Dating Celtic Art: a Major Radiocarbon Dating Programme of Iron Age and Early Roman Metalwork in Britain

Abstract

This paper presents the first substantial set of radiocarbon determinations for the later Iron Age decorated metalwork known as Celtic art in Britain. Hitherto this material has been dated relatively on the basis of changes in decoration and form, which were then linked to materials with some absolute date. The latter process has tended to give relatively late dates, as most of the material with a firm date stems from the last century BC or after. This has meant that British Celtic art appears to be rather later than that on the Continent. Our results provide some tentative support for an earlier dating for at least some British material, more closely aligned to that on the Continent. Stead, building on earlier work, has developed a series of Stages or Styles for the decorations of Celtic art and we shall review these here. We also look at particular classes of artefacts and forms of deposition in the light of our new results. We conclude by drawing some contrasts between Bronze Age metalwork and that of Celtic art, reflecting on how far assumptions of a sequential series of changes, key to all forms of typology, are useful in the case of the latter.