ABSTRACT
The problems of identifying, dating and explaining the La Tène in Ireland are even more fundamental than for Britain. First of all, it would not be pure casuistry to ask how far the types representative of the Irish La Tène are in fact La Tène at all. Types such as Y-pendants are not part of the La Tène repertory in Continental Europe, and the one type that is ubiquitous in great numbers in Continental Europe, the safety-pin brooch, is represented in Ireland by barely thirty examples. A second consideration is the distribution of Irish La Tène types (Figure 8.1A). Their occurrence in the northern two-thirds of the country, broadly north of a line from Dublin to Galway Bay, has been long remarked and contrasted, notably by Caulfield (1977; 1981), with the ‘non-La Tène’ Iron Age of southern and south-western Ireland, of which the stone-built cashels or cathairs have sometimes been taken as representative. The concept of a non-La Tène Iron Age is important, not just for Ireland but for Atlantic Britain and Atlantic Western Europe as well, and challenges the exclusive equation, too often encouraged by the identification of La Tène art as Celtic, of La Tène archaeological material culture with populations that might be identified as archaeologically or ethnically Celtic. Third, there is the issue of dating. In the absence of a Roman occupation horizon, it is plainly even more difficult in Ireland than it is in most of Britain to establish an independent chronology for finds that largely lack context. Furthermore, within the older diffusionist framework, any connection that might be perceived between Irish and British La Tène metal-work necessarily saw Ireland in the secondary role of recipient. Hence the Irish decorated scabbards, instead of being recognized as a regional manifestation of the European fashion for elaborate sword ornamentation from at least the third century bc, were seen as secondary to Piggott’s Group III Yorkshire swords, and interpreted as the product of a ‘plantation of Ulster’ by Yorkshire charioteers, with a dating in Ireland no earlier than the first century bc (Piggott, 1950, 16). Though more recent scholarship has been inclined towards an earlier dating, the weight of convention has commonly assigned the scabbards to a dating no earlier than the closing centuries of the first millennium bc. The Knock (Clonmacnoise) torc has stood alone around 300 bc on account of its recognition as an import from the La Tène B2 series of buffer torcs of Central Europe. But, as with Britain, 300 bc has remained the chronological watershed, with the bulk of ‘La Tène’ metal-work following that date, after due allowance for ‘time lag’.
