The Camuni are an ancient people of uncertain origin (according to Pliny the Elder, they were Euganei; according to Strabo, they were Rhaetians) who live in Val Camonica—in what is now northern Lombardy—during the Iron Age, although  groups of hunters, shepherds and farmers are known to have lived in the area since the Neolithic.

They reach the height of their power during the Iron Age due to the presence of numerous iron mills in Val Camonica.

Their historical importance is, however, mostly due to their legacy of carved rocks, around three hundred thousand in number, which date from the Palaeolithic to the Middle Ages.

West Central Europe (2637 – 910 BCE): Bronze and Iron Age Cultures of the Rhine and Jura

Geographic and Environmental Context

West Central Europe includes modern Germany west of 10°E and the Rhine-adjacent far northwest of Switzerland, including Basel and the eastern Jura Mountains.

• The Rhine Valley and Moselle basin provided fertile soils, abundant water, and easy routes of communication.

• The Jura uplands offered natural corridors linking the Rhine to Burgundy and the Rhône.

• Forested uplands alternated with open plains suited to farming and grazing.

Climate and Environmental Shifts

• The later Bronze Age and early Iron Age coincided with a generally warm, stable climate, though punctuated by wetter intervals.

• Forest clearance expanded, encouraging cereal cultivation and settlement density.

Societies and Political Developments

• Urnfield culture (c. 1300–750 BCE): widespread cremation burials and hilltop fortifications across the Rhine uplands.

• Hallstatt culture (c. 800–450 BCE): introduced iron technology, social stratification, and elite warrior burials, visible in tumuli along the Rhine.

• By the later Iron Age, Celtic (La Tène) culture dominated, with fortified hilltop oppida like Basel-Münsterhügel and Heuneburg emerging as regional centers.

• Local chieftains controlled trade in salt, metals, and wine, embedding the region into a broader Celtic world.

Economy and Trade

• Agriculture: barley, wheat, millet, and legumes expanded with iron tools.

• Salt extraction from Rhine valley springs became crucial for preservation and trade.

• Long-distance commerce linked the Rhine–Jura to Etruscan and Greek merchants, who exchanged wine, ceramics, and luxury goods for metal and salt.

Subsistence and Technology

• Iron ploughshares and tools increased yields.

• Pottery kilns, weaving, and metalworking spread widely.

• River transport on the Rhine carried goods north to the North Sea and south into Gaul.

Movement and Interaction Corridors

• The Rhine River was the main artery north–south.

• Jura mountain passes connected Celtic communities to Mediterranean traders.

• Salt and wine routes tied the region into the Hallstatt–La Tène network.

Belief and Symbolism

• Warrior burials with swords, wagons, and ornaments symbolized elite status.

• Sacred groves, springs, and rivers were focal points of ritual.

• Early Celtic art (La Tène style) expressed curvilinear, symbolic motifs tied to cosmology.

Adaptation and Resilience

• Agricultural diversification and salt trade provided resilience.

• Oppida functioned as refuges in conflict and as trade hubs.

• Iron technology embedded resilience in both farming and warfare.

Long-Term Significance

By 910 BCE, West Central Europe was firmly part of the Celtic world, tied to Mediterranean exchange through the Rhine–Jura corridor. Iron technology, salt wealth, and fortified towns prepared the ground for later encounters with Rome.

The community at Hallstatt exploits the salt mines in the area, worked from time to time since the Neolithic period, from the eighth century to fifth century BCE.

The style and decoration of the grave goods found in the cemetery are very distinctive, and artifacts made in this style are widespread in Europe.

Archaeologists divide stratigraphy at the type-site into four phases, extending from about 1200 BCE until around 500 BCE: • HaA 1200-1000 • HaB 1000-800 • HaC 800-650 • HaD 650-475 Hallstatt phases A-B are part of the Bronze Age Urnfield culture.

Phase A indicates Villanovan influence.

The Swiss plateau lies in the western part of the pre- or proto-Celtic Halstatt culture from about 1200 BCE.

Regional cultural variations in Italy are well established by the time of the introduction of iron by the Villanovan culture, the earliest Iron Age culture of central and northern Italy, abruptly following the Bronze Age Terramare culture in about 1100.

Villanovan cultural origins, but perhaps not all its peoples, may lie in the Eastern Alps, with connections to the Halstatt culture.

The Villanovans practice cremation and bury the ashes of their dead in pottery urns of distinctive double-cone shape.

The first of two phases of Villanovan culture, called proto-Villanovan or Villanovan I, spans the years from 1100 BC to 900 BCE.

Villanovan settlements are generally centered in the Po River valley and Etruria around Bologna—later an important Etruscan center—and areas in Emilia Romagna (at Verucchio) in Tuscany and at Fermi, Lazio.

