The Celts (1987) s02e01 Episode Script
The Man with the Golden Shoes
Don't be fooled by this Austrian chocolate box.
If you get behind the picture, you'll find, here at Hallstatt, the very first proof that there ever was a people called Celts.
Not Scotland, nor Wales, nor Ireland.
The village of Hallstatt feels like a place scarcely touched by time.
Alps enclose it.
The lake, they say, is bottomless.
I hadn't expected such an inaccessible place to be a major source of Celtic identity.
But once upon a time, the Hallstatt community had power and energy in enough quantity to connect this remote place with the outside world.
The source of this distinction? A huge natural resource, a vital ingredient in ancient economies.
They mined the salt here.
Over two and a half thousand years ago, they burrowed into this mountain and, marvellously, the salt preserved them, and in time, came to identify them.
The trouble with the past, of course, is dust to dust.
Unless you've got some salt.
This mud comes from the oldest salt mine in the world, and has been used here in this Austrian spa town.
It's been used to heal, to preserve the body.
By cocooning herself in this ancient mud, this girl is protecting herself against the ravages of time.
And exactly the same principle, and exactly the same mineral, leads us to the Celts.
Because the implements of the ancient miners were also preserved.
Their headgear, their drinking utensils, and, to carry the salt to the collection point, a hod made of wood and leather.
Such local curiosities caught the imagination of a mining engineer, Georg Ramsauer, director of operations at Hallstatt.
In 1846, Ramsauer turned amateur archaeologist, and he made an extraordinary discovery.
On the slopes above the mine, he found a vast burial ground, over two and a half thousand graves.
This was the cemetery of the Hallstatt upper classes.
Buried ritually, festooned with their worldly goods.
Their jewels, their weapons, their wealth.
A local artist recorded Ramsauer's find.
The skeletons, the little piles of grave goods.
And professional antiquarians began to take an interest.
They too began with the salt.
Just over a century ago, archaeologists from Vienna came in here and found, preserved in the salt, traces, objects which they recognised.
And from them, they began to put together a picture which has been referred to ever since as the Hallstatt Period.
The first tangible date for the Celts.
700 years before Christ.
This is how the picture began to unfold.
First of all, they, the archaeologists, turned to the ancient verbal reports of the Greeks and the Etruscans who said that they had been trading with a people, a very distinctive people, who lived in this region.
Then came the words, however wide of the mark, of the old historians.
And finally, there was the cosmopolitan influence evident on the swords and the daggers and the brooches found here at Hallstatt.
And the archaeologists agreed that the people who lived and mined here were the same people, that same hardworking, restless, imaginative people that the Greeks called Keltoi.
At the same time as Hallstatt's aristocracy flourished, another burial mound in Austria received this.
A little bronze cart on which a goddess, surrounded by armed warriors and antlered animals, leads the dead person in procession to the afterlife.
It's very small.
The entire piece would almost fit in a shoebox.
But its implications are enormous.
Their funeral rites hallmarked the early Celts.
People were buried with the things they loved, or with specially made objects.
Jewellery, less prestigious everyday pieces.
Hallstatt, the place and the period, was the point at which the Celts were first identified.
They were recognised by the design of the goods they buried.
And when all their past was excavated, the old map of Europe began to change colour.
Because, before these discoveries, the word "civilisation" had meant, largely, Greece and Rome.
But now, thanks to the miners of Hallstatt, all those old bets were off.
Hallstatt is no longer just the place name of a remote Austrian village.
It's an archaeological definition of early Celtic civilisation, roughly 700 to 500 BC.
I think that the criteria by which modern archaeologists would identify the Celts would, of course, be mainly material.
Artefacts and burials and equipment of that sort.
But of course, these weren't necessarily the criteria by which the classical authors identified the Celts.
They think of the Celts as people who were the principal barbarian people north of the Alps.
By barbarians, of course They didn't use the word in our modern sense, but rather in the sense of people who lived outside the Roman the area of Roman culture and Roman domination.
And I think that they would have been thinking primarily of language.
And this is useful, this is important, because it does mean that to the classical authors, Latin and Greek of, say, the third, second century BC, the Celts were recognised as having a certain homogeneity based primarily upon language.
Also, presumably, on lifestyle.
Like any other early society, the Celts were distinctive in the way in which they developed from the primitive.
Their ancestors graduated from hunting food to producing it.
They cleared forests, raised stock, settled in river valleys, the Danube and the Rhine.
Their houses, also, were distinctive, large and circular, built of planks and wickerwork, with a dome of heavy thatch.
They wrote nothing down, a fact which misrepresents them.
Non-literate doesn't mean they were non-intellectual.
Those who did encounter them reported "the vanity which makes them unbearable", but they were a warrior elite, and "given to garrulousness", but they had an oral tradition.
"To the frankness and high-spiritedness of their temperament "must be added traits of childish boastfulness "and love of decorations," said the Greeks.
A typical emergent nation, showy and self-regarding, tribal and opportunistic, who believed in glorifying individuality and who cultivated the power of the family unit.
The Celts were a successful farming, trading society, who had wealth and comfort and security and leisure.
Boo! Aaah! Whenever one runs into a successful economy, it is a powerful, powerful society which sustains that economy.
And therefore, we can think in terms of the Celtic culture, which, of course, spans most of northern Europe, including the British Isles, as a powerful balance, if you like, to the Greek and Roman world, about which we know so much.
It's quite unfair to regard this as a subsistence society simply because we have no written records.
The artefactual remains suggest it's a vibrant, highly organised, multi-structured society, which is very powerful.
Again and again, you find this power and wealth in their artefacts.
For example, the Snettisham torc, 20 centimetres across, made of gold, with a little silver, some copper, found in Norfolk in 1950.
It's not so much what they buried - domestic utensils, pots, beakers, personal ornamentation, horse trappings, the bones of sacrificial victims - it wasn't so much what they buried as how they're buried.
In one entire era, certain prehistoric European societies over in the east of Europe cremated, and then they put the bones and the ashes in huge urns and buried those in fields.
Vast cemeteries.
Along with these urn-fielders, there were tumulus graves, long, large barrows uniting entire families in death.
These consistent and unique patterns of burial and grave-goods, when they radiated out across Europe, disclosed the Celts in the beginnings of their culture.
Cheshire, England.
In a waterlogged marsh, a gruesome prehistoric mystery.
In August 1984, workers harvesting peat collided sharply with their own past.
The digger sliced through a body.
The police were called in.
But this post mortem was a matter of unusually delicate and complex pathology, and it wasn't a police matter.
The British Museum became coroners for a time.
This wasn't a recent death.
The body was over 2,000 years old.
Here was an opportunity to use all the technology of modern science to scrutinise the past.
Biologists, zoologists, radiologists, computer scientists, forensic scientists, surgeons - out of their intricate cooperation, the bizarre details emerged.
Left shoulder uppermost, the body had been lying on its right-hand side, half curled up.
The peat had preserved and tanned the skin, even though the bone beneath had decomposed to the point where the joints had frayed.
Face down, the left ear bent over, the head had been flattened by the pressure of centuries of slime and peat.
Slowly, the figure began to take real shape.
When the face was turned around, it became apparent that this was the body of a well-nourished young man, five feet six inches tall, weighing about ten stone.
Not a slave, not a labourer, a well-kept man.
He had a neatly trimmed moustache and beard.
Is it the top lip or is it the bottom lip, in fact? If you come Look at the way that hair's growing there.
Yes.
The piecing together of the last hours of the dead man's life had to surmount problems which had accumulated for over 2,000 years.
We're going to need a lot of careful study, because of the distortion that has occurred.
A general surgeon from Nottingham Hospital followed the usual post mortem procedures, and investigated the contents of the stomach.
