1918.] EVIDENCE OF MAN IN GUERNSEY. 129 



civilization of Western Europe, once the knowledge of working 

 and casting metal was discovered by the people of the West and 

 the North, each district developed certain typical forms of 

 weapons and of ornamentation on their own lines and formed 

 new centres of distribution. This is particularly the case in 

 the development of bronze axes or palstaves, which originated 

 in the west, and in Brittany, England and Northern Europe 

 were evolved typical forms differing slightly from each other 

 and quite unknown in the East, where the earliest form of flat 

 copper or bronze celt, the prototype of all, was followed directly 

 by the long bronze dagger and then by the long bronze sword. 



The Bronze Age in France is thought to have begun about 

 2,500 B.C., and its first period ended about 2,000 B.C. Then 

 followed four subsequent divisions or periods, each marked by 

 an advance in culture, in the knowledge of working metal and 

 of greater intercourse with the higher civilisation of the Medi- 

 terranean, until about 900 B.C. invaders from the East, by the 

 Rhine valley, brought with them a knowledge of iron and of a 

 culture they had developed in the valley of the Danube, chiefly 

 at Hallstatt in Styria, from which the two first periods, the 

 Hallstatt periods of the Early Iron Age are named. 



The chief centre of the Hallstatt period of the Iron Age in 

 France was in the eastern and central provinces, where iron ore 

 was plentiful. The great forests which covered central France 

 seem to have formed an almost impenetrable barrier to the 

 expansion of the invaders to the west, and hardly a trace of 

 their existence has been found in Brittany, which remained in 

 the Bronze Age until about 500 B.C. Then in the fifth century 

 B.C. came the great invasion of the Celts or Gauls (probably of 

 the same race as their predecessors), whose empire at the time 

 of its widest extension stretched from the mouth of the Danube 

 to the western shores of France, who established themselves in 

 Galatia in Asia Minor, in Britain, Upper Italy, and who overran 

 Spain. 



Their civilisation is called by archaeologists the La Teneperiod, 

 from La Tene on the Lake of Neuchatel in Switzerland, where 

 the typical culture of the period was first noticed and scientifi- 

 cally studied. It has been subdivided into three sub-periods. La 

 Tene I and II representing the time, 500 to 100 B.C., when the 

 Celtic empire reached its widest extension and its chieftains 

 were possessed of quantities of gold ornaments, tores, bracelets 

 and cups and vases of gold, some of the latter of Greek or 

 Etruscan manufacture ; also of Greek and Etruscan Abases of 

 silver and bronze, obtained either by barter or by pillage, 

 which they copied more or less successfully. The last period 

 La Tene III dates from about 100 B.C. or a little earlier. It 

 marks the decline of the Celtic empire under the pressure of 

 Germanic tribes, and lasted in France until the conquest of 



