VIX

At the small settlement of Vix near Châtillon on the upper Seine River in eastern France, an unusually richly outfitted grave was excavated in 1952 and 1953. Numerous burial mounds are still visible around the fortified hilltop site of Mont Lassois, but the mound above the Vix grave had eroded and was no longer apparent on the surface. Excavations revealed the remains of a mound 42 meters in diameter and probably about 5 meters high, within which was a wooden chamber 3.1 by 2.75 meters in size, covered by a layer of stones. Inside was an undisturbed burial that included the skeletal remains of a woman about thirty-five years of age, buried c. 480 b.c., at the end of the Early Iron Age.

The grave contained goods that characterize rich women's burials of the Early Iron Age, but also unique objects. The woman's body was laid on the box of a wagon in the center of the grave, with her head toward the north. The wagon's detached four wheels had been arranged along the east wall of the chamber. On the western side was an extraordinary assemblage of ceramic, bronze, and silver vessels. Around her neck the woman wore a uniquely ornamented gold ring of exceptionally fine workmanship, weighing 480 grams. At the two terminals were lion paws, tiny winged horses, and intricately incised ornamentation. Gold neck rings are characteristic of richly outfitted Early Iron Age burials in temperate Europe, but the Vix ring is different from all others. The style of ornament suggests connections with Greek and Scythian decorative traditions, but specialists have not agreed on the probable place of manufacture.

Her other personal ornaments are of types common to well-equipped women's graves, but she was buried with more of them, and many are unusually richly decorated. On each wrist she wore three bracelets of schist and one of thin bronze. A necklace was made of amber, diorite, and serpentine beads. On each ankle was a hollow bronze ring. With her were eight fibulae, ornamental brooches, which worked on the principle of the modern safety pin, that were used to fasten garments and for decoration. Two were of iron, the other six of bronze, and some were ornamented with gold, amber, and coral. Amber and coral were both exotic luxuries—amber came from the coast of the Baltic Sea to the northeast and coral from the Mediterranean to the south.

The feasting equipment in the grave consisted of eight vessels, at least six of them imports from the Greek and Etruscan worlds. Two wine cups were products of the luxury ceramic industry in Athens. One was painted in the black-figure style about 525 b.c., and the other was a plain black cup made about 515 b.c. A bronze jug and three basins all may have come from Etruscan workshops in Italy. A silver bowl with a central omphalos, or knob, of sheet gold was 23 centimeters in diameter. The most unusual object in the grave was an enormous bronze krater, a kind of vessel used in the Greek world for mixing wine and water at feasts, made by Greek bronzesmiths.

The Vix krater is 1.64 meters tall and weighs 208 kilograms—the largest metal krater known. It would have held about 1,100 liters, but there is some question as to whether it could, in fact, have been used. It is possible that the weight of so much liquid would have burst the thin bronze. While the body of the krater is hammered sheet bronze, the base, handles, rim, and figures around the neck are all cast. The handles represent figures of gorgons, and the cast bronze figures on the neck are Greek warriors, their horses, and chariots. With the krater was a bronze lid 1.02 meters in diameter, in the center of which stood a figure of a women 19 centimeters tall.

Based on stylistic analysis, art historians believe that the krater was made in a Greek workshop in southern Italy about 530 b.c. This unusually large and finely made object may have been transported in pieces across the Tyrrhenian Sea, up the Rhône Valley, and overland to the headwaters of the Seine and then to Vix. Each of the small bronze figures has a Greek letter on the reverse side and is attached to a spot on the neck with a corresponding letter, as if assembly was required. The most interesting questions are, Why was this very unusual and costly object brought to this place far from the centers of power and wealth of the Mediterranean civilizations? And who was the woman with whom this extraordinary vessel was buried? Most scholarly opinion is that it was a political gift—a present from a powerful Greek group to a potentate in Early Iron Age Europe, perhaps to establish favorable relations for the trade system that is represented so well by Greek and Etruscan luxury goods in this grave and at other sites of the period. At some stage between manufacture and burial, someone removed all of the spears held in the hands of the warriors figured on the neck of the krater. Who might have done this and why?

Archaeological excavations in 1991–1993 uncovered a square enclosure 23 meters on a side, bounded by a ditch, 200 meters southwest of the Vix burial. An opening in the ditch 1.2 meters wide at the center of one side faces the fortified hilltop settlement on Mont Lassois. Animal bones and remains of ceramic bowls in the ditch suggest that rituals associated with funeral rites were conducted in the enclosure. In the ditch just east of the opening were two almost life-size limestone sculptures of seated humans, one of a woman wearing a neck ring resembling that in the rich grave and the other of a man wearing a sword and holding a shield. Apparently these figures were placed at either side of the entrance into the enclosure. The Vix burial and associated enclosure provide unusually rich information about wealth and status, contact with Mediterranean societies, the role of feasting and display in social and political systems, and the character of funerary ritual in Early Iron Age Europe.

See alsoHochdorf (vol. 1, part 1); Greek Colonies in the West (vol. 2, part 6).

bibliography

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Joffroy, René. Le trésor de Vix. Paris: Fayard, 1962.

——. La tombe de Vix (Côte-d'Or). Vol. 48, fascicle 1. Paris: Monuments et Mémoires (Fondation Eugène Piot), 1954.

Moscati, Sabatino, Otto-Herman Frey, Vencelas Kruta, Barry Raftery, and Miklós Szabó, eds. The Celts. New York: Rizzoli, 1991.

Wells, Peter S. Beyond Celts, Germans and Scythians: Archaeology and Identity in Iron Age Europe. London: Duckworth, 2001.

Peter S. Wells