Help wanted for Yuletide book wish list

[Bier Keller]

Genossen,

yesterday my mother-in-law asked what books I wanted for Yule. Now in the last 3 years nearly every site I have worked on, Hallstatt and La Tene period features and artefacts have been much in evidence. This is an area that I would really like to expand upon. Can anybody suggest to me any good English language books that give a good overview of these cultures. I wouldn't cry either if anyone could suggest anything a bit more specialised that dealt with ceramic sequences - ideally with pictures that I could colour in with my crayons.

Cheers,

Bier Keller

[kevin wooldridge]

I can't think of any La Tene 'picture books' off the top of my head, but I would suggest to your mother-in-law that she takes care if seeking archaeological books on Amazon at the moment.

There seems to be a 'flowering' of persons putting their undergraduate/post-graduate dissertations on Amazon (through various companies with names like Book llc). I wouldn't dis the content of any of these per se, but just urge caution. You might be getting little more than a photo-copy through the post at some vastly inflated price. A colleague of mine who has his Masters dissertation on one of these sites was surprised to see it 'selling' for ?46....or ?65 secondhand....even more suprising since he hasn't had any buyers of an original copy yet, let alone a secondhand one!!

[Jack]

Only fluent in the northern stuff

D.W. Harding 2004, The Iron Age in Northern Britain

Then trawl his bibliography?

[Dinosaur]

Do we get La Tene stuff up here? All I ever get is a bit of curved gully, two or three postholes, a few bits of black naff pot and the ubiquitous single sherd of samian, not even any dead animal...am I missing something?

[Jack]

Obviously............:face-stir:

[Hermannyorks]

Do we get La Tene stuff up here? All I ever get is a bit of curved gully, two or three postholes, a few bits of black naff pot and the ubiquitous single sherd of samian, not even any dead animal...am I missing something?

Maybe the fact that Bier Kellar is based in Munich, and has been digging in Bavaria for the past three years (At least)

[trowelmonkey]

I'm afraid that all the up-to-date technical books covering artefacts, buildings, etc I know are in French, but I could post a list if you like. I'm afraid that nearly all my German texts are philological:I

In English, I could only recommend:

Celts, Image & Their Culture byHelmut Birkhan. It's basically a glossy picture book of artefacts arranged thematically. I like it because it doesn't just show the "usual suspects." Indeed, it contains over 800 illustrations. The book has been criticised in reviews for being text-lite. I think this is unfair as it was intended as a companion volume to Kelten - Versuch einer Gesamtdarstellung ihrer Kultur and anyway, there's a middle-brow introductory chapter in German, English and French, which in itself is handy for getting into the vocabulary of talking about "stuff." Currently, it's very expensive, but sometimes it turns up at a reasonable price on ABE.

For pictures alone, there's the now pretty old, but stunning exhibition catalogue for I Celti: [catalogo della mostra a Venezia, Palazzo Grassi, 1991] (please Santa....) It's fair to say that stumbling onto that book in my local library when it was hot off the press was instrumental to the subsequent course of my life. Highly recommended.

For a general overview The Celtic World ed. Miranda Green is a ragbag of essays by eminent scholars. Most of them have held up pretty well since its publication in 1995, although it's much easier now to see the zeitgeist it was written in. (The eve of devolution, anyone?)

The Megaw's Celtic Art has a lot of nice photos and is useful for the evolution of design aesthetics, but doesn't have enough social context for my liking. But then, that was never the point of the book.

If I could only go for one, I'd go for the Birkhan.

Hope Santa's good to you :face-kiss:
TM