THE SECOND PHASE
Perhaps the hill-forts were not entirely effective or perhaps a compromise was reached. In any case, the newcomers from the Marne district did establish themselves, first in the southeast and then to the north and west. They brought iron with decoration of the La Tène type and also the two-wheeled chariot. Like the Wessex warriors of over a thousand years earlier, they made “heroes’” graves, with their warriors buried in the war-chariots and dressed in full trappings.
CELTIC BUCKLE
The metal work of these Marnian newcomers is excellent. The peculiar Celtic art style, based originally on the classic tendril motif, is colorful and virile, and fits with Greek and Roman descriptions of Celtic love of color in dress. There is a strong trace of these newcomers northward in Yorkshire, linked by Ptolemy’s description to the Parisii, doubtless part of the Celtic tribe which originally gave its name to Paris on the Seine. Near Glastonbury, in Somerset, two villages in swamps have been excavated. They seem to date toward the middle of the first century B.C., which was a troubled time in Britain. The circular houses were built on timber platforms surrounded with palisades. The preservation of antiquities by the water-logged peat of the swamp has yielded us a long catalogue of the materials of these villagers.
In Scotland, which yields its first iron tools at a date of about 100 B.C., and in northern Ireland even slightly earlier, the effects of the two phases of newcomers tend especially to blend. Hill-forts, “brochs” (stone-built round towers) and a variety of other strange structures seem to appear as the new ideas develop in the comparative isolation of northern Britain.