A Celtic Feast: The Iron Age Cauldrons from Chiseldon, Wiltshire

Abstract

• This volume presents for the first time the results of the excavation and scientific analysis between 2005 and 2013 of seventeen Iron Age cauldrons discovered in a large pit on farmland in the parish of Chiseldon, Wiltshire, and consequently acquired by the British Museum. The assemblage is unprecedented in many respects and is the largest known single deposit of prehistoric cauldrons from Europe. The hoard was deposited in the fourth or third centuries BC, although hoarding as a practice is generally underrepresented during this period. The discovery of so many contemporary vessels in one deposit has important implications for our understanding of middle Iron Age society in southern Britain. Thought to be vessels made and used for feasting, the capacity represented by the Chiseldon Hoard indicates the potential in these societies to host feasts with many hundreds, if not thousands of participants, demonstrating levels of sophistication and organisation traditionally viewed as being beyond societies with relatively flat social hierarchies.