The mechanical digger had sliced the body more or less in half.
One leg was missing.
And under the abdominal flap of skin, the next clues.
- I think that's the stomach.
- Yeah.
Almost certainly.
There, it's got some solids Got a pair of scissors? This is his oesophagus in my left fingers, left hand.
Then it gives way into his stomach, and I've got the first part of his duodenum in my right hand.
And you can see that there are some food debris residues present, actually, in the sac of the stomach.
Microscopic examination revealed the details of the dead man's last meal.
Some form of wholemeal bread, baked over a fire of heather, and, according to the traces of moss found in the stomach, washed down with water from a local pool.
He'd also been infested with worms.
Cause of death? The X-rays of the cranium showed a nasty wound, forensically consistent with a downward blow or two.
The interesting one this is under the wound, in the top of the head, isn't it? - Right through it, yes.
- You see the fragment actually driven in.
Which, again, confirms a narrow striking object.
Probably something like a small axe.
From the looks of that wound, driven in twice.
Fascinating.
But the edges of the wound had swollen at the time, which wouldn't have happened if death had been instantaneous.
You can see the wound there with its flap of skin, which is typical of a lacerated wound - in fact, two lacerated wounds joined together.
In fact, the cause of death was a garotte, still in evidence, which broke the dead man's neck, after which his throat had been cut, just beneath the noose.
The unfortunate victim was most likely a ritual sacrifice.
He was naked, except for a band of fox fur on his arm.
He was hit on the head, kneed in the back, garotted and stabbed, in the marshlands of Lindow Moss, sometime between 300 BC and anno Domini.
This is a reconstruction of Lindow Man's head.
Sacrificed to a Celtic water deity? The historian Tacitus made an observation about the Celtic tribes.
"Traitors and deserters are hanged on trees.
"Cowards, shirkers and sodomites "are pressed down in the slimy mud of a bog.
" Less than a hundred miles away, to the east of Lindow, in Yorkshire, recent digs uncovered a form of burial rarely found elsewhere in Britain.
In one grave, they found a pair of chariot wheels, as well as the relevant yokes and horse trappings.
Such burial rites are rare in ancient Britain, and they reflect those practised by the Iron Age Celts in eastern and central Europe.
The Yorkshire graves, when opened, could have come straight from the drawings made at Hallstatt.
They pose a question.
How did this extraordinary similarity occur? "They are wont to change their abode on slight provocation, " wrote the first-century Greek historian Strabo.
"They migrate in bands, with all their battle array, "or they set out with all their households, "when displaced by a stronger enemy.
" Wanderlust, the romance of travel, restless movement.
Certainly all part of the image of the Celts.
Random spontaneous migrations brought them, like so many others, into Europe, after the Ice Age had melted, in search of the good land.
And from where? Who knows? "From the fringes of the most ancient East," according to one scribe.
From the foothills of the Himalayas? Perhaps, because certainly, their earliest traces, and their languages, do give solid proof of an Indo-European core.
Up through Asia Minor, Scythia, centuries of straggling, sporadic wagon trains, exotic nomads, into and across the great Hungarian plain.
And then, even when they did settle, they still moved, because the eldest son of a family, an overcrowded family, would take his dependants and buy a one-way ticket to fame and fortune.
And on and on that pattern must have repeated itself, over and over again, until eventually, there they were, a bright, individual, recognisable people splashed across the entire fabric of Europe, from Bohemia to Belgium.
The people whom we would eventually call Celts had arrived.
Since the days when they were first identified by the Greeks as the Keltoi, the strangers, the outsiders, their migrations were a European travelogue.
Ancient fragments of inscription, Celtic languages still recognisable in place names, heroic local legends, these are the landmarks in their colourful pathways.
Their origins lie hidden beneath the foundations of great cities, in places which seem unexpected, exotic, even.
Especially if you compare them with the clichés we now associate with the word Celtic.
Well, there are no thatched cottages, nor kilts, nor shillelaghs here in Budapest.
But the Celts were here too.
That hill, that was a Celtic fort.
Eastern Europe, Hungary, has as much a place in their story as Ireland or Wales because here, they dwelt.
But these carvings in the Hungarian plains outside Budapest show how their traces evaporated.
These are not purely Celtic.
The references are cross-fertilised because centuries of other cultures mingled here.
The Celts who raided the Balkans encountered Cimmerians, Illyrians, Thracians, Romans.
Celtic investigations here are frustrated by the silting up of so many other cultures.
But in occasional finds - pottery, house traces - the evidence is sufficient to prove their presence here conclusively, although nothing like the huge find which identified the second great phase of the Celtic world.
On the shores of Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland, at a place called La Tène, in the latter part of the last century, the waters of an old river dropped suddenly to a freakishly low level.
In the mud, Celtic treasure trove.
Masses of different artefacts, many of them made in a distinctive new style.
La Tène was the site of a prosperous Celtic settlement.
There's been continuous life of one kind or another along this lake shore for centuries.
Excavation is a prominent feature here.
An artefact classified as La Tène culture - that's from 500 BC onwards - therefore implies something with a particular sophistication.
The objects which come under the heading La Tène culture are remarkable.
The Celts were turning out artefacts of this quality 500 years before Christ, the product of a spontaneous imaginative spurt.
But their fine art reached a summit in one breathtaking object, in the magnificent Gundestrup cauldron.
It's huge, made of sheets of silver, each one heavily decorated, as if to tell a story.
It was found buried in a bog in Denmark.
It summarises the brilliance and skill of all Celtic culture.
If Hallstatt was the root, then La Tène was the flower.
There was a major practical dimension to the ornate art, and one which was crucial to their emergence as a European power.
They had taken a skill in its infancy in the Bronze Age and developed it.
Now, a new metal came into their hands which increased their warlike capacities and gave them an awesome, almost mystical dimension, in the same way as their horsemanship had done.
The horse, the great enabler, more than a mode of transport, a means of heroic distinction.
Imagine how they must have looked, those Celtic riders.
Stunning prowess.
Even the haughty Romans were impressed when the Celts rode roughshod, literally over them.
And the smith? He was in the pay of the gods.
Not because he shod their horses, he didn't.
No need to.
No roads.
But because he commanded iron.
That quantum leap that gave the Celts greater force.
Iron weapons gave them superior power, mightier glory.
And when the iron went into their soul, it became the stuff of legend.
Warriors, champions, the strangers called Keltoi.
They lived in their own epics and they died in them.
The technicoloured impression we have of the word Celt came from that new and savage superiority over their contemporaries north of the Alps.
This, now, was a primary Iron Age people, whose weapons cut deeper, lasted longer.
The use of iron enabled them to raid and slaughter and defend, to achieve fearsome reputations, and to control their subjects even in death.
A plateau of Celtic power was reached by a prince in southern Germany, not far from the river Danube.
In 1978, an archaeologist called George Bean arrived in the locality of Hochdorf, near Stuttgart, to investigate another chance find.
The local schoolteacher had observed what she called "untypical stones".
The ploughs, she said, kept striking large rocks.
What she had stumbled upon was a tumulus on the edge of the village.
The Hochdorf treasure, the greatest single Celtic find of the 20th century.
The Stuttgart area has always been wealthy.
This is an ancient trading post.
Since prehistoric times, travellers have been stopping in these parts.
The contents of the Hochdorf tumulus were taken to the museum in Stuttgart.
Five years of detailed investigation then began, in the laboratories behind the public section.
The intention, to summarise and qualify and restore the proceeds of the grave.
In this find, there wasn't a body.
It had decomposed.
Nevertheless, there were new and startling pieces of hard evidence which could be subject to analysis.
Forensics.
