ABSTRACT
The Celtic world from the sixth century Bc inherited a very long and sophisticated tradition of woodworking, in continental Europe and Britain going back to at least the beginning of the fourth millennium. The recovery of this fundamental episode in the history of technology has been a product of the exploitation over the last three decades of the potentialities of what has become known as wetland archaeology, where waterlogged conditions provide a medium for the preservation of wood, otherwise a fugitive natural substance save in exceptional circumstances such as extreme aridity or permafrost. An early example of wetland investigation was of course that of the Swiss lakeside sites first revealed in the 1850s and increasingly with the lowering of water levels in 1870–5; the great iron age site of La Tène was first discovered in 1858. In Britain the Glastonbury and Meare wetland iron age sites were excavated from 1892 (Coles and Coles 1986), but the co-ordinated work of archaeologists and natural scientists on the Somerset peat bogs and their contained artefacts, which has given us such astonishing new information, dates from the early 1960s, supplemented by similar projects in the Cambridgeshire Fens. We can now talk with some confidence about the salient facts of prehistoric European woodworking shared by the Celts before the Roman period.
