The time when the last carp’s tongue hoards from Atlantic Late Bronze Age 3 (the Vénat horizon, Milcent, 2012) were buried has been a long debated issue… and still is: the assumption that the most recent hoards were abandoned at the beginning of the Early Iron Age only has been supported and remains so. The contemporaneity of Hallstatt flanged hilt-grip swords (traditionally called Gündlingen type) and these hoards has been assessed many a time, in particular because blade fragments from Gündlingen type swords as well as one Hallstatt razor were supposedly present.Relying on bibliographical sources, the author has carried out a critical review of the Early Iron Age bronze artefacts said to have been identified in some rare hoards from Atlantic Late Bronze Age 3. An overall negative result ensued.The fragments interpreted as pieces of blades from Hallstatt swords (Vénat, Granville-Sainte-Honorine, probably Chamery and some from the seemingly ambiguous discovery in Hourtin) display mere ridges underlining the edges, which cannot be taken for the fine ribs present on Gündlingen type swords. The pieces of blades come from a possibly later model of Ewart Park type swords. A few fragments from Hourtin seem to actually display embossed lines, in which case the question of pieces from Gündlingen type sword blades remains relevant. But in Western Gaul, one can nevertheless notice that embossed lines are documented on some rare swords from the end of the Bronze Age, either imported or produced locally (Mörigen type swords, including one dredged from the Garonne river near Bordeaux; a fragment of sword blade of undetermined type in Hourtin; a decorated sword blade from a variant of Vénat type carp’s tongue sword; Tarquinia type antenna-hilted swords from Amboise). A carp’s tongue sword blade from the Vénat hoard is richly decorated with incisions parallel to the midrib, simulating an actual pattern of embossed lines. The same pattern is to be found on the antenna-hilted sword blade coming from the same hoard. Potential prototypes for embossed lines decoration are thus definitely present in Western Europe. Hence, there is no need to necessarily invoke an imitation of Hallstatt swords in order to explain the genesis of western swords. Moreover, embossed lines may well be the mere stylistic evolution of the lateral angulations that exist on some blades.The razor from Guennoc Island does not come obviously from the hoard of the isle; it must be considered as an independent and uncertain discovery, maybe from a burial.The identification of various artefacts remains disputable: fragments of razors from the Petit-Villatte hoard abusively attributed to Havré type; the proximal part of a hilt with a concave oval pommel from the Prairie de Mauves hoard, which has nothing in common with the antenna-hilted Early Iron Age swords; Longy type annular plaques remotely resembling those from the Ha C Velburg-Lengenfeld burial in Bavaria. On the other hand, Ha C or Ha D bronze artefacts were sometimes later added in museums or collections to hoards’ ones, see for instance armlets in the Vénat one. A heterogeneous bunch of bronze objects of unknown provenance “enriched” the Plessé hoard.Either because of their typological determination, or because of the conditions of their discovery, the main objects relied upon for a late dating to the beginning of Early Iron Age of the large hoards from the carp’s tongue horizon do not as a consequence resist an accurate analysis. The fragments of wagons that are sometimes put forward must not be considered as late elements, but as the prototypes of their Early Iron Age correspondents, in other words as tested models, the production of which may have remained more or less unchanged throughout times, which is a rather common phenomenon. Other models of artefacts, such as armlets decorated with small protrusions, or various types of plaques, also herald the Early Iron Age types. The presence of iron pieces (the Vénat, Petit-Villatte, Isles in Chabris, and La Haute Queue in Lacroix-Saint-Ouen hoards) are now no argument for a late dating any more, since iron, already becoming less rare during Late Bronze Age, actually appears in France during Middle Bronze age and beginning of Late Bronze Age. The horse bit cheek from the Guennoc island hoard cannot be considered as a late element as it once was: it is a variant of the Wallerfangen and Corcelettes forms that are attested not only in the Wallerfangen hoard in Saarland, but in the Swiss lakeside settlements as well, abandoned at the end of Late Bronze Age. Obviously, it would be fallacious to think that the production of bronze artefacts during Late Atlantic Bronze Age 3 ceased or drastically changed at the turn of Early Iron Age. We could certainly multiply the examples of the continuity or slow evolution of artefacts, but our knowledge of this particular production during the beginning of Early Iron Age (Ha C) is overshadowed by the almost lack of hoards and the poorness of the rare ones dated from this period. The phenomenon is known to have regained importance only during the middle phase of the Early Iron Age (Ha D1), in particular through the hoards of Armorican type socketed axes in Brittany and Normandy, of ornaments in the Center-West, and the Launac type hoards in Southern Gaul. Hoards such as those of Wattenheim/Alsenborn, Kr. Kaiserslautern in Saarland, or of Scharlachkopf in Bingen, Kr. Mainz-Bingen in Rheinland-Palatinate, those of the Llyn Fawr horizon in Great-Britain, or even the socketed axe from the grave number 3 of Court-Saint-Etienne in Belgium, all testify that the typology of the commonplace bronze artefacts had remained quite similar to the Late Bronze Age one, whereas the models of swords had actually changed.

EXPLOR_STEP=$WICRI_ROOT/Wicri/France/explor/LeHavreV1/Data/Hal/Checkpoint

HfdSelect -h $EXPLOR_STEP/biblio.hfd -nk 000095 | SxmlIndent | more

HfdSelect -h $EXPLOR_AREA/Data/Hal/Checkpoint/biblio.hfd -nk 000095 | SxmlIndent | more

{{Explor lien
   |wiki=    Wicri/France
   |area=    LeHavreV1
   |flux=    Hal
   |étape=   Checkpoint
   |type=    RBID
   |clé=     Hal:hal-01099229
   |texte=   Hallstatt CArtefacts in Carp's Toungue Hoards ? A critical examination
}}