Where have all the Warriors Gone? Some Aspects of Stone Sculpture from Britain to Bohemia

Abstract

The image of the ancient Celts as painted both by our Classical sources and modern popular myth is, in Stuart Piggott’s words, that of «swaggering, belching, touchy chieftains and their equally impossible warrior crew, hands twitching to the sword-hilt at the imagined hint of an insult» (Piggott 1965, 229). While we need not prolong the debate concerning the very existence of an ancient ‘Celtic’ culture, it is clear that in terms of archaeological material, there existed in Europe prior to the establishment of the Roman Empire, a number of disparate and definable local communities, linked in part at least by language and, over arching all, a common belief system and visual vocabulary. It should come as no surprise that certain regions lack, in terms of sculpture, visible evidence of this warrior society. In surveying the scanty examples from the British Isles and Ireland on the one hand and Bohemia on the other, this paper not only underscores the lack of warrior statues but illustrates how rare outside Iberia are any representations of warriors from the main area of La Tène culture in western and central Europe. In contrasting this lacuna with the widespread evidence for socalled ‘warrior’ graves of the fifth to second century BC, the paper briefly discusses the rôle played by such ‘warriors’.