Iron Age secrets exhumed from riches-filled crypt

By Bruce Bower, 2:00pm, February 2, 2017, New Scientist

Discoveries in a richly appointed 2,600-year-old burial chamber point to surprisingly close ties between Central Europe’s earliest cities and Mediterranean societies. Dated to 583 B.C., this grave also helps pin down when people inhabited what may have been the first city north of the Alps.
 

Five gold spheres and a gold pinhead (far right), each shown from two angles, were found on the skeleton of a woman buried near an early Iron Age hill fort in Germany. © Archaeological State Office of Baden-Württemberg, Antiquity Publications, Ltd.

An array of fine jewelry, luxury goods and even a rare piece of horse armor found in the grave indicates that “there were craftsmen working in the early Celtic centers north of the Alps who learned their crafts south of the Alps,” says archaeologist Dirk Krausse of the Archaeological State Office of Baden-Württemberg, Germany.

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