The two main hypotheses as to the origins of the Etruscan civilization in the Early Iron Age are autochthonous development in situ out of the Villanovan culture and oriental (Anatolian) colonization of Italy.

The classification of the Etruscan language in the Tyrsenian family reflects this ambiguity.

Etruscan is on one hand cognate to the Rhaetic language spoken in the Alps north of Etruria, suggesting autochthonous connections; on the other hand, the Lemnian language found on the "Lemnos stele" is closely related to Etruscan, entailing either Etruscan presence in "Tyrsenian" Lemnos, or "Tyrsenian" expansion westward to Etruria.

Among various recent DNA studies linking the modern Tuscan population to Anatolians, and to the people of Caucasus, where the concentration of the shared y-haplogroup G reaches its greatest presence, particularly among the Ossetians and Georgians, one conducted by geneticist, Alberto Piazza of the University of Turin links the Etruscans to Turkey.

The team compared DNA sequences with those from men in modern Turkey, northern Italy, the Greek island of Lemnos, the Italian islands of Sicily and Sardinia and the southern Balkans.

They found that the genetic sequences of the Tuscan men varied significantly from those of men in surrounding regions in Italy, and that the men from Murlo and Volterra were the most closely related to men from Turkey.

One genetic variant in Murlo in particular is shared only by people from Turkey.

The mummies of the Tarim Basin, located in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China's far west, present an ethnological mystery.

Archaeologists have found most of the mummies on the eastern (around the area of Lopnur, Subeshi near Turpan, Kroran, Kumul) and southern (Khotan, Niya, Qiemo) edge of the Tarim Basin, many of them in very good condition, owing to the dryness of the desert and the desiccation it produced in the corpses.

The mummies share many typical Caucasoid body features (elongated bodies, angular faces, recessed eyes), and many of them have their hair physically intact, ranging in color from blond to red to deep brown, and generally long, curly and braided.

It is not known whether their hair has been bleached by internment in salt.

Their costumes, and especially textiles, may indicate a common origin with Indo-European Neolithic clothing techniques or a common low-level textile technology.

Chärchän man wore a red twill tunic and tartan leggings.

Textile expert Elizabeth Wayland Barber, who examined the tartan-style cloth, discusses similarities between it and fragments recovered from salt mines associated with the Hallstatt culture.

Tumulus (kurgan) burial becomes common in phase B of the Hallstatt culture, and cremation predominates.

Central Europe (909 BCE – 819 CE): From Celtic Oppida to Carolingian Heartlands

Regional Overview

At the center of the continent, Central Europe bridged the Mediterranean, the North Sea, and the Eurasian steppe.
Its three natural components—the eastern plains of the Danube and Vistula, the southern Alpine corridors of Raetia and Noricum, and the western Rhineland frontier—were never ruled as one but developed in tandem, linked by rivers, roads, and migration.
Over nearly two millennia, Celts, Romans, Sarmatians, Germans, and Slavs each left their imprint. The region’s history from the Iron Age through late Antiquity was one of integration through diversity: from tribal oppida to Roman provinces and, after Rome’s fall, to the Carolingian empire that reclaimed its center.

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Geography and Environment

The region’s unity lay in its waterways and passes.

• In the east, the Danube, Elbe, and Vistula threaded loess plains and forested uplands through present-day Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia, their fertile valleys sustaining dense settlement.

• The south consisted of the Alpine and sub-Alpine basins—Tyrol, Carinthia, and the Swiss Plateau—where copper, salt, and Alpine pastures underwrote a transhumant economy.

• The west, anchored on the Rhine corridor, combined temperate agriculture with riverine trade, opening north to the North Sea and south to Gaul and the Mediterranean.

Climatic oscillations—the Late Bronze Age cool phase, the Roman Warm Period, and the fluctuations of late Antiquity—alternately favored expansion and contraction of settlement, but the region’s ecological diversity provided stability through change.

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Societies and Political Developments

Celtic Foundations and Roman Conquest

From the 8th to 1st centuries BCE, Hallstatt and La Tène cultures dominated the uplands and river valleys. Celtic oppida such as the Heuneburg, Manching, and Bratislava were proto-urban centers with metallurgy, coinage, and long-distance trade.
To the east, Dacians and Thracians built fortified hilltop towns, while steppe peoples—Scythians and Sarmatians—pressed in from the Pontic frontier.

Roman expansion from the 1st century BCE onward transformed these worlds.
The provinces of Raetia, Noricum, Pannonia, and Germania Superior laced the region with roads, bridges, and legionary colonies: Vindobona (Vienna), Carnuntum, Augsburg, Cologne, Mainz, and Trier.
Latin law, architecture, and Christianity spread along the Rhine–Danube axis, binding Alpine valleys to Mediterranean markets.

