Iron Age sites are grouped near trade routes to the south, at or near the headwaters of the Rhone or Saône Rivers, or near the east-west trading route provided by the Danube River. Even in the 1850s, when the first of the rich chieftains’ burials were being discovered