The Welsh Gold Celts
"Before the end of the Bronze Age a class system had begun to operate in western Europe. Rich chieftains were buried with golden ornaments and their earthen fortresses appeared on many hilltops. The people were separating into frequently warring tribes and by 1400 BC the noble common purpose which had created Avebury and Stonehenge, when men and women dedicated themselves to great communal tasks, appears to have evaporated. Most of the causewayed camps were turned into hillforts and the bigger ones, such as Maiden Castle, grew into packed cities within their great walls and ditches. A complicated political system seems to have existed of warlike tribal chieftains whose realms were fairly extensive. In Britain particularly, where the hillforts jostle each other around the great causewayed power centres, it seems likely that barons and lesser nobles fortified themselves with earthen walls and defended homesteads, while the kings or chiefs dwelt in grander style in minor fortified cities. The nature of the people was undergoing inevitable change. Instead of a peaceable community, strongly attuned to the cosmic laws of being and the magnetic forces of the earth, the hillforts seem to tell us of a newly insecure and fractious society in which individual greed and ego were becoming dominant. We can know quite a bit about what the people looked like and what they wore and ate from the preserved bodies recovered from Danish bogs. We know that a number of cereals were used to make bread and that it and meat were the staple foods.
The men wore woollen tunics and capes, with close caps, while the women wore decorated woolen tunics, bonnets, girdles and tassels, and hairnets. This uneasy society came to be joined - as early perhaps as 2000 BC - by new waves of settlers, the Celts; or one should say, by Celticspeaking immigrants, for the Celts were never a very unified nation but rather were a collection of volatile tribes with a taste for trade and art. 'Since the Celts were always in a minority and did not, strictly speaking, constitute a single Celtic race, the Celtic world was primarily a conglomeration of different nations under a Celtic elite, the indigenous peoples being first enslaved and then fused together by a common Celtic language, civilisation and religion. They brought with them the knowledge of the wheel and the design of the war chariot, and were later attributed with the discovery of how to smelt iron, thus giving rise to the 'Iron Age'. Descriptions have come down to us from the pen of a Greek writer, Poseidonius. He says: The Celts are terrifying in appearance, with deep-sounding and very harsh voices... they wear a striking kind of clothing - tunics dyed and stained in various colours, and trousers, which they call Bracae and they wear striped cloaks... picked out with a variegated small check pattern. Their armour includes man-sized shields, decorated in individual fashion... on their heads they wear bronze helmets .... To the frankness and high-spiritedness of their temperament must be added the traits of childish boastfulness and love of decoration. They wear ornaments of gold, torcs on their necks, and bracelets on their arms and wrists, while people of high rank wear dyed garments besprinkled with gold."
Source: The Encyclopaedia of the Celts,
Compiled & edited by: Knud Mariboe ©, 1994.