Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-vvkck Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T05:48:15.555Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Visions of Power: Imagery and Symbols in Late Iron Age Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2011

John Creighton
John Creighton
Affiliation:
Department of Archaeology, University of Reading
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

This article is a speculative essay about one aspect of authority and power in the late Iron Age. Excellent narratives exist which discuss the political context of the rise of the polities of Verica and Cunobelin in the South East of Britain, but over the last few decades the place of druids in this story has been neglected. However druids did exist, and they need to be worked into our narratives of the past. What follows leads to a discussion of their nature and function in society, and of their decline in importance during the large-scale social changes which took place in the generations immediately preceding the Roman conquest. The article uses a mixture of ethnographic, historical, numismatic, and archaeological evidence.

Type
Articles
Information
Britannia , Volume 26 , November 1995 , pp. 285 - 301
Copyright
Copyright © John Creighton 1995. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Haslegrove provides one of the best descriptions of the development of SE Britian throughout this period linking it in to changes across the channel in Gallia-Belgica: Haslegrove, C.C., ‘Romanisation before the conquest,’ in Blagg, T.F.C. and King, A.C. (eds), Military and Civilian in Roman Britian, BAR 136 (1984), 5–63.Google Scholar

2 The Druids were last comprehensively looked at by S. Piggott, The Druids (1968).

3 Allen and Nash provide accessible introductions to the origins of coinage in temperate Europe: D.F. Allen (ed. D. Nash) The Coins of the Ancient Celts (1980); D. Nash, Coinage in the Celtic World (1987).

4 See J. Puhvel, ‘Aspects of equine functionality’, in J. Puhvel (ed.), Myth and Law among the Indo-Europeans (1970), 159–72.

5 K. Simms, From Kings to Warlords: The Changing Political Structure of Gaelic Ireland in the Later Middle Ages (1987).

6 ibid., 21.

7 The use of a horsewhip is referred to in the twelfth-century Life of Colman son of Luachán in the initiation of the kings of Tara. This is discussed by Simms, op.cit. (note 5), 23.

8 ibid., 23.

9 ibid., 21–2; after: Giraldus Cambrensis, Topographia Hibernie III.25, O'Meara (ed.), 93–4, transl. O'Meara, 109–10. The event may be derived from oral tradition and represent a discontinued practice, or indeed it could have taken place at any time up to the twelfth century when the text was written. The Fulachta Fiadh or ‘burnt mounds’ of Northern Europe, with their dual cooking and bathing function, may provide archaeological support for such stories, however they do date by and large to the Bronze Age. For the functional debate see: Drisceoil, D.A.Ó, ‘Burnt mounds: cooking or bathing?’ Antiquity 62 (1988), 671–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the latest broad survey dating the mounds see: Brindley, A.L., Lanting, J.N., and Mook, W.G., ‘Radiocarbon dates from Irish Fulachta Fiadh and other burnt mounds’, The Journal of Irish Archaeology v (1989/1990), 25–33.Google Scholar

10 See Puhvel, op.cit. (note 4).

11 Hill, J.D., ‘Can we recognise a different European past? A contrastive archaeology of later prehistoric settlement in southern England’, Journ. European Arch, i (1993), 57–75.Google Scholar

12 Allen, op.cit. (note 3), 122.

13 For a series of references to king-horse and god-horse combinations in Irish, Breton, and British myth see T.F. O'Rahilly, Early Irish History and Mythology (1946), 290–4; however, much of the ‘historical reconstruction’ from Irish mythology in this work is entirely speculative.

14 Particularly in Armorica: P. de Jersey, Coinage in Iron Age Armorica (1994).

15 R. Megaw and V. Megaw, Celtic Art: From its Beginnings to the Book of Kelts (1989), 160, 224.

16 Allen, op.cit. (note 3), 9.

17 ibid., 18.

18 ibid., 19.

19 ibid., 5.

20 B.W. Cunliffe, ‘Money and society in pre-Roman Britain’, in B.W. Cunliffe (ed.), Coinage and Society in Britian and Gaul: Some Current Problems (1981), 29–39.

