to the west of Hallstatt, was found in a grave below the defended settlement of Glauberg northeast of Frankfurt, the most northerly of the early La Tène princely complexes. Clearly, the local production of prestige goods followed the trading patterns of the southern imports.

Below the defended settlement of the Glauberg a cursus (a ritual monument made up of parallel bars and external ditches) and three warrior graves, two with bronze wine flagons, Have been found. Most remarkable are fragments of at least four deliberately broken statues—one, complete save for his feet, is a warrior with sword, shield, and Mediterranean-looking cuirass and crowned with a strange heraldic, balloonlike headdress such as is commonly found with other early La Tène depictions of the human head. Statuary of any sort from the early La Tène period is extremely rare, and the most likely source of inspiration for such figures lies in the territory of Picenum in central Italy.

Although mining activities continued at Hallstatt, the site itself seems to have declined in contrast to those at Dürrnberg, an Iron Age salt-mining center forty kilometers west of Halstatt in Austria, where salt-mining activities continued from the later seventh century until the second century b.c. At Dürrnberg the houses of the mining community and their related small-scale cemeteries have been the focus of a series of continuing excavation projects, most recently concentrated on the examination of the ancient mine shafts and associated works. Although the graves only occasionally contain Mediterranean imports, their relative wealth must have been a direct result of the bartering strength represented by the salt, which was much in demand south of the Alps. Visitors from the south not only lived but also died on the Dürrnberg as can be deducted by some of the “foreign” elements in the graves.

Another intriguing link between north and south is the hoard of neck and arm rings found high in the Swiss Alps at Erstfeld, near the St. Gotthard Pass and some distance from the new centers of power. One of the later “princely” graves is that at Waldalgesheim, near Bonn, where in 1970 Ernest A. Werth identified “Gaulish copies” among the fine metalwork. The grave contained a bronze flagon decorated with a carefully laid out compass design as well as objects in a new style that has been named after the site. It can be demonstrated that the gold neck and arm rings in the grave were produced by at least three different craftsmen, and analysis has also suggested that the decorated neck ring and the pair of arm rings were made from melted-down gold staters (coins) of Philip II of Macedon.

Although “the early style” makes use of curvilinear decoration, it is often static, and the newer “vegetal” style, as exemplified by the gold rings from Waldalgesheim, is based on a writhing plant tendril within which, from time to time, hidden faces lurk, or as the founding father of early Celtic art studies, Paul Jacobsthal, wrote in 1941, in Cheshire Cat fashion, now visible, now hidden. This style became geographically widespread at a time in the late fourth century b.c. when classical sources report invasions and settlement in the Po Valley in northern Italy while regions of northeastern France lost population. In France, there was a major development of wheel-thrown pedestaled painted pottery with vegetal designs, showing the possible influence of Italo-Greek red-figure pottery. Certainly, in northern Italy graves have been found that contain typical La Tène B weapons and fibulae together with local pottery.

In northeastern France, what may regarded as the first scientific excavation of a La Tène cemetery was carried out by an officer of the Corps Royal des Ingénieurs Géographes (Royal Corps of Geographic Engineers). The barrow burials were mostly excavated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by collectors who were not averse to robbing each others’ excavations, and that fact and the sale of objects to other collectors have made the accurate attribution of nineteenth- and even earlier-twentieth-century finds in this region uncertain. It has also meant the loss to France of major pieces, such as a large collection assembled from 1863 by Léon Morel, a local tax collector in Champagne, and a unique pair of locally produced bronze-spouted flagons and an attendant pair of Etruscan stamnoi discovered in 1927 at Basse-Yutz