Barbarian Migrations and Successor Realms

From the 2nd to 6th centuries CE, the Germanic migrations (Goths, Vandals, Lombards) and steppe incursions (Huns, later Avars) reconfigured the map.
While Dacia north of the Danube was abandoned, Romanized populations endured in the Alpine and Rhineland provinces.
In the Carpathian Basin, Avars forged a nomadic empire (6th–8th c.); to the north, Slavic peoples spread through Poland, Bohemia, and the upper Elbe, adapting shifting cultivation to forest soils.
By the 8th–9th centuries, Bavarian, Alemannic, and Frankish duchies consolidated the west and south, while Carantania and early Moravian and Polish formations took shape in the east.

The Carolingian Heartland

In the west, the Franks turned the old Roman frontier into the nucleus of renewal.
From Trier and Cologne to Aachen, the Rhine valley became the core of Merovingian, then Carolingian, power.
Charlemagne’s coronation in 800 CE crowned three centuries of recovery, drawing on Roman roads, monastic estates, and the agrarian surplus of the Rhineland and Alpine forelands.

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Economy and Exchange

Agriculture expanded from Iron Age clearings to Roman villa estates and Carolingian manors.
The iron plow, crop rotation, and horse harness improved yields; vines and orchards lined the Rhine and Danube.
Mining of salt, copper, and iron in Alpine zones supplied tools and weapons; the Amber Route, Danube, and Rhine carried metals, wine, and ceramics across the region.
After Rome’s decline, trade contracted but never ceased: episcopal towns and abbeys kept the market network alive until Carolingian revival restored continental exchange.

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Technology and Material Culture

Technological continuity marked the region’s strength.
Hallstatt ironworking laid foundations for Roman metallurgy; Roman engineering—roads, aqueducts, mills—remained visible for centuries.
Alpine communities perfected terracing, transhumant dairying, and bridge building over torrents.
Post-Roman craftsmen fused Germanic and Roman styles: brooches and weapon fittings of cloisonné gold, timber-rampart hillforts, and early Christian basilicas in stone.

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Belief and Symbolism

Religious change paralleled political transformation.
Celtic polytheism and Dacian mountain cults yielded to Roman civic gods, then to Christianity.
By the 4th century CE, bishoprics dotted the Rhine and Danube; saints’ cults (e.g., Martin of Tours, Severin of Noricum) replaced heroic warrior deities.
In pagan enclaves, Slavic and Germanic animisms persisted into the 8th–9th centuries, even as monasteries at Reichenau, Fulda, and St. Gallen disseminated the new faith and literacy.

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Adaptation and Resilience

Central Europe’s endurance rested on layered infrastructures:

• River networks provided mobility when frontiers collapsed.

• Alpine passes (Brenner, Great St. Bernard, Gotthard) guaranteed transcontinental trade.

• Agrarian diversity—from steppe pastures to vineyard slopes—hedged climatic and political risk.
  Roman urban shells became episcopal towns; hillforts evolved into medieval castles.
  Even under invasion, the region’s ecological and cultural web proved self-repairing.

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Regional Synthesis and Long-Term Significance

By 819 CE, Central Europe had completed its transformation from an Iron-Age mosaic to the heartland of medieval Christendom.
The east, heir to Celtic, Dacian, and steppe legacies, blended into the Slavic and Avar worlds that would birth Moravia, Poland, and Hungary.
The south, keeper of the Alpine passes, preserved Roman engineering and Latin speech, incubating the Rhaeto-Romance and Bavarian spheres.
The west, rejuvenated under the Franks, became the imperial and ecclesiastical core of the Carolingian world.

Together these three subregions—eastern plains, southern Alps, and western Rhine—formed a single organism whose arteries were rivers and passes.
Their natural division explains the region’s balance: eastward the open steppe, southward the mountain corridors, westward the frontier heart.
From this equilibrium emerged Europe’s enduring center—where empires met, cultures fused, and the medieval order first took shape.

East Central Europe (909 BCE – 819 CE) Early Iron and Antiquity — Celts, Dacians, Sarmatians, Rome, and Early Slavs

Geographic and Environmental Context

East Central Europe includes the greater part of Germany (including Berlin, Munich, Hamburg), Poland, Czechia (Bohemia and Moravia), Slovakia, Hungary, northeastern Austria, and the Danube basin through the Carpathian arc.

• Anchors: La Tène Celtic towns (Bohemia, Danube), Dacian hillforts (Transylvania, Carpathians), Sarmatian steppe (Hungary Plain), Roman Pannonia/Noricum, Germanic Przeworsk–Wielbark in Poland, Slavic Prague–Korchak in later centuries.

