The village of Halstaat in Austria provided the starting point for the journey of the Celts. Halstaat sits in an area called Salzkammergat, or place of the good salt. In 1846, a man named George Ramsauer, who was director of the Halstaat State Mine, decided to investigate reports of his workers of ancient miners whose bodies were preserved in the salt of the mine. Stories of how the area was the provider of salt for the Roman empire by a non-Roman people fired up Ramsauer's imagination. Investigation of the area revealed a number of grassy mounds that turned out to be ancient burial sites. Ramsauer, although not a trained archaeologist, discovered over twenty-five hundred graves in the area, and exhaustively recorded the contents of over one thousand of them.
In 1876, a group of scientists from Vienna came to investigate Ramsauer's discoveries. Their exhaustive investigation of the salt mine, and the surrounding graves, revealed signs of a different civilization. Their report read, "We find certain types of remains,- pots, implements, burial rites, house forms- constantly recurring together. Such a complex of regularly associated traces we shall term 'a cultural group' or a 'culture'. We assume that such a complex is the material expression of what today would be called a people.". Thus was born the term "Halstaat Culture." The discovery of the objects revealed a people that were beyond the start of the rudimentary development of culture. There were definite class structures uncovered. The workers in the mines were definitely not of the same status as the people of the elaborate graves. The hierarchy of the society was shown by what was buried with the dead, or what was not.
The Halstaat period of Celtic life is generally set at starting around 900 to 800 BC. The periods are divided into the categories A, B, and C. When reference is made to the Halstaat periods, they refer to the development, or lack of development, of the culture. For instance, objects found in Ireland and England that have been dated to 400 BC are referred to as being of the Halstaat A period, even though on continental Europe the culture was already into the La Tene development, because of the state of the objects. Not all areas advanced at the same rate. Halstaat A and B belong to the Late Bronze Age. Halstaat C is the early Iron Age. With this discovery, the idea of "civilization" was given a new definition. Not just Rome or Greece, but Celtica, as well, reigned as a major culture.