That's why I'm here.
Science, analysis, backup.
The hard facts.
And how exciting those facts are.
What do you think this is? Well, since forensics makes archaeology come alive, all the clues are here.
It's made of bronze, well-fashioned.
When it was found, it was highly polished.
In the bronze, you will find embedded pieces of fabric.
The fabric analysis says hemp, wool, the fur of badgers.
The scientists also found traces of pollen here.
They were able to deduct from that that the flowers came in the late summer.
Other clues, the illustrations.
Those horses.
Like cave drawings? No, they're a bit more sophisticated than that.
And these drawings, those people, are they dancing or fighting? Whatever they're doing, there's an air of ritual about them.
Ritual, that's the key word.
That's the word to stick with.
This was a funeral bed, a bier, of a grand Celtic prince.
He was a big man, in every sense.
He was about six feet tall, around 40 years of age.
And when they laid him out here, in the summer of 550 BC, on this bronze couch, this bronze sofa, on eight castors, resting on eight small female statues, they garlanded him with flowers, they dressed him in fine robes.
And they bedecked him with gold.
A gold neckband, Gold brooches and fasteners for his cloaks.
A gold armlet.
An exquisite dagger, beautifully fashioned and configured, tapered, burnished with the finest of gold.
Obviously, a prized possession, which was lying on top of a gold belt.
And on his feet, a pair of gold shoes.
This Celtic prince was the man with the golden shoes.
We didn't find the actual shoes, the leather shoes, most probably, but gold bands which were sewn on his shoes, made from very thin gold.
And you can distinguish the right and the left foot or shoe.
But it was very funny that they put the shoes Either they put the shoes the wrong way on or the woman who was sewing this gold on mixed up right and left.
That shows that they worked very fast, or it was not important, the details were not important, it was just important to put gold on this body.
This sturdy four-wheeled wagon was found in the grave of the man with the golden shoes.
Elaborate, iron-plated, made of ash and elm and maple.
Very strongly crafted iron-bound wheels.
And it was piled high with the necessities of life, or should I say, in this case, the necessities of death.
There were bowls and plates and platters and drinking vessels, hunting and slaughtering knives, in other words, utensils.
Now, what all this means is that if this funeral ritual was still fashionable today, you and I would be burying our wealthiest relative in his tomb complete with his limousine - in this case, obviously, a Rolls-Royce - and the contents of his kitchen cupboard.
Food and transport to take him grandly on.
Because this man wasn't dying.
This man was going somewhere.
The technical knowledge in this grave is rather astonishing, and in some parts, even superior to that of the Greek civilisation.
So it seems that And we know from literature and from other finds, of course, that the Celts were not a population they didn't form a state, as the Romans, for example, but they were divided in different tribes.
And one of these tribes was living here, and those people gave the origin to the later Latin the real Celtic culture and civilisation.
Wherever he was going, our Celtic prince was going to arrive in right good order.
In one corner of his tomb, they found this huge cauldron.
Talk about one for the road.
There was enough drink in this thing for the entire tribe.
Nearly 400 litres of honey mead taken from the bees of late summer.
The scientists say this was Greek, probably made in a colony in the south of Italy, and perhaps a gift from another statesman or a passing trader.
And nearby, on the walls of the tomb, hung a row of drinking horns.
This huge one, five litres large, a mighty draught for the prince himself, and there were eight others for his travelling companions.
There's something very interesting here.
In transit, or wherever, one of these handles, one of these lions, broke off, got damaged, disappeared, anyway, and a Celtic craftsman made a replacement.
It's different, it's cruder, perhaps, but it's more imaginative.
It's artistic, as distinct from being just a mass-produced handle.
The main reason for all these gold decorations was that these people wanted to show the dead person to his people.
So they made most of these gold decorations for the burial itself, they didn't use them in life.
Besides, this necklace was a status symbol, but the other objects were made for the burial, and, for example, the gold decorations on the drinking horns, they were just put on for the burial.
It's quite clear that they wanted to show the grave chamber and the dead body at the burial festivals.
I think there was it was not just a common burial, but it was a folk festival, really.
The society which generated the wealth of the Hochdorf prince was much more solid than that suggested by either the classical accounts or the term prehistoric.
This is what I suppose you'd call the shock of the old, because it always comes as a shock to our super-modern sensibilities to realise, even from a reconstruction like this, that the Celts had exactly the same basics as ourselves.
Beds, chests, shelves, even wooden tiles on the floor.
Everything here is based on ancient illustration or archaeological evidence.
All we're missing now are the ducks flying up the wall.
Reconstructions like this reflect the various advances in their lifestyle.
A Celtic farm settlement in Austria was more advanced, had more domestic amenities and comforts, than an Iron Age contemporary settlement in the west of Ireland.
This reconstruction at Craggaunowen in County Clare recreates, in schoolbook detail, the traditional Celtic lifestyle.
They always chose terrific sites to build their houses, and not just for aesthetic reasons, either.
There was fish in the lake, there were deer in the woods.
There was ample timber, rich loam for growing crops in.
The marriage of the practical and the beautiful.
Of course, water makes a marvellous defence.
Defence against what? Why would they build watchtowers? Well, naturally, to keep out warring tribes, unwelcome visitors, cattle rustlers.
The animals were kept inside the palisade.
It formed a marvellous playpen for the children, kept them safe from the wolves.
The compounds consisted of dwelling houses and storage buildings, which varied in degree, size and extent.
The family which sustained this level of civilisation was the basis for the chieftain and petty kingship system by which the Celts governed wherever they lived across Europe.
The Celtic tribal system was a major element in the early cultural structure of the continent.
The Celtic peoples had considerable influence upon all their neighbours.
And by the time the Romans reached Britain, and, indeed, established a shrine at Bath, on foundations which had long been sacred to the Celts, these barbarians had been seen and acknowledged as the fathers of Europe.
I think it's perfectly fair to refer to the Celts as the fathers of Europe because the Celts were one of the great barbarian peoples recognised by classical writers, they said the Celts were one of the great peoples of the barbarian world.
The Celts were an ethnic entity and, after all, they occupied a vast area of Europe, and the Roman interlude was comparatively short compared with the period when the Celts were emerging and developing.
They are the earliest people with a name, with a real identity in barbarian Europe, that we can point to as our roots.
So how, then, did the lurid impressions of the Celts arise? However superficial the classical reports were, they do at least give us a rough guess of what Celtic family life must have looked like.
One account made much of how the whole race is madly fond of war, but do such observations do justice to what was, after all, a mature and self-assured civilisation? The barbarian impression hardly takes account of, for instance, their sophisticated hierarchical system.
The chieftain's house was his castle.
Here he gathered round him his extended family.
Their priests, their champions, their entertainers, their servants, their children.
It was an effective way of ruling over the people.
a steed, a steed that bears McDiarmuid forth He's a mettled colt, of fairest eye I suppose it's understandable that the writers emphasise the spectacular.
Some Celtic behaviour was exaggerated.
They cut people's heads off.
They painted their own bodies.
They were boasters and braggers, said the Greeks.
Oh! This boisterousness, the wine drinking and beer drinking, and the element of bragadocio that you get amongst them, it doesn't, of course, bring into focus at all the literary aspect, the poetic aspect, and, in a sense, the religious aspect, which except insofar as this is represented in the burial remains, because when one comes down to the later ages, in Ireland and in, say, Wales, one finds lots of evidences which point to a very sophisticated religious system, which was also accompanied by a corresponding learned system.
This is the kind of thing that couldn't possibly have existed without not intellectual pretensions but intellectual performance.
The principal among the intellectual performers was the bard.
He was feared by all, even by the king, because his words were tinged with the danger of prophecy.
