Duncan Garrow & Chris Gosden. Technologies of enchantment? Exploring Celtic art.

Jones, Andrew Meirion

DUNCAN GARROW & CHRIS GOSDEN. Technologies of enchantment? Exploring Celtic art: 400 BC to AD 100. xx+376 pages, 106 illustrations, 9 tables. 2012. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 98-0-19-954806-4 hardback 80 [pounds sterling].

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This welcome volume sheds light on the spectacular body of Celtic art from Britain. The definition of 'the Celts' as an ethnic entity, however is a notoriously thorny problem; it follows that the definition of what constitutes 'Celtic art' is equally, if not more, problematic.

The volume is the result of a major AHRC-funded project that aimed to examine and re-analyse all Celtic art objects from Britain. The first two chapters of the volume begin impressively with a discussion of the issues of reciprocity and reproduction pertinent to the exchange of metalwork in the later Iron Age and Romano-British period, and the question of 'social ontologies'. These chapters position the discussion of Celtic art in relation to wider questions relating to the agentic and ontological character of materials. The second chapter firmly introduces the major influence on the project, the work of the anthropologist Alfred Gell (1998), and his agency-centred account of art. The volume's title is derived from an early paper by Gell (1992).

These opening chapters offer a useful starting point for discussions relating to the ontological nature of materials in non-Western societies. I welcome these discussions and believe that it is critical that we move beyond the limited empirical horizons outlined by Enlightenment thinkers, a legacy to which we are heirs in the modern West. I am unconvinced, however, that Cell's work provides the best starting point for these discussions, as the secondary agency he accords to artworks ultimately retains the division between active subjects and inert materials that the authors seek to question (see Holbraad 2009 for wider discussion; also Henare et al. 2007; Ingold 2007); indeed Gosden (2001: 164) has previously recognised this point.

Gell (1992) argues that skill of manufacture helps to invest artworks with the ability to dazzle, his 'technology of enchantment'. For this reason, Chapter 4 discusses the Technologies of making as a way into prehistoric 'technologies of enchantment'. This chapter had enormous potential to demonstrate how and why materials worked to invest crafted artefacts with aesthetic and sensory appeal. The discussion, however, offers a fairly conventional description of bronze- and iron-working with little real discussion of the potency of materials. Like much of Gell's work, the account is one-sided; material forms are the result of "social or cosmological rules" that "lay behind the patterning of where things were made and thrown away" (p. 107). In other words, materials have little real agency, their manufacture is the result of social and cosmological belief. The ontological distinction that Garrow and Gosden sought to question in the opening chapters has therefore been retained in their analysis. This is a shame, as metals are some of the most potent and mutable of materials. One wonders if the potency, potentiality and changeable character of metals had been incorporated into the analysis of their manufacture, how this would have invested Garrow and Gosden's account with a novel understanding of material ontologies in the Late Iron Age and Romano-British period (see Conneller 2011 for such an account of practices of making in Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Europe).

The following chapters (5-8) deal with empirical aspects of the evidence including a discussion of swords, torcs and coins, with specific chapters focusing on hoards, burials and settlement deposits. Each chapter provides a detailed analysis of the patterns of deposition associated with different classes of material. The burial chapter (7) has several useful summaries of particularly important depositional contexts, including Kirkburn, East Yorkshire; Mill Hill, Kent; and Baldock, Hertfordshire, while the settlement chapter (8) likewise discusses in detail key sites such as Gussage All Saints, Dorset; Bury Hill, Hampshire; and Newstead, Melrose, Scottish Borders. In each case, the authors ask how Celtic aft objects function. Curiously we find in Chapter 6 that many artefacts are argued to metaphorically represent community as objects "reinforced or created the social" (pp. 255-56). This argument is also developed in the concluding chapter. This point is especially peculiar as it seems to return us to the kind of semiotic approaches that Cell's analysis of artworks sought to critique.

To conclude, this volume offers a useful summation of approaches to Celtic aft in Britain. It is a shame that one of the signal triumphs of this project--the radiocarbon dating of Celtic art--received little discussion in the volume; it would have been good to reconsider the significance of this body of material in the light of what are remarkably tight chronological boundaries and in relation to the European Iron Age sequence. Strangely, while seeking to investigate the parameters of Celtic art, the authors have retained the traditional idea of 'Celtic art' as being solely associated with metalwork. It would have been interesting to examine how decoration works in comparison to decorated 'craft' objects of pottery, bone and antler. While this is, in many ways, a landmark analysis, I believe it to be ultimately flawed as it relies too heavily on Cell's theoretical underpinnings. If the authors truly wished to investigate the ontological character of materials, they needed to have paid more attention to the sensory and material qualities of the artefacts, thereby placing materials at the centre of their analysis. By doing so the authors might have loosened the boundaries between metalwork and other decorated materials, and more fully realised their stated aim (p. 5) of understanding the impact of the decorative arts in Late Iron Age and Romano-British social relations. Ultimately, we are left with the impression that 'Celtic art' objects worked to reproduce prestige identities, a conclusion that does little to unseat traditional assumptions.

References

CONNELLER, C. 2011. An archaeology of materials. Substantial transformations in early prehistoric Europe. London: Routledge.

GELL, A. 1992. The technology of enchantment and the enchantment of technology, in J. Coote & A. Shelton (ed.) Anthropology, art and aesthetics: 40-63. Oxford: Clarendon.

--1998. Art and agency: an anthropological theory. Oxford: Clarendon.

GOSDEN, C. 2001. Making sense: archaeology and aesthetics. World Archaeology 33: 163-67.

HENARE, A., M. HOLBRAAD & S. WASTELL. 2007. Introduction: thinking through things, in A. Henare, M. Holbraad & S. Wastell (ed.) Thinking though things: theorising artefacts ethnographically: 1-31. London: Routledge.

HOLBRAAD, M. 2009. Ontology, ethnography, archaeology: an afterword on the ontography of things. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 19: 431-41.

INGOLD, T. 2007. Materials against materiality. Archaeological Dialogues 14: 1-16.

ANDREW MEIRION JONES

Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton, UK

(Email: amj@soton.ac.uk)