Climate & Environmental Shifts

• First-millennium variability; generally temperate, supporting dense agriculture.

Societies & Political Developments

• Celts (La Tène) dominated 5th–1st c. BCE; established oppida and coinage.

• Dacians built fortified towns in Transylvania; fought Rome.

• Romans annexed Pannonia/Noricum (1st c. CE); towns, roads, villas flourished.

• Sarmatian nomads entered Carpathian Basin (1st–4th c. CE).

• Germanic tribes (Goths, Vandals, Lombards) moved through Poland–Danube (2nd–6th c. CE).

• Slavic tribes expanded into Poland, Bohemia, Slovakia, Carpathian Basin (6th–9th c. CE).

• Avars (6th–8th c.) created steppe empire in Carpathian Basin; Franks reached Bavaria; Byzantine influence extended to Danube frontier.

Economy & Trade

• Agriculture intensified (plow, iron tools); vineyards, orchards.

• Trade along Amber Route, Danube limes; Roman goods spread widely.

• Slavic garden-farming with slash-and-burn in forests.

Technology & Material Culture

• Iron weapons, tools; oppida walls; Roman villas, baths, roads.

• Slavic handmade pottery; hillforts with timber ramparts.

Belief & Symbolism

• Celtic polytheism, Dacian–Thracian cults; later Christianity spread via Rome and Byzantium.

• Slavic animism persisted into 9th c.

Environmental Adaptation & Resilience

• Agro-pastoral diversity buffered shocks; Roman infrastructure sustained exchange until collapse; Slavic subsistence flexibility supported expansion.

Legacy & Transition

By 819 CE, East Central Europe was a cultural crossroads: Celtic and Roman legacies, Dacian fortresses, Sarmatian horsemen, Avar steppe polities, and Slavic villages coexisted — laying foundations for the medieval polities of Moravia, Poland, and Hungary.

East Central Europe (909–478 BCE)

Hallstatt Foundations, River-Valley Farming, and the Proto-Celtic Landscape

Between 909 and 478 BCE, East Central Europe—encompassing modern Germany, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, northeastern Austria, and the Danube basin—was characterized by expanding agricultural societies, growing iron technology, and increasingly organized hilltop communities. Dense forests, fertile river valleys, and broad upland basins supported a mixed agro-pastoral economy that gradually transformed the landscape. During this period the Hallstatt cultural sphere expanded across much of the region, laying foundations for the Celtic societies that would later dominate large portions of Central Europe.

Political and Social Developments

Hallstatt Communities and Regional Elites

Throughout the Danube basin, Bohemia, Moravia, Bavaria, and Austria, Hallstatt societies became increasingly organized. Regional elites emerged through control of agricultural production, metal resources, and long-distance exchange networks.

Political authority remained localized, but fortified hilltop settlements and elite residences indicate growing social hierarchy.

Forest and River Communities

Beyond the Hallstatt core, communities across Poland and northern regions remained organized around river valleys, mixed farming systems, and forest resources. Political structures were generally decentralized and tied closely to kinship and local territories.

Economic and Technological Developments

Expansion of Iron Technology

Iron tools and weapons became increasingly widespread. Improved agricultural implements supported greater productivity, while iron weaponry contributed to changing military and social structures.

River-Based Exchange Networks

The Danube and its tributaries connected communities throughout the region. Salt, metals, livestock, forest products, and prestige goods circulated through growing exchange systems linking East Central Europe to the Mediterranean and wider Europe.

Agricultural Intensification

Settlements expanded cereal cultivation, livestock management, orchards, and pasture systems. Forest clearance accelerated in many river valleys and upland basins.

Cultural and Artistic Developments

Hallstatt Artistic Traditions

Elite material culture flourished through decorated metalwork, ceremonial objects, weapons, and personal ornaments. Long-distance influences from southern Europe became increasingly visible.

Sacred Landscapes

Hilltops, springs, groves, rivers, and prominent natural features served as focal points of ritual activity. Ancestor veneration and landscape-based religious systems remained central to community life.

Settlement Patterns and Land Use

Hilltop Communities

Fortified hilltop settlements expanded throughout many regions, functioning as centers of authority, refuge, and exchange.

Agricultural Landscapes

River valleys became increasingly cultivated. Villages remained relatively dispersed, embedded within broad mosaics of fields, pasture, forests, and wetlands.

Long-Term Consequences and Historical Significance

The era from 909 to 478 BCE established many of the environmental, economic, and social foundations of later East Central European history. By the end of the period, expanding iron technology, fortified settlements, agricultural intensification, and growing elite authority had prepared the ground for the emergence of the Celtic La Tène world.