Those whom he praised were honoured.
Those whom he satirised lost face.
Fervent verses I owe to him whose countenance is ruddy as the dark wine McDiarmuid, with tense tresses awound with long locks, fierce and noble The steed that bears Maguire forth is a halt, pot-bellied nag Upon his meagre, mangy hump is placed his rider's mouldering pillion The steed that bears McDiarmuid forth is a mettled colt of fairest eye! The warrior's slim horse, as he skims the ground makes a breach for the pure wind to enter What I particularly enjoy about the Celts is the they were human beings who behaved in a way which we can actually recognise, because that kind of behaviour is inherent in us.
And the Celt, simply because he lived a couple of thousand years ago, and dressed in a particular way, was no different from us, he was a human being, constrained in his behaviour in the same way as we are.
Now, for example, Celtic battle was a very simple concept in its original style.
The two conflicting hordes met, their chieftains and heroes went out in single combat, and had a a number of combats, and when that was over, normally, everyone would go home.
It was a contest, it was ritualised battle, and in many ways, our football match is precisely that, it's a ritualised battle, very territorial, in which the heroes from the two territories come together and they compete.
One of their diversions involved playing with death.
Several ancient writers described how the Celts sometimes engage in single combat at dinner.
Assembling in arms, they have a mock battle drill and a mutual thrust and parry.
But, sometimes wounds are inflicted, and the irritation caused by this may even lead to the slaying of the opponent, unless the bystanders hold them back.
In most cases, though, it was show.
Young lions sharpening their claws.
Hold! The Celts that we read about and we study archaeologically were in a fairly primitive form of their development.
They were organised in kingdoms, and with chieftains, chiefdoms as well.
And they didn't really begin to get together to form a state.
But we can begin to see the beginnings of it in central Gaul just before Caesar, when the idea of the king and the chieftain is very much politically downgraded and is totally unacceptable.
To aspire to kingship was a very serious crime, and what you find there is elected magistrates, courts, large urban centres and a money economy, and these are the movements towards statehood.
The physical structure of statehood had actually been fashioned already in miniature.
Fortresses like Maiden Castle on the south coast of England could have become the powerful strongholds of an empire.
The Celtic tribes who occupied these ramparts had virtually created a mini-state, with tremendous authority over the countryside and the coastline.
All the Celtic hill forts, by virtue of their position, had autonomy and security.
Maiden Castle itself resisted wave after wave of invader.
In Britain, in Ireland, Germany, France, Austria, could the Celtic hill forts have become links in a powerful chain of command across Europe? But the Celts were about to be engulfed by history.
Their world, their continent had begun to shrink, and their reduction, their ultimate confinement to the shoals of the northwestern Atlantic was about to begin.
Take them on the wing at the height of their powers, all across Europe, say, two centuries before Christ.
Now, the word which seems to me to characterise them at that point is the word energy.
Their system of government was tribal, familial, hierarchical and vigorous.
They seemed strong and assured, they had all the assets which confidence brings.
Their mythologies and rituals had given them a moral system and a depth.
They were known, respected and feared.
They were swift, warlike, fierce and lethal.
At this point, they could have and perhaps should have gone on to become one of the really great civilisations of the world.
But they didn't.
The fact is, they never united politically in the sense of becoming one nation, and so they never united militarily.
And they paid for this with their identity.
At the point where statehood could have evolved, in France at least, the Western Empire of Rome came marching upwards.
Julius Caesar's war machine divided and conquered.
The disciplined legions of Rome routed the romantic Celt.
The principles of death rather than dishonour were useless to the dying Gaul.
The Romans always had the upper hand.
The Celts never had an army.
For one brief moment, though, in central France, it looked as if the Celts just might win.
And that was when they united in one vast army under the mighty warrior king Vercingetorix.
He was the son of a nobleman from the Auvergne.
Summae diligenciae was how Caesar described him in his own account of the Gallic Wars, a man of, massive energy, super Celt, in fact.
Vercingetorix and his huge army, drawn from all the tribes of France, forced Caesar and his legions back on their heels on several occasions, until the crunch came at the Battle of Alesia, 52 BC, a watershed in the history of the Celts.
From specially and speedily built siege works, fortifications - these are reconstructions - Julius Caesar finally was able to see off the Celts' last stand.
Well, Frank, my old Celt, I see you've reduced your tribal horde into something approaching military discipline.
And that Caesar might as well have been playing war games himself.
Vercingetorix retreated to the town of Alesia on a hilltop.
And made a trap for himself.
All Caesar had to do was sit it out.
Now I've moved my man forward to the edge of your fortifications.
What happens next? Well, they're going to try and struggle through these pits, and they'll be jolly lucky if they get to the other side, because these are deep and they have sharpened stakes in the bottom of them.
I rather believe that your people wear rather odd garments, or none at all and I should think it would be very unpleasant.
Then you've got the wall.
Now, what you're going to do with that That Roman legionary's waiting for you at the top.
Destricto ensi.
Latin remark.
With drawn swords.
Those horrid little swords the Romans use.
We shall have our long slashing swords, which are much more effective.
But what will you be on? Will you be on a ladder? - Ladders, yes.
- Yes, well.
They'll decapitate you as you come up the ladder.
I think we can probably take a few of you with us.
Well, I daresay a few.
You can't have an omelette, you know.
Now I'm attacking your walls from the front There's absolutely no doubt that the Celts were particularly good at the first rush.
And Caesar himself talks about the great danger of fighting a Celtic army.
It was that the first rush was bravely delivered, they came on with tremendous determination.
But Caesar reckoned that they had no long-term staying power.
They would rush very bravely, the individuals making up the Celtic army would fight extremely hard, but they wouldn't react particularly effectively to Roman moves, they wouldn't be able to sustain themselves in the field for long.
So if the Romans could sustain themselves in the face of the immediate pressure, they would then grind the Celts down by organised tactics, by discipline, by the discipline and organisation which would actually enable inferior Roman numbers to triumph over superior Celtic numbers.
Because we're really seeing an early example of the triumph of organisation over disorganisation.
So we have various sorts of mêlée developing at night, through the day, from midday until sundown, Caesar says, they fought.
But finally, alas, Vercingetorix is defeated.
The following day, even before they had buried their dead warriors, Vercingetorix addressed his defeated chieftains.
He said to them, "I didn't undertake this war for personal gain.
"I did it in the cause of national liberty.
" But he had failed and therefore he had, as was the custom, to place himself at their disposal.
Which meant that they could choose either to kill him themselves, or to surrender him to the Romans.
Surrender was agreed upon.
And, typically, he decked himself out in his most magnificent robes, and presented himself at the tent of Julius Caesar.
They kept him in captivity for six years.
Caesar conquered Gaul, and when he returned home to Rome and triumph, Vercigetorix was paraded as one of his prizes through the streets like some zoo animal, and then these civilised Romans strangled this great chieftain and thereby snuffed out the last vestiges of a cohesive Celtic identity.
The history of any civilisation is also a history of savagery, usually inflicted at the beginning and usually suffered at the end, and the greatest barbarism which the Celts experienced was not, I believe, the Roman colonisation, nor the Anglo-Saxon conquest.
It was cultural.
Ultimately, they were destroyed, wiped out, by romantic nonsense, insulting stereotype.
Because if you pursue that most lovely of Celtic idioms, the quest, the search for soul, for roots, you do not arrive at a kingly castle with wimpled maidens and winsome heroes on white horses, and druids and a certain wild singing, drinking charm.
You arrive in a family circle of solidly built houses inhabited by intelligent farmers who scratched, clawed, fought their way up the ladder of existence, until they reach the point where they were entitled to be called a civilisation.
