229. The Hallstadt and LaTène Periods
North of the Mediterranean lands, the prehistoric Iron Age of Europe is divided into two periods: that of Hallstadt, named after a site in Austria, and lasting from about 900 to 500 B.C.; and that of LaTène, designated from a famous discovery in Switzerland, which stretched from 500 B.C. until almost the birth of Christ. The Hallstadt period is better developed in middle than in western Europe: it was influenced from Greece, the Balkans, and Italy. It prevailed along the Adriatic and Danube as far as Bosnia and Hungary; over all but northern Germany; in Switzerland; and in eastern France. Its flow was northwestward. The LaTène culture was carried primarily by Kelts, falls into the period of their greatest extension and prosperity, and centers in France. Here it seems to have developed under the stimulus of Greek colonization at Marseilles, to have spread northward to the British Isles, and eastward into central Europe. Its general flow was northeastward.
Considerable iron and bronze work of some technical fineness was made during the Hallstadt and LaTène periods. Fibulas, jewelry, weapons, and cult apparatus were often elaborate. But the quality of the cultures remained homespun, backward, and barbaric as compared with the plasticity and polish which contemporary Greek civilization had attained.
The Hallstadt culture, for instance, was wholly without cities, stone architecture or bridges, paved roads, coins, writing of any sort, the potter’s wheel, or rotary millstone; nor was metal used for agricultural implements. It was a time of villages, small towns, and scattered homes; of sacred groves instead of temples; of boggy roads, of ox-carts and solid wooden wheels; of a heavy, barbaric, warlike population, half like European peasants, half like pioneers; self-content, yet always dimly conscious that in the southern distance there lay lands of wealth, refinement, and achievement.
The LaTène time showed many advances; but, relatively to the civilizations of Greece and Rome—it was the period of Phidias and Plato, of Archimedes and Cicero—the northern culture was as many milestones of progress behind as during the Hallstadt era. The coins in use were Greek, or local imitations of Greek money, their figures and legends often corrupted to complete meaninglessness. Writing was still absent. Some attempts at script began to be made toward the close of LaTène, but they resulted in nothing more than the awkward Ogham and Runic systems. Until perhaps a century or two before Cæsar, there were no cities or fortified towns in Gaul. When they arose, it was on heights, behind walls of mixed logs, earth, and stone, as against the masonry circumvallations which the Ægean peoples were erecting more than a thousand years before. Even these poor towns were built only by Kelts; the Germanic tribes remained shy of them for centuries longer. Society was still essentially proto-feudal and rustic. But there had filtered in from the Mediterranean, and were being wrought locally, holed axes, iron wagon wheels, the potter’s wheel and potter’s oven, rotary mills, dice, tongs, scissors, saws, and scythes—all new to these northern lands, and curiously modern in their fundamental types as compared with the essentially half-primitive, half-barbarian suggestion that Hallstadt manufactures carry.