Overview

The Gundestrup Cauldron is the largest known piece of European Iron Age silver work: a deep gilded silver vessel about 42 centimetres high and 69 centimetres across, its inner and outer plates worked in repousse with deities, processions, animals and a horned figure often linked to a Celtic god. It was found dismantled in a peat bog at Gundestrup in Himmerland, Denmark, in 1891, and has been in the National Museum of Denmark since.

Peat cutters found the Gundestrup Cauldron on 28 May 1891 in the Raevemose bog near Gundestrup, in the Himmerland region of Denmark, dismantled into its constituent silver panels and stacked inside its base, a deposition pattern archaeologists read as deliberate ritual placement rather than accidental loss or storage. The panels' imagery has attracted a wide range of scholarly and popular interpretation over more than a century of study, from readings that treat individual figures as specific named Celtic deities, Cernunnos chief among them, to more cautious approaches that decline to assign fixed identities to figures whose only surviving context is the cauldron's own imagery, unsupported by any accompanying text, since the culture or cultures that produced it left no contemporary written explanation of what the scenes depicted were understood to mean.