And nothing less than that view is valid, even in the walking, talking, standing still cliché that is television.
If you get behind the picture, you'll find, here at Hallstatt, the very first proof that there ever was a people called Celts.
Not Scotland, nor Wales, nor Ireland.
The village of Hallstatt feels like a place scarcely touched by time.
Alps enclose it.
The lake, they say, is bottomless.
I hadn't expected such an inaccessible place to be a major source of Celtic identity.
But once upon a time, the Hallstatt community had power and energy in enough quantity to connect this remote place with the outside world.
The source of this distinction? A huge natural resource, a vital ingredient in ancient economies.
They mined the salt here.
Over two and a half thousand years ago, they burrowed into this mountain and, marvellously, the salt preserved them, and in time, came to identify them.
The trouble with the past, of course, is dust to dust.
Unless you've got some salt.
This mud comes from the oldest salt mine in the world, and has been used here in this Austrian spa town.
It's been used to heal, to preserve the body.
By cocooning herself in this ancient mud, this girl is protecting herself against the ravages of time.
And exactly the same principle, and exactly the same mineral, leads us to the Celts.
Because the implements of the ancient miners were also preserved.
Their headgear, their drinking utensils, and, to carry the salt to the collection point, a hod made of wood and leather.
Such local curiosities caught the imagination of a mining engineer, Georg Ramsauer, director of operations at Hallstatt.
In 1846, Ramsauer turned amateur archaeologist, and he made an extraordinary discovery.
On the slopes above the mine, he found a vast burial ground, over two and a half thousand graves.
This was the cemetery of the Hallstatt upper classes.
Buried ritually, festooned with their worldly goods.
Their jewels, their weapons, their wealth.
A local artist recorded Ramsauer's find.
The skeletons, the little piles of grave goods.
And professional antiquarians began to take an interest.
They too began with the salt.
Just over a century ago, archaeologists from Vienna came in here and found, preserved in the salt, traces, objects which they recognised.
And from them, they began to put together a picture which has been referred to ever since as the Hallstatt Period.
The first tangible date for the Celts.
700 years before Christ.
This is how the picture began to unfold.
First of all, they, the archaeologists, turned to the ancient verbal reports of the Greeks and the Etruscans who said that they had been trading with a people, a very distinctive people, who lived in this region.
Then came the words, however wide of the mark, of the old historians.
And finally, there was the cosmopolitan influence evident on the swords and the daggers and the brooches found here at Hallstatt.
And the archaeologists agreed that the people who lived and mined here were the same people, that same hardworking, restless, imaginative people that the Greeks called Keltoi.
At the same time as Hallstatt's aristocracy flourished, another burial mound in Austria received this.
A little bronze cart on which a goddess, surrounded by armed warriors and antlered animals, leads the dead person in procession to the afterlife.
It's very small.
The entire piece would almost fit in a shoebox.
But its implications are enormous.
Their funeral rites hallmarked the early Celts.
People were buried with the things they loved, or with specially made objects.
Jewellery, less prestigious everyday pieces.
Hallstatt, the place and the period, was the point at which the Celts were first identified.
They were recognised by the design of the goods they buried.
And when all their past was excavated, the old map of Europe began to change colour.
Because, before these discoveries, the word "civilisation" had meant, largely, Greece and Rome.
But now, thanks to the miners of Hallstatt, all those old bets were off.
Hallstatt is no longer just the place name of a remote Austrian village.
It's an archaeological definition of early Celtic civilisation, roughly 700 to 500 BC.
I think that the criteria by which modern archaeologists would identify the Celts would, of course, be mainly material.
Artefacts and burials and equipment of that sort.
But of course, these weren't necessarily the criteria by which the classical authors identified the Celts.
They think of the Celts as people who were the principal barbarian people north of the Alps.
By barbarians, of course They didn't use the word in our modern sense, but rather in the sense of people who lived outside the Roman the area of Roman culture and Roman domination.
And I think that they would have been thinking primarily of language.
And this is useful, this is important, because it does mean that to the classical authors, Latin and Greek of, say, the third, second century BC, the Celts were recognised as having a certain homogeneity based primarily upon language.
Also, presumably, on lifestyle.
Like any other early society, the Celts were distinctive in the way in which they developed from the primitive.
Their ancestors graduated from hunting food to producing it.
They cleared forests, raised stock, settled in river valleys, the Danube and the Rhine.
Their houses, also, were distinctive, large and circular, built of planks and wickerwork, with a dome of heavy thatch.
They wrote nothing down, a fact which misrepresents them.
Non-literate doesn't mean they were non-intellectual.
Those who did encounter them reported "the vanity which makes them unbearable", but they were a warrior elite, and "given to garrulousness", but they had an oral tradition.
"To the frankness and high-spiritedness of their temperament "must be added traits of childish boastfulness "and love of decorations," said the Greeks.
A typical emergent nation, showy and self-regarding, tribal and opportunistic, who believed in glorifying individuality and who cultivated the power of the family unit.
The Celts were a successful farming, trading society, who had wealth and comfort and security and leisure.
Boo! Aaah! Whenever one runs into a successful economy, it is a powerful, powerful society which sustains that economy.
And therefore, we can think in terms of the Celtic culture, which, of course, spans most of northern Europe, including the British Isles, as a powerful balance, if you like, to the Greek and Roman world, about which we know so much.
It's quite unfair to regard this as a subsistence society simply because we have no written records.
The artefactual remains suggest it's a vibrant, highly organised, multi-structured society, which is very powerful.
Again and again, you find this power and wealth in their artefacts.
For example, the Snettisham torc, 20 centimetres across, made of gold, with a little silver, some copper, found in Norfolk in 1950.
It's not so much what they buried - domestic utensils, pots, beakers, personal ornamentation, horse trappings, the bones of sacrificial victims - it wasn't so much what they buried as how they're buried.
In one entire era, certain prehistoric European societies over in the east of Europe cremated, and then they put the bones and the ashes in huge urns and buried those in fields.
Vast cemeteries.
Along with these urn-fielders, there were tumulus graves, long, large barrows uniting entire families in death.
These consistent and unique patterns of burial and grave-goods, when they radiated out across Europe, disclosed the Celts in the beginnings of their culture.
Cheshire, England.
In a waterlogged marsh, a gruesome prehistoric mystery.
In August 1984, workers harvesting peat collided sharply with their own past.
The digger sliced through a body.
The police were called in.
But this post mortem was a matter of unusually delicate and complex pathology, and it wasn't a police matter.
The British Museum became coroners for a time.
This wasn't a recent death.
The body was over 2,000 years old.
Here was an opportunity to use all the technology of modern science to scrutinise the past.
Biologists, zoologists, radiologists, computer scientists, forensic scientists, surgeons - out of their intricate cooperation, the bizarre details emerged.
Left shoulder uppermost, the body had been lying on its right-hand side, half curled up.
The peat had preserved and tanned the skin, even though the bone beneath had decomposed to the point where the joints had frayed.
Face down, the left ear bent over, the head had been flattened by the pressure of centuries of slime and peat.
Slowly, the figure began to take real shape.
When the face was turned around, it became apparent that this was the body of a well-nourished young man, five feet six inches tall, weighing about ten stone.
Not a slave, not a labourer, a well-kept man.
He had a neatly trimmed moustache and beard.
Is it the top lip or is it the bottom lip, in fact? If you come Look at the way that hair's growing there.
Yes.
The piecing together of the last hours of the dead man's life had to surmount problems which had accumulated for over 2,000 years.
We're going to need a lot of careful study, because of the distortion that has occurred.
A general surgeon from Nottingham Hospital followed the usual post mortem procedures, and investigated the contents of the stomach.
