Brittany and the Atlantic Archipelago, 450-1200 : contact, myth and history

Author / Creator

Brett, Caroline, author

Available as

Physical

Summary

"Brittany is rich in archaeological remains from prehistory. At many junctures in the remote past, the peninsula has been a centre of cultural innovation, or a corridor by which innovations have pa...

"Brittany is rich in archaeological remains from prehistory. At many junctures in the remote past, the peninsula has been a centre of cultural innovation, or a corridor by which innovations have passed between the Mediterranean, inland Europe and the Atlantic. At the dawn of the Neolithic, it was the home of some of Europe's earliest and most spectacular megalithic funerary monuments, in particular the sequence of long mounds, passage graves and tumuli around Carnac from between 4700 and 3500 BC. At about the same period, thousands of dolerite axes made from the local stone at Plussulien, Côtes d'Armor, were transported all over western France. In the third millennium BC, rich grave goods and votive deposits show the region benefiting from its central position along the riverine and ocean trade routes from the Mediterranean to Britain. In the later Bronze Age Brittany may have been relatively isolated, a possible sign of this being the manufacture of thousands of non-functional bronze axes with a high lead content, purely for ritual burial. But from ca 500 BC Brittany's external contacts revived, with signs that it developed a 'middleman' role in channelling materials such as tin and copper from southern Ireland and south-west Britain to the power centres of west-central Europe, and later to the Mediterranean. It may have been by way of Brittany that La Tène art spread to Britain in the fifth century BC, the region's elegantly decorated pottery making use of the sinuous motifs of central European metalwork in a new medium. A dense settlement pattern reveals an elite able to assert its status with defended, banked and ditched enclosures and, on the coast, 'cliff castles'. Another distinctive artefact that survives in thousands from Iron Age Brittany is the stela, or shaped stone column. On the eve of Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul for the Roman Empire, we glimpse the political make-up of the peninsula. It comprised five territorial units, civitates, that each issued its own sophisticated coinage and had become rich from trading in Mediterranean wine with southern Britain; and it was part of a larger maritime region called in Gaulish Aremorica, the land facing the sea. 'Armorica' (French Armorique) is often used by modern writers as a synonym for Brittany, or as a convenient term for the peninsula in the prehistoric and Roman periods before it was settled by Britons. It must be borne in mind, however, that historically the name 'Armorica' referred to different extents of land at different times, usually including more territory than what later became 'Brittany'"--

Show More