THE HEUNEBURG (BADEN-WÜRTTEMBERG) AND THE HALLSTATT-PERIOD CELTS

The Heuneburg is part of an important proto-urban complex of the Late Hallstatt period beside the upper Danube in Baden-Württemberg. Since it is not very far from the river’s source, it is widely believed to be the Celtic polis of Pyrene at the source of the Danube, mentioned by Herodotus in the fifth century bc . This identification is the main justification for associating the Danube valley with the Hallstatt-period Celts. A well-established objection is that Herodotus was under the misapprehension that the Danube rose in the Pyrenees in the far west of Europe and that he mistook the mountain-name Pyrene as the name of a polis . Two recent objections to this objection are that the term polis is especially appropriate for the Heuneburg, the ‘first city north of the Alps’, and that there is a reference to a Pyrene in the area of the Heuneburg in a fifteenth-century manuscript from Crete. Both objections are shown to be invalid, and further arguments are advanced for supposing that Herodotus’s Celts were nearer the Pyrenees than Baden-Württemberg.