21 Allen, op. cit. (note 3), 38.

22 For example see: Green, M., ‘The iconography of Celtic coins’, in Mays, M. (ed.), Celtic Coinage: Britain and Beyond, BAR 222 (1992), 151–64Google Scholar; and Henig, M., ‘The origin of some ancient British coin types’, Britannia iii (1972), 209–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Megaw and Megaw, op.cit. (note 15), 206.

24 R. Van Arsdell, Celtic Coinage of Britain (1989).

25 Allen, D.F., ‘Cunobelin's gold,’ Britannia iv (1975), 1–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 Allen, op.cit. (note 3), 149.

27 Lewis-Williams, J.D. and Dowson, T.A., ‘The signs of all times: entoptic phenomena in Upper Paleolithic art’, Current Anthropology xxix.2 (1988), 201–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 The original paper led to a wide range of responses which were largely supportive, though critical of specific aspects. The authors followed up their ideas in a second paper in which they carried their ideas forward into the Neolithic largely in response to a paper by Bradley. A recent critique of the concept was written by Dronfield in which he took various known shamanistic and non-shamanistic art assemblages and tested for phosphenes and entoptic shapes. Some appeared as diagnostic, others not so. References: Bradley, R., ‘Deaths and entrances: a contextual analysis of megalithic art’, Current Anthropology xxv.l (1989), 68–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lewis-Williams, I.D. and Dowson, T.A., ‘On vision and power in the neolithic: evidence from the decorated monuments’, Current Anthropology xxxiv.i (1993), 55–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dronfield, J., ‘Ways of seeing, ways of telling: Irish passage tomb art, style and the university of vision’, in Lorblanchet, M. and Bahn, P.G. (eds), Rock Art Studies: The Post-Stylistic Era or Where do we go from here?. Oxbow monograph 35 (1993), 179–94.Google Scholar

29 Van Arsdell, op.cit. (note 24).

30 Dronfield, op.cit. (note 28).

31 R. Layton, The Anthropology of Art (1981), 173.

32 Ray and Blaker, quotation cited in Layton, ibid., 176.

33 A. Sherratt, ‘Sacred and profane substances: the ritual use of narcotics in Later Neolithic Europe’, in P. Garwood, D. Jennings, R. Skeates and J. Toms (eds), Sacred and Profane, Proceedings of a Conference on Archaeology, Ritual and Religion; Oxford 1989 (1991), 50–64; 52.

34 ibid.

35 Piggott, following De Witt, refers to the anachronism of Caesar's account: op.cit. (note 2), 128.

36 P. MacCana, ‘Early Irish ideology and the concept of Irish unity’, in R. Kearney (ed.), The Irish Mind: Exploring Intellectual Traditions (1985), 56–78; 69.

37 Piggott, op.cit. (note 2), 129–30.

38 Simms, op.cit. (note 5), 87–8.

39 ibid., 87.

40 ibid., 88.

41 cf. R. Bradley, The Social Foundations of Prehistoric Britain: Themes and Variations in the Archaeology of Power (1984), 150; Stevens, C.E., ‘The Frilford site – a postscript’, Oxon. v (1940), 166–7; I. Hodder, ‘Some new directions in the spatial analysis of archaeological data at the regional scale’, in D.L. Clarke, (ed.), Spatial Archaeology (1977), 223–351; and A. Fitzpatrick, ‘The deposition of Late La Tene Age metalwork in watery contexts in southern England’, in B. Cunliffe and D. Miles (eds), Aspects of the Iron Age in Central Southern Britain (1984), 178–90.Google Scholar

42 Haselgrove, C.C., Iron Age Coinage in SE Britain: the Archaeological Context, BAR 174 (1987), 119.Google Scholar

43 Waite, G.A., Ritual and Religion in Iron Age Britain, BAR 149 (1985).Google Scholar

44 L. Sellwood, ‘Tribal boundaries viewed from the perspective of numismatic evidence’, in B.W. Cunliffe and D. Miles (eds), Aspects of the Iron Age in Central Southern Britain (1984), 191–204; fig 13.11.

45 R. Bradley, The Passage of Arms: An Archaeological Analysis of Prehistoric Hoards and Votive Deposits (1990).