Quote Originally Posted by NeonGod
I agree about the Urnfield culture having subcultures; it makes perfect sense, and I agree that the early Hallstatt Celts would not have been without un-Celtic traits while still early in their history. However, the use of iron tools is not so much a tenant of their Culture as a technology, improved and different as it was. You're probably right that the Hallstatters with iron tools were definitively Hallstatt, but the use of iron tools is not a necessary tenant of Hallstatt culture; it's more of a temporal indication, a historical 'bookmark', if you will.
Yes, but I mean to say that the particular landmark in their history is where they're no longer a subset of the Urnfeld, and more specifically Celtic. Not simply because they were using iron (though the use of iron was the first employment of iron in weapons), but because of how they used it (iron works and such display the first evidence of specifically Celtic art). Of course, it's not like, one day a Hallstatt-region craftsman decided to work iron into a hunting knife, and suddenly they're all 'Celts', but it does represent the dynamic shift from being 'another part of the Urnfeld culture', into being what we recognize as Celts (a combination of warriors-ironsmiths-traders).