Iron Age Celtic Graves Continue to Yield Surprises for UWM Archeologist

MILWAUKEE — Continuing a successful field study that has yielded some unexpected results, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Anthropology Professor Bettina Arnold is back from a summer sojourn to Germany where she and her team of colleagues and students from UWM and several other institutions uncovered further surprises from Iron age Celtic burials.

"It was a good season," Arnold says of the three months she and her research team spent exploring a second burial mound associated with the early Iron Age Heuneburg hillfort on the Danube River. While much of Europe was hit with heavy rains, the team was able to take advantage of the better weather in upper Swabia to make some important discoveries.

The archeologists uncovered 18 graves, and those in turn yielded some surprises. More than 50 percent of the burials were women, a considerably higher percentage than in previous digs. Two female burials were uncovered, with one yielding a most tantalizing surprise.

"We found two instances of bronze neck rings, or torcs, in graves, and those were reserved for people of high standing in the community," she explains. "The unusual part was that one was in a child's grave, which is very rare. In fact, it's rare to find children buried in early Iron Age mounds in this region; typically their bodies were disposed of in some other way."

Further compounding the mystery is that the grave in question was located in close proximity to those of a man and a woman, but neither of those featured such a neck ring. There's no way of really knowing whether this was a family unit or whether the proximity was a matter of accident or necessity.

"The question is why, if they are related, the child had a neck ring and the adults did not?" she says. "That doesn't fit the usual pattern."

Similarly, the 2000 excavation of a mound only 200 meters away from the one excavated by the team this summer yielded a "weird iron object" that was at first unidentifiable because it was lifted from the ground with the surrounding dirt intact. Once restored in the laboratory, it turned out to be a helmet plume clamp that would have attached horse hair, feathers or some other ornamental projection to a leather helmet.

The only problem is, according to Arnold, "helmets aren't supposed to be here. They're not typical of the region during this time (600-450 BC)."

Perhaps the buried character was a mercenary from another part of the world, hired out to the people of the area. Perhaps he had traveled and brought the unusual fashion back with him.

Trying to unravel mysteries such as these is one of the most challenging parts of an archeologist's job, Arnold says.

"You study the material culture and the written sources, if any, and try to come to a conclusion that best fits the data available. But it's always going to be provisional," she says. "Without skeletal remains, due to the acidic soil in both mounds, it's very difficult to say much with any degree of certainty in some of these cases."

Arnold, who is on sabbatical this year, is also working with German colleagues on the analysis of materials recovered in the mound burials excavated in 2000, including a large bronze cauldron that may have contained mead, wine or beer and been buried as a sign of its owner's elevated status in the community.

Textile fragments, preserved through contact with bronze and iron, are also being studied at Harvard University's Peabody Museum. Arnold hopes to have a final report on the excavation of both mounds completed by 2005.

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