The mechanical digger had sliced the body more or less in half.
One leg was missing.
And under the abdominal flap of skin, the next clues.
- I think that's the stomach.
- Yeah.
Almost certainly.
There, it's got some solids Got a pair of scissors? This is his oesophagus in my left fingers, left hand.
Then it gives way into his stomach, and I've got the first part of his duodenum in my right hand.
And you can see that there are some food debris residues present, actually, in the sac of the stomach.
Microscopic examination revealed the details of the dead man's last meal.
Some form of wholemeal bread, baked over a fire of heather, and, according to the traces of moss found in the stomach, washed down with water from a local pool.
He'd also been infested with worms.
Cause of death? The X-rays of the cranium showed a nasty wound, forensically consistent with a downward blow or two.
The interesting one this is under the wound, in the top of the head, isn't it? - Right through it, yes.
- You see the fragment actually driven in.
Which, again, confirms a narrow striking object.
Probably something like a small axe.
From the looks of that wound, driven in twice.
Fascinating.
But the edges of the wound had swollen at the time, which wouldn't have happened if death had been instantaneous.
You can see the wound there with its flap of skin, which is typical of a lacerated wound - in fact, two lacerated wounds joined together.
In fact, the cause of death was a garotte, still in evidence, which broke the dead man's neck, after which his throat had been cut, just beneath the noose.
The unfortunate victim was most likely a ritual sacrifice.
He was naked, except for a band of fox fur on his arm.
He was hit on the head, kneed in the back, garotted and stabbed, in the marshlands of Lindow Moss, sometime between 300 BC and anno Domini.
This is a reconstruction of Lindow Man's head.
Sacrificed to a Celtic water deity? The historian Tacitus made an observation about the Celtic tribes.
"Traitors and deserters are hanged on trees.
"Cowards, shirkers and sodomites "are pressed down in the slimy mud of a bog.
" Less than a hundred miles away, to the east of Lindow, in Yorkshire, recent digs uncovered a form of burial rarely found elsewhere in Britain.
In one grave, they found a pair of chariot wheels, as well as the relevant yokes and horse trappings.
Such burial rites are rare in ancient Britain, and they reflect those practised by the Iron Age Celts in eastern and central Europe.
The Yorkshire graves, when opened, could have come straight from the drawings made at Hallstatt.
They pose a question.
How did this extraordinary similarity occur? "They are wont to change their abode on slight provocation, " wrote the first-century Greek historian Strabo.
"They migrate in bands, with all their battle array, "or they set out with all their households, "when displaced by a stronger enemy.
" Wanderlust, the romance of travel, restless movement.
Certainly all part of the image of the Celts.
Random spontaneous migrations brought them, like so many others, into Europe, after the Ice Age had melted, in search of the good land.
And from where? Who knows? "From the fringes of the most ancient East," according to one scribe.
From the foothills of the Himalayas? Perhaps, because certainly, their earliest traces, and their languages, do give solid proof of an Indo-European core.
Up through Asia Minor, Scythia, centuries of straggling, sporadic wagon trains, exotic nomads, into and across the great Hungarian plain.
And then, even when they did settle, they still moved, because the eldest son of a family, an overcrowded family, would take his dependants and buy a one-way ticket to fame and fortune.
And on and on that pattern must have repeated itself, over and over again, until eventually, there they were, a bright, individual, recognisable people splashed across the entire fabric of Europe, from Bohemia to Belgium.
The people whom we would eventually call Celts had arrived.
Since the days when they were first identified by the Greeks as the Keltoi, the strangers, the outsiders, their migrations were a European travelogue.
Ancient fragments of inscription, Celtic languages still recognisable in place names, heroic local legends, these are the landmarks in their colourful pathways.
Their origins lie hidden beneath the foundations of great cities, in places which seem unexpected, exotic, even.
Especially if you compare them with the clichés we now associate with the word Celtic.
Well, there are no thatched cottages, nor kilts, nor shillelaghs here in Budapest.
But the Celts were here too.
That hill, that was a Celtic fort.
Eastern Europe, Hungary, has as much a place in their story as Ireland or Wales because here, they dwelt.
But these carvings in the Hungarian plains outside Budapest show how their traces evaporated.
These are not purely Celtic.
The references are cross-fertilised because centuries of other cultures mingled here.
The Celts who raided the Balkans encountered Cimmerians, Illyrians, Thracians, Romans.
Celtic investigations here are frustrated by the silting up of so many other cultures.
But in occasional finds - pottery, house traces - the evidence is sufficient to prove their presence here conclusively, although nothing like the huge find which identified the second great phase of the Celtic world.
On the shores of Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland, at a place called La Tène, in the latter part of the last century, the waters of an old river dropped suddenly to a freakishly low level.
In the mud, Celtic treasure trove.
Masses of different artefacts, many of them made in a distinctive new style.
La Tène was the site of a prosperous Celtic settlement.
There's been continuous life of one kind or another along this lake shore for centuries.
Excavation is a prominent feature here.
An artefact classified as La Tène culture - that's from 500 BC onwards - therefore implies something with a particular sophistication.
The objects which come under the heading La Tène culture are remarkable.
The Celts were turning out artefacts of this quality 500 years before Christ, the product of a spontaneous imaginative spurt.
But their fine art reached a summit in one breathtaking object, in the magnificent Gundestrup cauldron.
It's huge, made of sheets of silver, each one heavily decorated, as if to tell a story.
It was found buried in a bog in Denmark.
It summarises the brilliance and skill of all Celtic culture.
If Hallstatt was the root, then La Tène was the flower.
There was a major practical dimension to the ornate art, and one which was crucial to their emergence as a European power.
They had taken a skill in its infancy in the Bronze Age and developed it.
Now, a new metal came into their hands which increased their warlike capacities and gave them an awesome, almost mystical dimension, in the same way as their horsemanship had done.
The horse, the great enabler, more than a mode of transport, a means of heroic distinction.
Imagine how they must have looked, those Celtic riders.
Stunning prowess.
Even the haughty Romans were impressed when the Celts rode roughshod, literally over them.
And the smith? He was in the pay of the gods.
Not because he shod their horses, he didn't.
No need to.
No roads.
But because he commanded iron.
That quantum leap that gave the Celts greater force.
Iron weapons gave them superior power, mightier glory.
And when the iron went into their soul, it became the stuff of legend.
Warriors, champions, the strangers called Keltoi.
They lived in their own epics and they died in them.
The technicoloured impression we have of the word Celt came from that new and savage superiority over their contemporaries north of the Alps.
This, now, was a primary Iron Age people, whose weapons cut deeper, lasted longer.
The use of iron enabled them to raid and slaughter and defend, to achieve fearsome reputations, and to control their subjects even in death.
A plateau of Celtic power was reached by a prince in southern Germany, not far from the river Danube.
In 1978, an archaeologist called George Bean arrived in the locality of Hochdorf, near Stuttgart, to investigate another chance find.
The local schoolteacher had observed what she called "untypical stones".
The ploughs, she said, kept striking large rocks.
What she had stumbled upon was a tumulus on the edge of the village.
The Hochdorf treasure, the greatest single Celtic find of the 20th century.
The Stuttgart area has always been wealthy.
This is an ancient trading post.
Since prehistoric times, travellers have been stopping in these parts.
The contents of the Hochdorf tumulus were taken to the museum in Stuttgart.
Five years of detailed investigation then began, in the laboratories behind the public section.
The intention, to summarise and qualify and restore the proceeds of the grave.
In this find, there wasn't a body.
It had decomposed.
Nevertheless, there were new and startling pieces of hard evidence which could be subject to analysis.
Forensics.
That's why I'm here.
Science, analysis, backup.
The hard facts.
