ABSTRACT
Artwork, which here must include costume, is full of social implications. First, it has given a fluid, often vivid, means of communication between people, as individuals (sometimes eyeball-to-eyeball; Jope 1987: pls: Xia, Viiia; fig. 3b), as groups, or as institutions. Second, Celtic art has been a means of displaying social rank (or aspiration thereto); there can be no doubt of the hierarchic nature of societies who possessed display works like the Agris helmet (p. 380). It can give some guidance concerning social level and context within the changing structure of Celtic communities through more than a millennium, not least during the complex processes of conurbanization (often oversimplified in discussion) in ‘barbarian’ Europe from the sixth to first centuries Bc. Artwork has further been a potent factor in expressing cultural taste and human relations with the supernatural, which profoundly affect relations between people. It can sometimes also give clues to the life style and living conditions of different social strata.
