Last week at the Keltenwelt Museum, Glauberg, Germany. The discovery in 1996 of the detailed, life-s
Last week at the Keltenwelt Museum, Glauberg, Germany. The discovery in 1996 of the detailed, life-sized sandstone statue in Glauberg, a hillfort inhabited since Neolithic times, was a scientific sensation. Never before had such a perfect statue or stele of a Celtic warrior been uncovered. This extremely rare find, dating from the 5th century BC, was found in the ditch surrounding a huge barrow, which was totally vanished at the time and only detectable by a suspicious semicircle on an air photo in 1988, that led the archaeologists to investigate and discover this entirely unexpected burial site. The stele, fully preserved except for its feet, depicts an armed male warrior. It measures 186 cm in height and weighs 230 kg. It is made from a type of sandstone available within a few kilometres of Glauberg. Unlike the Hirschlanden statue (found in 1969), who is naked, this warrior is fully clothed. Much detail is clearly visible: his trousers, composite armour tunic, wooden shield and a typical La Tène sword hanging from his right side. The moustachioed man wears a torc with three pendants, remarkably similar to the one from the chamber in mound 1, several rings on both arms and one on the right hand. On his head, he wears a hood-like headdress crowned by two protrusions, resembling the shape of a mistletoe leaf. Such headdresses are also known from a handful of contemporary sculptures. As mistletoe is believed to have held a magical or religious significance to the Celts, it could indicate that the warrior depicted also played the role of a druid. Fragments of three similar statues were also discovered in the area. It is suggested that all four statues once stood in the rectangular enclosure. Perhaps they were associated with an ancestor cult. Parallels to the Glauberg warrior statue exist in the form of stelai from other La Tène sites, such as the Holzgerlingen figure (Württemberg State Museum in Stuttgart), a pillar-stele from Pfalzfeld (St Goar), today in the Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn, the Warrior of Hirschlanden and others. The high quality of the tomb furnishings as well as other features associated with them indicate that the graves, and their occupants, were of extremely high status. They are therefore classed as “princely” burials, on a par with other well-known finds, including those at Vix (Burgundy, France), and Hochdorf (Baden-Württemberg, Germany). -- source link