And how exciting those facts are.
What do you think this is? Well, since forensics makes archaeology come alive, all the clues are here.
It's made of bronze, well-fashioned.
When it was found, it was highly polished.
In the bronze, you will find embedded pieces of fabric.
The fabric analysis says hemp, wool, the fur of badgers.
The scientists also found traces of pollen here.
They were able to deduct from that that the flowers came in the late summer.
Other clues, the illustrations.
Those horses.
Like cave drawings? No, they're a bit more sophisticated than that.
And these drawings, those people, are they dancing or fighting? Whatever they're doing, there's an air of ritual about them.
Ritual, that's the key word.
That's the word to stick with.
This was a funeral bed, a bier, of a grand Celtic prince.
He was a big man, in every sense.
He was about six feet tall, around 40 years of age.
And when they laid him out here, in the summer of 550 BC, on this bronze couch, this bronze sofa, on eight castors, resting on eight small female statues, they garlanded him with flowers, they dressed him in fine robes.
And they bedecked him with gold.
A gold neckband, Gold brooches and fasteners for his cloaks.
A gold armlet.
An exquisite dagger, beautifully fashioned and configured, tapered, burnished with the finest of gold.
Obviously, a prized possession, which was lying on top of a gold belt.
And on his feet, a pair of gold shoes.
This Celtic prince was the man with the golden shoes.
We didn't find the actual shoes, the leather shoes, most probably, but gold bands which were sewn on his shoes, made from very thin gold.
And you can distinguish the right and the left foot or shoe.
But it was very funny that they put the shoes Either they put the shoes the wrong way on or the woman who was sewing this gold on mixed up right and left.
That shows that they worked very fast, or it was not important, the details were not important, it was just important to put gold on this body.
This sturdy four-wheeled wagon was found in the grave of the man with the golden shoes.
Elaborate, iron-plated, made of ash and elm and maple.
Very strongly crafted iron-bound wheels.
And it was piled high with the necessities of life, or should I say, in this case, the necessities of death.
There were bowls and plates and platters and drinking vessels, hunting and slaughtering knives, in other words, utensils.
Now, what all this means is that if this funeral ritual was still fashionable today, you and I would be burying our wealthiest relative in his tomb complete with his limousine - in this case, obviously, a Rolls-Royce - and the contents of his kitchen cupboard.
Food and transport to take him grandly on.
Because this man wasn't dying.
This man was going somewhere.
The technical knowledge in this grave is rather astonishing, and in some parts, even superior to that of the Greek civilisation.
So it seems that And we know from literature and from other finds, of course, that the Celts were not a population they didn't form a state, as the Romans, for example, but they were divided in different tribes.
And one of these tribes was living here, and those people gave the origin to the later Latin the real Celtic culture and civilisation.
Wherever he was going, our Celtic prince was going to arrive in right good order.
In one corner of his tomb, they found this huge cauldron.
Talk about one for the road.
There was enough drink in this thing for the entire tribe.
Nearly 400 litres of honey mead taken from the bees of late summer.
The scientists say this was Greek, probably made in a colony in the south of Italy, and perhaps a gift from another statesman or a passing trader.
And nearby, on the walls of the tomb, hung a row of drinking horns.
This huge one, five litres large, a mighty draught for the prince himself, and there were eight others for his travelling companions.
There's something very interesting here.
In transit, or wherever, one of these handles, one of these lions, broke off, got damaged, disappeared, anyway, and a Celtic craftsman made a replacement.
It's different, it's cruder, perhaps, but it's more imaginative.
It's artistic, as distinct from being just a mass-produced handle.
The main reason for all these gold decorations was that these people wanted to show the dead person to his people.
So they made most of these gold decorations for the burial itself, they didn't use them in life.
Besides, this necklace was a status symbol, but the other objects were made for the burial, and, for example, the gold decorations on the drinking horns, they were just put on for the burial.
It's quite clear that they wanted to show the grave chamber and the dead body at the burial festivals.
I think there was it was not just a common burial, but it was a folk festival, really.
The society which generated the wealth of the Hochdorf prince was much more solid than that suggested by either the classical accounts or the term prehistoric.
This is what I suppose you'd call the shock of the old, because it always comes as a shock to our super-modern sensibilities to realise, even from a reconstruction like this, that the Celts had exactly the same basics as ourselves.
Beds, chests, shelves, even wooden tiles on the floor.
Everything here is based on ancient illustration or archaeological evidence.
All we're missing now are the ducks flying up the wall.
Reconstructions like this reflect the various advances in their lifestyle.
A Celtic farm settlement in Austria was more advanced, had more domestic amenities and comforts, than an Iron Age contemporary settlement in the west of Ireland.
This reconstruction at Craggaunowen in County Clare recreates, in schoolbook detail, the traditional Celtic lifestyle.
They always chose terrific sites to build their houses, and not just for aesthetic reasons, either.
There was fish in the lake, there were deer in the woods.
There was ample timber, rich loam for growing crops in.
The marriage of the practical and the beautiful.
Of course, water makes a marvellous defence.
Defence against what? Why would they build watchtowers? Well, naturally, to keep out warring tribes, unwelcome visitors, cattle rustlers.
The animals were kept inside the palisade.
It formed a marvellous playpen for the children, kept them safe from the wolves.
The compounds consisted of dwelling houses and storage buildings, which varied in degree, size and extent.
The family which sustained this level of civilisation was the basis for the chieftain and petty kingship system by which the Celts governed wherever they lived across Europe.
The Celtic tribal system was a major element in the early cultural structure of the continent.
The Celtic peoples had considerable influence upon all their neighbours.
And by the time the Romans reached Britain, and, indeed, established a shrine at Bath, on foundations which had long been sacred to the Celts, these barbarians had been seen and acknowledged as the fathers of Europe.
I think it's perfectly fair to refer to the Celts as the fathers of Europe because the Celts were one of the great barbarian peoples recognised by classical writers, they said the Celts were one of the great peoples of the barbarian world.
The Celts were an ethnic entity and, after all, they occupied a vast area of Europe, and the Roman interlude was comparatively short compared with the period when the Celts were emerging and developing.
They are the earliest people with a name, with a real identity in barbarian Europe, that we can point to as our roots.
So how, then, did the lurid impressions of the Celts arise? However superficial the classical reports were, they do at least give us a rough guess of what Celtic family life must have looked like.
One account made much of how the whole race is madly fond of war, but do such observations do justice to what was, after all, a mature and self-assured civilisation? The barbarian impression hardly takes account of, for instance, their sophisticated hierarchical system.
The chieftain's house was his castle.
Here he gathered round him his extended family.
Their priests, their champions, their entertainers, their servants, their children.
It was an effective way of ruling over the people.
a steed, a steed that bears McDiarmuid forth He's a mettled colt, of fairest eye I suppose it's understandable that the writers emphasise the spectacular.
Some Celtic behaviour was exaggerated.
They cut people's heads off.
They painted their own bodies.
They were boasters and braggers, said the Greeks.
Oh! This boisterousness, the wine drinking and beer drinking, and the element of bragadocio that you get amongst them, it doesn't, of course, bring into focus at all the literary aspect, the poetic aspect, and, in a sense, the religious aspect, which except insofar as this is represented in the burial remains, because when one comes down to the later ages, in Ireland and in, say, Wales, one finds lots of evidences which point to a very sophisticated religious system, which was also accompanied by a corresponding learned system.
This is the kind of thing that couldn't possibly have existed without not intellectual pretensions but intellectual performance.
The principal among the intellectual performers was the bard.
He was feared by all, even by the king, because his words were tinged with the danger of prophecy.
Those whom he praised were honoured.
Those whom he satirised lost face.
