A bronze brooch, or fibula, in the La Tène style
Fibula, La Tene type, 6th–5th century BCE
Marked Hallstatt, Austria

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

Hallstatt, La Tène and the Celts

Across Iron Age Europe, people mined salt deep in the Alps, worked iron, and made swirling, curving art that archaeologists call La Tène. The Greeks called some of them Keltoi, but no one called the whole lot Celts at the time.

Place
Hallstatt, Austria · La Tène, Switzerland · Heuneburg, Germany · Bibracte, FranceEurope
Laid out as
A civilisationA society seen from the inside: its rulers, places, work, beliefs and daily life, laid out like the rooms of a house.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. IThe salt miners of Hallstatt
  2. IIIron changes everything
  3. IIILa Tène art
  4. IVWho were the Celts?
  5. VHillforts and oppida
  6. VIDruids, from Roman eyes

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Vercingetorix
  • Johann Georg Ramsauer

Objects

  • The Gundestrup cauldron
  • The Battersea shield
  • Salt-miners’ leather bags

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

800 BC to 50 BC. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?