Szabó Miklós, Petres F. Éva: Decorated weapons on the La Tene Iron Age in the Carpathian Basin. (Inventaria Praehistorica Hungariae 5; Budapest, 1992)
I. EXPERIMENTATION - The post-Waldalgesheim design
these must obviously also be valid for the latter. 120 Notwithstanding that the sword from Gáva-Katóhalom is similarly a stray find, the investigation of the find spot and the comparison of the recovered finds with material from other cemeteries in northeastern Hungary suggest that it cannot be earlier than the La Tène B2 phase. 121 A further clue is offered by the graves from the Kosd cemetery which include two variants (a wider and narrower one) of the oval, openwork chape-end enclosing a pair of rosettes from an unambiguously La Tène B2 context. "0"-shaped chape-ends are a further variant, as are angular and deltoid forms, as well as some openwork specimens which of the "standardised" oval type. Considering that beside the characteristic chape-end, most of the relevant pieces have a frontal reinforce with two discs and two round loop-plates on their reverse, the following typological conclusion can be drawn: the suspension loop of the HatvanBoldog and the Gáva scabbard can as a matter of fact be regarded as a variant — in other words, the type specimen is itself a variant in terms of the larger series of the type. This would call for the introduction of a new category in view of the terminological difficulties. 122 Disregarding now a detailed review of typological problems which are secondary to stylistic analyses, what needs to be emphasized is that the material from the Carpathian Basin is no earlier than the La Tène B2 phase. 123 In contrast, it is fairly clear that scabbards with semicircular openwork chapes with rosettes appear earlier in the west than in the region we are concerned with. 124 Considering that the series of relevant swords from the Carpathian Basin can broadly be assigned to the first half of the 3rd century B. C, their distribution reflects the historical situation prior to the Balkanic invasion in the course of which new Celtic groups arrived to the Carpathian Basin from the west in the late 4th century B.C. 125 This in turn offers yet another set of conclusions. On the one hand, artistic phenomena reflecting western Celtic contacts can be safely linked to this historic situation, whilst on the other, the activity of the workshop producing the Liter 1 scabbard (Cat.no. 39; Pis 43, 44) and the Rezi-Rezicser sword (Cat.no. 56, Suppl. 3) illustrates the distinctly eclectic nature of the artistic tendencies of this critical period. Neither is it difficult to perceive the emergent artistic mainstream: vegetal motifs inspired by the Waldalgesheim tradition began to play an increasingly prominent role in the decoration of sword scabbards. The ultimate question is how the assumed eastern Celtic workshops contributed to the subsequent development of these adopted and rather heterogeneously applied style forms.
