How many armor and weapons in a group of Celts??

[Folkert van Wijk]

I do have a question I would like to put to you folks.

I am thinking of starting to draw and paint again in the near future, and off course the subjects will be Celts and their world...
Most likely I will be depicting besides others, warriors and maybe even big groups of them... But I am still in the dark considering the amount of swords, mail armor and helmets there would be around during the La Tene II and III periods

I ques when you have for example one small group of 9 Celts of a mixed wealth, then:
1 would where mail armor
3 would have a sword.
6 would have a helmet (of a mixed design and quality)
(all) 9 would have a shield and a spear (maybe even two or three different ones each...)
(all) 9 would have something like a side arm or utility knife..

Of course if you where looking at a group of Celtic cavalry (equites) then these would be the richer ones and besides shields and spears, all would have at least swords and helmets.
But I ques even then only a view off these would sport mail armor...

[Robert Vermaat]

Hi Folkert,

Your guess is as good as mine, and of course guessing about 'a group' of Celts cannot be so specific as to any exact number of such items, because the group can come from a great number of different backgrounds which would influence that number.

But maybe we can guess at an answer. We have the Hjortspring boat.

The Hjortspring boat was built around 300-400 BC for a crew of 22–23 men. It is thought that the boat was raiding Denmark, either alone or part of a larger group, but the raid failed. The weapons and much of the equipment of the raiders was then sacrificed in Hjortspring Mose at Als in Sønderjylland as part of a religious ritual. I think the cureent thinking is (Garrelt?) that the find represents the composition of the raiding group.
The find contained 60-80 shields of a Celtic type, with 33 'richly' decorated shieldbosses, 169 spearheads (138 iron, 31 bone), 11 swords of a Germanic type, and (rust of) 10 to 20 mailcoats.

That would possibly give you an indication (no more!) of what a group of at least 60-80 Celts could have looked like. What surprised me was that high number of mailcoats. Going with the highest number in men (based on 80 shields) and the lowest number of mail coats (10, if we accept that these we all that were recovered and sacrificed in that one boat), every man in 8 wore mail armour.

[Paullus Scipio]

Robert has beaten me top it in pointing to the Hjortspring boat, which, apart from literary descriptions is as good a guide as we have.Unfortunately, much is guesswork - for example we can't tell if the 'crew' were Germanic or Celtic, which is unsurprising given the blur between cultures. That they were apparently so well equipped might seem surprising, until it is remembered they were likely the 'professional' retinue of their chief rather than the average tribesman called up to fight, or possibly even 'professional' pirates.
Then again, we cannot speak of generic 'Celts' either. The weapon mix and types undoubtedly varied over time and from place to place, and from Tribe to Tribe, and one would not expect a Galatian warband to look much like the Cenomani in Northern Italy fighting the Romans with Hannibal, or the Belgae facing Caesar.......

[MeinPanzer]

Robert has beaten me top it in pointing to the Hjortspring boat, which, apart from literary descriptions is as good a guide as we have.Unfortunately, much is guesswork - for example we can't tell if the 'crew' were Germanic or Celtic, which is unsurprising given the blur between cultures.

They were undoubtedly Germanic; there is some good evidence that the raiders came from southern Sweden.

That they were apparently so well equipped might seem surprising, until it is remembered they were likely the 'professional' retinue of their chief rather than the average tribesman called up to fight, or possibly even 'professional' pirates.

Much has been written about the Hjortspring deposit and what can be inferred about the composition of the warband from the equipment deposited therein, but one important study is often overlooked. Jes Martens' "A Wooden Shield-Boss from Kvaerloev, Scania. Some Remarks on the Weaponry of the Early Pre-Roman Iron Age in Northern Aurope and the Origin of the Hjortspring Warriors" discusses many interesting details of the deposit, including the date and the context of the weaponry in a broader northern European zone. While a group of a hundred men seems small, as Martens notes, using only very rough numbers based on archaeological surveys of villages in southern Sweden, "a hundred men would represent the total number of men capable of bearing arms of at least ten villages of Grontoft size [this is a village surveyed that contained about ten houses]. This is, however, an absolute minimum calculation.... If this estimate is correct then raising an army of the Hjortspring size would demand for a landscape of at least the size of Scania [this is a region in southern Sweden which stretches about 130 km from north to south]. In other words, a raiding group the size of the Hjortspring invaders would have been a substantial force, and not just a minor group of pirates.

Then again, we cannot speak of generic 'Celts' either. The weapon mix and types undoubtedly varied over time and from place to place, and from Tribe to Tribe, and one would not expect a Galatian warband to look much like the Cenomani in Northern Italy fighting the Romans with Hannibal, or the Belgae facing Caesar.......

In this respect it may be useful to examine the statistical analyses of weapons finds in Celtic cemeteries and their distribution in individual graves. The only example I am familiar with is Aurel Rustoiu, "A Journey to Mediterranean. Peregrinations of a Celtic Warrior from Transylvania," in Studia Universitatis "Babes-Bolyai," Historia 51, no. 1 (June 2006): 42-85, which examines the distribution of weapons and armour in several eastern Celtic cemeteries.

