As a part of the Family Weekends at the ROM we will be putting out some treasures from the vaults, objects for which we presently do not have in the gallery. For the Celtic weekend of March 3 and 4 we have a display of weapons from the Bronze Age of the Celtic World, roughly 2,000 to 700 BC. During this period valuable bronze, a mixture of copper and the rare metal tin, would have been used by the elite of society, and warrior chieftains and heroes would be armed with these beautifully gleaming spears, shields, and swords. Although the ROM has Bronze Age objects from all over Europe, these are from the Atlantic region, the same region that was the site of Megalith constructions like Stonehenge earlier in the Neolithic, and is where we find Celtic-speaking peoples in the Iron Age (after 700 BC). Archaeologists once thought that the Celts spread out from Middle Europe in the Iron Age with the Hallstatt culture, but more recent thinking is that the people had been living on the edges of the Atlantic for much, much longer, and it was just the objects of the culture, the pottery and other artefacts, that spread across Europe with the spread of iron metallurgy. We don’t really know what language was spoken by the people that made and used these artefacts, but genetic evidence supports the view that most of the population of Britain and Ireland are Celts who came from Spain five thousand years ago – with the spread of Megaliths.
But the Celts weren’t just about weaponry, if you come to the Celtic weekend we will have a lot of music, dance, stories, and other family activities!