ABSTRACT
The early La T6ne phase: the ‘Marnian’ problem A n y s y s t e m of classification of the Iron Age carries with it the danger of excessive rigidity, just as the use of an absolute chronology is liable to hamper through inflexibility. No subject has been more bedevilled by these problems than the so-called ‘Marnian’ issue, which in recent years has stimulated considerable controversy concerning the value of certain categories of evidence as an index of cultural change. The ceramic affinities between certain early La Tene groups in the south-east of England, and assemblages from the Marnian hinterland of northern France had long been recognised, and generally accepted as valid. By 1939, an attempt had been made by Hawkes to rationalise the fragmentary evidence then available into a coherent historical interpretation. The appearance of certain outstanding classes of pottery, including pedestal bases, vases with sharply angular shoul ders, and tub-shaped ‘saucepan’ pots, he regarded as the product of a widespread invasion of Continental Celts from the Marne region around 250 B.C. This martial immigration was further witnessed by notable metal types, including La Tene 1 brooches, and the distinctive Swiss bent silver ring from Park Brow. The native response to this threat by the warrior aristocracy of the Marne was the hasty construction of hillforts in the third century through out southern England. In retrospect, we may feel that any attempt to explain as the product of a single historical event such a multiplicity of diverse cultural phenomena was bound to result in over-simplification and error. The loopholes which appear in any theory after thirty years of further research are not hard to expose, as Hodson has adequately demon strated. (For the principal arguments of the ‘invasion controversy’, see C. F. C. Hawkes, 1959; Hodson, i960; 1962; 1964a; 1964b; Clark, 1966; C. F. C. Hawkes, 1966; D. W.Hard ing, 1970.) But we should remember that the relatively short time-scale into which the Iron Age in Britain then had to be compressed inevitably resulted in the conflation of material types which might now be regarded as representative of successive cultural phases. Within the chronological framework now available, hillfort construction, for instance, must be diffused over a much greater span of time, extending conceivably back into the late Bronze Age. And though some hillforts may well have been built and others re-occupied, in the early La Tene period, as a result of renewed contact between southern Britain and the Continent, the intensity of such activity no longer demands interpretation in terms of a single historical invasion. Fundamental to this question, of course, is the extension of the chronological scale for the Iron Age, which enables us now to attribute the important ceramic links with the Marne, defined by Hawkes, to the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., rather than significantly later. The date of 250 B.C., which Hodson was still shadow-boxing in 1962, and which was being quoted as the period of Marnian incursions as recently as 1964 (Simpson), can now be firmly consigned to the archaeological archive, and hopefully
46. Continental vases earenes and vases piriformes. A and B , Marson> Marne. C and D, Somme-Bionne, Marne, 4^// from British Museum Morel Collection
C
forgotten. As for the case for a Marnian invasion itself, though we may no longer attach such significance to the evidence of hillforts, the ceramic evidence certainly merits serious attention, as do the broadly contemporary groups of early La Tene daggers and brooches.