[Folkert van Wijk]

Thanks guys the Hjortspring boat is a good thing to start with... Alldo probably more "Germanic" then "Celtic" for as far it's posible to tell them appart.
Ofcourse I do know there are richer and poorer populations of Celts and also do know there are more peasefull or warlike groups wandering around.
And then even the occation in wich we find them determinds the "tools" they take along...

All this is just to get an idea...

[Conal]

The only example I am familiar with is Aurel Rustoiu, "A Journey to Mediterranean. Peregrinations of a Celtic Warrior from Transylvania," in Studia Universitatis "Babes-Bolyai," Historia 51, no. 1 (June 2006): 42-85, which examines the distribution of weapons and armour in several eastern Celtic cemeteries.

I have googled nyself silly .... to no avail ... can you please show me where I can find this?

[MeinPanzer]

The only example I am familiar with is Aurel Rustoiu, "A Journey to Mediterranean. Peregrinations of a Celtic Warrior from Transylvania," in Studia Universitatis "Babes-Bolyai," Historia 51, no. 1 (June 2006): 42-85, which examines the distribution of weapons and armour in several eastern Celtic cemeteries.

I have googled nyself silly .... to no avail ... can you please show me where I can find this?

Do you live near a library that allows you to use interlibrary loans? According to WorldCat (an online library database), Cambridge and Oxford both have "Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Historia."

[MeinPanzer]

I was looking through some articles I'd scanned a while back and I came upon an article I'd totally forgotten about which is particularly relevant to this thread. Since it's a fairly short article, I'll provide a brief summary and some quotes (translated loosely). The article is Herbert Lorenz, "Associations d'armes dans les sepultures de la La Tene ancienne en Europe de l'ouest - un reflet de l'armement?" in Revue Aquitania, Supplement 1 (1986): 281-284. Note that these analyses apply to the La Tene ancienne period, which under Tischler's chronological system dates to c. 400-300 BC, and only apply to offensive arms.

Firstly, he establishes that "the spear dominated in the Marne-Moselle zone, that is to say Champagne, in the Ardennes and in the middle Rhine basin," stating that spearheads were found in 90% of burials including arms, while only 30% included swords. In contrast, "in the Rhine-Danube zone, that is to say Baden Wuerttemburg, in Alsace, and on the Swiss plateau, the sword dominated," with swords being found in more than 90% of armed tombs, while spearheads were found in only 60%. Furthermore, he notes that "when one finds many [spearheads] in a burial, it includes a large spearhead and two other smaller ones, which implies the association of a close combat spear and javelins." It is noted that "in the region west of the Rhine-Danube zone, the deceased received either a sword, or a sword and a spear. In the Marne-Moselle zone, either a spear; a spear and javelins; a sword and a spear; a sword, a spear, and javelins; or again only a sword were deposited in the burial of the deceased."

I won't go on to summarize his further discussion, which entails examining patterns of arms interment in graves of different subregions of the two major "zones," but here are the pie charts which he uses for examination. Note that I have no idea how large the sample groups are for these analyses.

http://antiquemilitaryhistory.com/image ... carms1.JPG
http://antiquemilitaryhistory.com/image ... carms2.JPG
http://antiquemilitaryhistory.com/image ... carms3.JPG
http://antiquemilitaryhistory.com/image ... carms4.JPG
http://antiquemilitaryhistory.com/image ... carms5.JPG

This is interesting food for thought when considering the varied armament of warriors during the La Tene ancienne time period, but Lorenz's concluding remarks should be heeded. He notes that the percentage of burials from this time period which include weapons is very low - from 10 to 28 %, depending on the region. Following this, he states that "the appearance of arms was regulated by funerary customs which differed considerably from one region to another," so that, for instance, he notes that the burials from Lorraine and Bourgogne largely lack arms because interring them with the dead was not a popular custom at this time. That having been said, the preference for certain combinations of arms likely also reflected their popularity in everyday use.

[Dan Howard]

The other problem is the status of theopeople getting these types of burials. If only the most wealthy people carried swords and only the most wealthy people are getting dug up, we could conclude that a far greater percentage of the culture used swords.

[Komanos]

Hmm, Lorenz actually differentiates between princely tombs and ordinary tombs in the figures Ruben included (though ordinary really may not be the best word, considering they account for such a small percentage of total burials). And indeed there are gaps between the princely warrior equipment and that of ordinary warriors. Even so, we find in Champagne that more ordinary burials contain swords than contain lances. We should also remember in dealing with the warrior burials that they are a social ritual, and while there may have been traditions relating to the depositing of grave goods, we must be careful in making associations with actual weapon kits or with the numbers of warriors in a community. Not that we can't do it, just we need to be careful.

What I don't comprehend is the difference between figure 2 and figure 3 (from the text, not the order of attached pics) and their treatment of the Rhine-Danube region. Does 2 treat it as a separate region, and 3 treat a certain area as part of the Marne-Moselle region? The crazy thing about it is the Rhine-Danube region in 2 has one of the heaviest concentrations of swords, while that in 3 has practically none at all. Is 3 supposed to be depicting the weapon associations on the east side of the Rhine? That's the best I can figure.