Evidence for dynastic succession among early Celtic elites in Central Europe

Nature Human Behaviour volume  8, pages 1467–1480 (2024 )Cite this article

The early Iron Age (800 to 450 BCE) in France, Germany and Switzerland, known as the ‘West-Hallstattkreis’, stands out as featuring the earliest evidence for supra-regional organization north of the Alps. Often referred to as ‘early Celtic’, suggesting tentative connections to later cultural phenomena, its societal and population structure remain enigmatic. Here we present genomic and isotope data from 31 individuals from this context in southern Germany, dating between 616 and 200 BCE. We identify multiple biologically related groups spanning three elite burials as far as 100 km apart, supported by trans-regional individual mobility inferred from isotope data. These include a close biological relationship between two of the richest burial mounds of the Hallstatt culture. Bayesian modelling points to an avuncular relationship between the two individuals, which may suggest a practice of matrilineal dynastic succession in early Celtic elites. We show that their ancestry is shared on a broad geographic scale from Iberia throughout Central-Eastern Europe, undergoing a decline after the late Iron Age (450 BCE to ~50 CE).

The European Iron Age north of the Alps is characterized by the two key archaeological cultures Hallstatt (800 to 450 BCE) and La Tène (after 450 BCE until the beginning of the Roman period around 50 BCE), which have been, to a different degree, described as ‘Celtic’1,2. Today regarded problematic as an ethnonym, the name ‘Celtic’ was first mentioned in Greek sources from the late sixth century BC, and it is abundantly used in antique sources for societies associated with the La Tène culture3,4. Apart from this historical record and its association with the later Hallstatt and La Tène cultures, there is also a connection to linguistic evidence for a common prehistoric language family across large parts of Europe (the Celtic languages). Indeed, the pan-European patterns and linguistic evidence for cultural connections during this time are complex and encompass a vast region from the Iberian Peninsula and the British Isles throughout Central Europe and as far east as Anatolia (during the third century BCE). While older research assumed an exclusive emergence of this later pan-European phenomenon in a relatively narrowly defined area northwest of the Alps, newer perspectives suggest a model of polycentric emergence in a wide area between the Atlantic coast and southwestern Germany5. One of these core regions was located in present-day eastern France, Switzerland and southwestern Germany. Between 600 and 400 BCE (Hallstatt D and La Tène A), this area stands out in its archaeological importance, as highlighted by rich ‘princely’ burials (‘Fürstengräber’).

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