Hallstatt culture

A salt-mining village above an Alpine lake gave its name to the Hallstatt culture, the leading archaeological culture of central and western Europe at the turn from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. In its narrow sense it covers the early Iron Age, from about 800 to 450 BCE, when chieftains in fortified hilltop centres traded with the Greek and Etruscan world. It grew out of the Urnfield culture, gave way to the La Tène culture, and is commonly linked with early Celtic-speaking peoples.

Hallstatt lies in the Salzkammergut of Austria, south-east of Salzburg. Its salt had been mined on and off since the Neolithic, with a peak from the eighth to the fifth centuries BCE, and the salt has preserved textiles, wood, leather, shoes and miners' backpacks. In 1846 Johann Georg Ramsauer found a large cemetery there and dug over a thousand graves; about 1,300 burials are now known, holding some 2,000 people. No settlement has been located, and many graves are rich enough to suggest that those buried there were a class controlling the mines rather than the miners. Activity faded around 500 BCE for unclear reasons, and mining shifted to nearby Hallein.

In 1902 Paul Reinecke divided the period into four phases based on finds from southern Germany: Hallstatt A and B (about 1200–800 BCE), which belong to the Bronze Age Urnfield culture, and Hallstatt C and D (about 800–450 BCE), the Hallstatt culture proper. Radiocarbon is of limited use here, because a "Hallstatt plateau" in the calibration curve makes dates between about 750 and 400 BCE hard to separate. Archaeologists rely instead on tree-ring dating, such as a cart grave at Wehringen dated to 778 BCE give or take five years, and on fast-changing brooch styles.

By the sixth century BCE the culture covered much of central and western Europe, from eastern France to Bohemia and Austria, and reached into northern Italy, with later influence in Britain, Ireland and Iberia. Archaeologists distinguish a western zone, where elite men were buried with swords and later daggers, sometimes with wagons, and an eastern zone, where warriors were buried with axes, helmets and breastplates and where art showed narrative scenes. The dividing line runs roughly through central Bohemia and Lower Austria.

Most people farmed in small villages, but some fortified hilltop sites, the so-called princely seats such as the Heuneburg on the upper Danube and Mont Lassois in eastern France, have been called the first cities north of the Alps. After Greek Marseille was founded around 600 BCE, trade up the Rhône brought Attic pottery, wine, amber, ivory and spectacular bronzes such as the Vix krater, the biggest metal vessel known from the western classical world. Rich graves under great mounds at Hochdorf, Vix and elsewhere held wagons, gold and imported vessels. Ancient DNA suggests elite succession sometimes passed through the female line.

Iron, at first a rare luxury, became common for swords after about 800 BCE. Craftsmen built standardised spoked wagons, used the potter's wheel and sawed long planks for burial chambers. Western art was mostly geometric, with waterfowl a favourite motif, and is usually counted as the first phase of Celtic art; the eastern zone drew on the narrative situla art of northern Italy.

At the end of the period the Heuneburg and other centres were destroyed or abandoned, rich burials stopped and old ones were looted, for reasons still debated. The La Tène culture arose to the west and north. Lepontic inscriptions from northern Italy suggest Celtic was spoken in parts of the Hallstatt world, which supports its link with the Celts; an older idea that Illyrians carried the eastern zone is now rejected.

Our 400 BCE map labels an approximate Hallstatt culture zone in the Alps and central Europe, around today's Austria; by that date, on most archaeologists' chronology, the culture was giving way to La Tène.