La Tène culture

The La Tène culture (/ləˈtɛn/; French pronunciation: ​) was a European Iron Age culture. It developed and flourished during the late Iron Age (from about 450 BCE to the Roman conquest in the 1st century BCE), succeeding the early Iron Age Hallstatt culture without any definite cultural break, under the impetus of considerable Mediterranean influence from the Greeks in pre-Roman Gaul, the Etruscans, and Golasecca culture. Ancient Near East (1200–550 BC)Iron Age metallurgyAncient iron production The La Tène culture (/ləˈtɛn/; French pronunciation: ​) was a European Iron Age culture. It developed and flourished during the late Iron Age (from about 450 BCE to the Roman conquest in the 1st century BCE), succeeding the early Iron Age Hallstatt culture without any definite cultural break, under the impetus of considerable Mediterranean influence from the Greeks in pre-Roman Gaul, the Etruscans, and Golasecca culture. Its territorial extent corresponded to what is now France, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Southern Germany, the Czech Republic, parts of Northern Italy, Slovenia and Hungary, as well as adjacent parts of the Netherlands, Slovakia, Croatia, Transylvania (western Romania), and Transcarpathia (western Ukraine).The Celtiberians of western Iberia shared many aspects of the culture, though not generally the artistic style. To the north extended the contemporary Pre-Roman Iron Age of Northern Europe, including the Jastorf culture of Northern Germany. Centered on ancient Gaul, the culture became very widespread, and encompasses a wide variety of local differences. It is often distinguished from earlier and neighbouring cultures mainly by the La Tène style of Celtic art, characterized by curving 'swirly' decoration, especially of metalwork. It is named after the type site of La Tène on the north side of Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland, where thousands of objects had been deposited in the lake, as was discovered after the water level dropped in 1857. La Tène is the type site and the term archaeologists use for the later period of the culture and art of the ancient Celts, a term that is firmly entrenched in the popular understanding, but presents numerous problems for historians and archaeologists. Extensive contacts through trade are recognized in foreign objects deposited in elite burials; stylistic influences on La Tène material culture can be recognized in Etruscan, Italic, Greek, Dacian and Scythian sources. Dateable Greek pottery and analysis employing scientific techniques such as dendrochronology and thermoluminescence help provide date ranges for an absolute chronology at some La Tène sites. La Tène history was originally divided into 'early', 'middle' and 'late' stages based on the typology of the metal finds (Otto Tischler 1885), with the Roman occupation greatly disrupting the culture, although many elements remain in Gallo-Roman and Romano-British culture. A broad cultural unity was not paralleled by overarching social-political unifying structures, and the extent to which the material culture can be linguistically linked is debated. The art history of La Tène culture has various schemes of periodization. The archaeological period is now mostly divided into four sub-periods, following Paul Reinecke. The preceding final phase of the Hallstatt culture, HaD, c. 650–450 BC, was also widespread across Central Europe, and the transition over this area was gradual, being mainly detected through La Tène style elite artefacts, which first appear on the western edge of the old Hallstatt region. Though there is no agreement on the precise region in which La Tène culture first developed, there is a broad consensus that the centre of the culture lay on the northwest edges of Hallstatt culture, north of the Alps, within the region between in the West the valleys of the Marne and Moselle, and the part of the Rhineland nearby. In the east the western end of the old Hallstatt core area in modern Bavaria, Austria and Switzerland formed a somewhat separate 'eastern style Province' in the early La Tène, joining with the western area in Alsace.In 1994 a prototypical ensemble of elite grave sites of the early 5th century BCE was excavated at Glauberg in Hesse, northeast of Frankfurt-am-Main, in a region that had formerly been considered peripheral to the La Tène sphere. The site at La Tène itself was therefore near the southern edge of the original 'core' area (as is also the case for the Hallstatt site for its core).