Fervent verses I owe to him whose countenance is ruddy as the dark wine McDiarmuid, with tense tresses awound with long locks, fierce and noble The steed that bears Maguire forth is a halt, pot-bellied nag Upon his meagre, mangy hump is placed his rider's mouldering pillion The steed that bears McDiarmuid forth is a mettled colt of fairest eye! The warrior's slim horse, as he skims the ground makes a breach for the pure wind to enter What I particularly enjoy about the Celts is the they were human beings who behaved in a way which we can actually recognise, because that kind of behaviour is inherent in us.
And the Celt, simply because he lived a couple of thousand years ago, and dressed in a particular way, was no different from us, he was a human being, constrained in his behaviour in the same way as we are.
Now, for example, Celtic battle was a very simple concept in its original style.
The two conflicting hordes met, their chieftains and heroes went out in single combat, and had a a number of combats, and when that was over, normally, everyone would go home.
It was a contest, it was ritualised battle, and in many ways, our football match is precisely that, it's a ritualised battle, very territorial, in which the heroes from the two territories come together and they compete.
One of their diversions involved playing with death.
Several ancient writers described how the Celts sometimes engage in single combat at dinner.
Assembling in arms, they have a mock battle drill and a mutual thrust and parry.
But, sometimes wounds are inflicted, and the irritation caused by this may even lead to the slaying of the opponent, unless the bystanders hold them back.
In most cases, though, it was show.
Young lions sharpening their claws.
Hold! The Celts that we read about and we study archaeologically were in a fairly primitive form of their development.
They were organised in kingdoms, and with chieftains, chiefdoms as well.
And they didn't really begin to get together to form a state.
But we can begin to see the beginnings of it in central Gaul just before Caesar, when the idea of the king and the chieftain is very much politically downgraded and is totally unacceptable.
To aspire to kingship was a very serious crime, and what you find there is elected magistrates, courts, large urban centres and a money economy, and these are the movements towards statehood.
The physical structure of statehood had actually been fashioned already in miniature.
Fortresses like Maiden Castle on the south coast of England could have become the powerful strongholds of an empire.
The Celtic tribes who occupied these ramparts had virtually created a mini-state, with tremendous authority over the countryside and the coastline.
All the Celtic hill forts, by virtue of their position, had autonomy and security.
Maiden Castle itself resisted wave after wave of invader.
In Britain, in Ireland, Germany, France, Austria, could the Celtic hill forts have become links in a powerful chain of command across Europe? But the Celts were about to be engulfed by history.
Their world, their continent had begun to shrink, and their reduction, their ultimate confinement to the shoals of the northwestern Atlantic was about to begin.
Take them on the wing at the height of their powers, all across Europe, say, two centuries before Christ.
Now, the word which seems to me to characterise them at that point is the word energy.
Their system of government was tribal, familial, hierarchical and vigorous.
They seemed strong and assured, they had all the assets which confidence brings.
Their mythologies and rituals had given them a moral system and a depth.
They were known, respected and feared.
They were swift, warlike, fierce and lethal.
At this point, they could have and perhaps should have gone on to become one of the really great civilisations of the world.
But they didn't.
The fact is, they never united politically in the sense of becoming one nation, and so they never united militarily.
And they paid for this with their identity.
At the point where statehood could have evolved, in France at least, the Western Empire of Rome came marching upwards.
Julius Caesar's war machine divided and conquered.
The disciplined legions of Rome routed the romantic Celt.
The principles of death rather than dishonour were useless to the dying Gaul.
The Romans always had the upper hand.
The Celts never had an army.
For one brief moment, though, in central France, it looked as if the Celts just might win.
And that was when they united in one vast army under the mighty warrior king Vercingetorix.
He was the son of a nobleman from the Auvergne.
Summae diligenciae was how Caesar described him in his own account of the Gallic Wars, a man of, massive energy, super Celt, in fact.
Vercingetorix and his huge army, drawn from all the tribes of France, forced Caesar and his legions back on their heels on several occasions, until the crunch came at the Battle of Alesia, 52 BC, a watershed in the history of the Celts.
From specially and speedily built siege works, fortifications - these are reconstructions - Julius Caesar finally was able to see off the Celts' last stand.
Well, Frank, my old Celt, I see you've reduced your tribal horde into something approaching military discipline.
And that Caesar might as well have been playing war games himself.
Vercingetorix retreated to the town of Alesia on a hilltop.
And made a trap for himself.
All Caesar had to do was sit it out.
Now I've moved my man forward to the edge of your fortifications.
What happens next? Well, they're going to try and struggle through these pits, and they'll be jolly lucky if they get to the other side, because these are deep and they have sharpened stakes in the bottom of them.
I rather believe that your people wear rather odd garments, or none at all and I should think it would be very unpleasant.
Then you've got the wall.
Now, what you're going to do with that That Roman legionary's waiting for you at the top.
Destricto ensi.
Latin remark.
With drawn swords.
Those horrid little swords the Romans use.
We shall have our long slashing swords, which are much more effective.
But what will you be on? Will you be on a ladder? - Ladders, yes.
- Yes, well.
They'll decapitate you as you come up the ladder.
I think we can probably take a few of you with us.
Well, I daresay a few.
You can't have an omelette, you know.
Now I'm attacking your walls from the front There's absolutely no doubt that the Celts were particularly good at the first rush.
And Caesar himself talks about the great danger of fighting a Celtic army.
It was that the first rush was bravely delivered, they came on with tremendous determination.
But Caesar reckoned that they had no long-term staying power.
They would rush very bravely, the individuals making up the Celtic army would fight extremely hard, but they wouldn't react particularly effectively to Roman moves, they wouldn't be able to sustain themselves in the field for long.
So if the Romans could sustain themselves in the face of the immediate pressure, they would then grind the Celts down by organised tactics, by discipline, by the discipline and organisation which would actually enable inferior Roman numbers to triumph over superior Celtic numbers.
Because we're really seeing an early example of the triumph of organisation over disorganisation.
So we have various sorts of mêlée developing at night, through the day, from midday until sundown, Caesar says, they fought.
But finally, alas, Vercingetorix is defeated.
The following day, even before they had buried their dead warriors, Vercingetorix addressed his defeated chieftains.
He said to them, "I didn't undertake this war for personal gain.
"I did it in the cause of national liberty.
" But he had failed and therefore he had, as was the custom, to place himself at their disposal.
Which meant that they could choose either to kill him themselves, or to surrender him to the Romans.
Surrender was agreed upon.
And, typically, he decked himself out in his most magnificent robes, and presented himself at the tent of Julius Caesar.
They kept him in captivity for six years.
Caesar conquered Gaul, and when he returned home to Rome and triumph, Vercigetorix was paraded as one of his prizes through the streets like some zoo animal, and then these civilised Romans strangled this great chieftain and thereby snuffed out the last vestiges of a cohesive Celtic identity.
The history of any civilisation is also a history of savagery, usually inflicted at the beginning and usually suffered at the end, and the greatest barbarism which the Celts experienced was not, I believe, the Roman colonisation, nor the Anglo-Saxon conquest.
It was cultural.
Ultimately, they were destroyed, wiped out, by romantic nonsense, insulting stereotype.
Because if you pursue that most lovely of Celtic idioms, the quest, the search for soul, for roots, you do not arrive at a kingly castle with wimpled maidens and winsome heroes on white horses, and druids and a certain wild singing, drinking charm.
You arrive in a family circle of solidly built houses inhabited by intelligent farmers who scratched, clawed, fought their way up the ladder of existence, until they reach the point where they were entitled to be called a civilisation.
And nothing less than that view is valid, even in the walking, talking, standing still cliché that is television.