Urnfield culture

The Urnfield culture is the name archaeologists give to the late Bronze Age societies of Central Europe, from about 1300 to 750 BCE. It takes its name from its most visible custom: the dead were cremated, and their ashes placed in pottery urns buried together in flat cemeteries. Spreading from a heartland between western Hungary and eastern France, it bridged the earlier Tumulus culture and the Iron Age Hallstatt culture, and it is often discussed in debates about the origins of the Celts.

The term was first used in the late nineteenth century in publications on cemeteries in southern Germany. In Paul Reinecke's widely used chronology, the Urnfield culture spans phases Hallstatt A and B, distinct from the Iron Age Hallstatt culture proper of phases C and D. Its start is hard to fix, because the shift from the Middle Bronze Age was gradual: in parts of Germany cremation and burial of the body were practised side by side, and some graves mix Tumulus pottery with Urnfield swords. In south-western Germany it was established by around 1200 BCE. The sub-phases are dated mainly by changes in artefact styles and are schematic, and archaeologists note the need for more radiocarbon and tree-ring dates. Cremation itself is often believed to have begun in Hungary, where the practice was common from the first half of the second millennium BCE.

The core area stretched from western Hungary to eastern France and from the Alps almost to the North Sea. Within it, local groups such as the South German, Lower Rhine and Middle Danube urnfields are told apart mainly by their pottery, while metalwork circulated much more widely, perhaps from specialist workshops serving regional elites. By the end of the second millennium BCE the tradition had reached Italy and north-western Europe, and urnfields appear in Languedoc and Catalonia in the ninth and eighth centuries BCE. The central European Lusatian culture belongs to the same tradition, and the Proto-Villanovan and Villanovan cultures of Italy show close similarities.

Settlements grew much more numerous than before. Fortified hilltop sites with stone or timber ramparts became typical and served as centres of metalworking; some, like the Bullenheimer Berg and the Ehrenbürg in Germany, covered about 30 hectares. In the east, huge enclosures such as Cornești-Iarcuri in Romania, almost 6 kilometres across, have been interpreted by some archaeologists as the centres of complex chiefdoms or early states. Farmers grew wheat, barley, pulses and, in places, millet, oats and rye, and kept cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, horses and geese. Copper was mined in the Eastern Alps, and underground rock-salt mining began at Hallstatt in the thirteenth century BCE.

Bronze-working reached a high level. Leaf-shaped swords suited to slashing replaced the stabbing swords of earlier times, and some warriors wore bronze helmets, shields, greaves and cuirasses, an idea that may have come from Mycenaean Greece. About a dozen early Urnfield graves contained four-wheeled wagons with bronze fittings, and miniature bronze cult wagons carrying cauldrons have parallels in the Nordic Bronze Age. Hoards of bronze objects were often left in rivers and bogs, probably as gifts to the gods.

The many hoards and hillforts led some earlier scholars to propose a Europe-wide wave of migrations linked to the upheavals of the Late Bronze Age collapse in the eastern Mediterranean. Whether large migrations happened remains unclear. The culture is generally agreed to have been at least partly Indo-European in speech, but its regional variety suggests several peoples. Some scholars link it to Proto-Celtic or a wider Italo-Celtic group, citing place names and early Celtic inscriptions from the Golasecca culture in northern Italy, while the older idea that the spread of hillforts and sheet-bronze working marks a Celtic expansion is no longer accepted.

Our 1000 BCE map labels the area "Urnfield cultures", across Central and Western Europe south of the Nordic Bronze Age. The outline is approximate.