Hallstatt culture
The Hallstatt culture is an archaeological culture belonging to the late Bronze and Iron Ages. It was Paul Reinecke who first assimilated the Hallstatt site with the urnfields, creating a periodization that Müller-Karpe later updated. Thus, Hallstatt was part of the urn fields and, in turn, was heir to them, maintaining a clear continuity, without breaks. However, it also received differentiating influences thanks to its contacts with the Northern Italy (Golasecca), with Mediterranean settlers across the Adriatic and also from the steppe peoples of Eastern Europe.
It was a transitional culture between the Bronze and Iron Ages, spreading mainly through Central Europe, France and the Balkans. Two major stages are usually distinguished (out of a total of four):
- Hallstatt A and B (1200-750 B.C.), corresponding to the Final Bronze of the urn fields.
- Hallstatt C and D (750-450 BC), consolidated as the First Age of Iron, although the C continues to belong to the urn fields.
This last phase (Phase D) ties in with the La Tène period (480-50 BC) or Second Iron Age.
The name of this culture is due to the Hallstatt Necropolis, located in the town of Hallstatt, in Austria, near Salzburg, where nearly 2,000 tombs and more than 6,000 objects have been found. The first to give it this nomenclature was Hans Hildebrand, and its following divisions were first established by Otto Tischler and later, the one used today, by Reinecke.
The use of iron at the beginning is minor. However, from VII B.C. C. its use is generalized little by little, like its commercialization.
Many of their settlements were fortified and dominated by a social class of warriors who formed a kind of aristocracy. Thanks to the use of iron instead of bronze, they obtained superior weapons.
There are excised, painted and graphite ceramics, sometimes with inlays, while, on swords, there are pommels inlaid with bone, ivory or amber.
This culture maintains contacts with the Mediterranean and with the steppes of eastern Europe. The trade in amber and tin persists in exchanges with the Mediterranean world.
Regarding the funeral rite, in the initial periods cremation and deposition in an urn were imposed, but from Hallstatt C there was an increase in burials, which were already predominant in Hallstatt D. There are clear differences in the tombs, for their trousseau and for their structures. The rich preferred to be deposited in wooden chambers, under a burial mound.
In Spain, one of the samples of the passage of this culture is found in Carrascosa del Campo, in the Celtiberian Necropolis of Las Madrigueras, important since they were the first vestiges found of this culture in the Iberian Peninsula. Various types of funerary urns were found, which shows that the population of this culture inhabited the center of the peninsula.
Many archaeologists consider that both due to the historical period and the coincidence in space with the first documented peoples, it is quite possible that most of the peoples who shared the Hallstatt culture would have spoken a language close to the Proto-Celtic language.