ABSTRACT
Jacobsthal’s dictum, that early Celtic art was ‘an art with no genesis’ (1944, 157) is one of the more famous quotations in the archaeological canon. He was, of course, referring to the genesis of the La Tène style, but even if we argue for a broader definition of Celtic art, the apparently sudden appearance of the La Tène Early Style still warrants explanation. There is no contradiction in Jacobsthal’s generalization and his identifying the triple sources of influence on the Early Style as ‘the East, Italy and Hallstatt’ (ibid., 155), since in this analysis he was dissecting the grammar of early Celtic art rather than its genesis as a technical, social or cognitive phenomenon. It remains true that early La Tène art appears in north-alpine Europe in the second half of the fifth century bc without clear archaeological evidence of cataclysmic change on the scale of population displacement or colonization, and without a revolution in industrial technology that might have generated a productive capacity hitherto lacking. Attempts have been made to depict the decline of the late Hallstatt strongholds (Fürstensitze) in south-west Germany as the outcome of radical social change (Pauli, 1985), but even if the evidence is interpreted in this way it is tangential to the regional foci in which early La Tène art first appears. Two approaches to the clarification of the genesis of Celtic art might be proposed. The first would be to examine older north-alpine traditions to see what antecedents there might have been for the recurrent themes of early La Tène art. The second approach would be to examine the cultural, technical and social milieu of the preceding periods in order to evaluate the environment out of which early La Tène art so suddenly and apparently without antecedents emerged. Both might help to redefine Celtic art in the broader sense of the art of later prehistoric communities that might reasonably be regarded as Celtic.
