It is named for its type site, Hallstatt, a lakeside village in the Austrian Salzkammergut southeast of Salzburg, where there was a rich salt mine, and some 1,300 burials are known, many with fine artifacts.

Already by 1881 Otto Tischler had made analogies to the Iron Age in the Northern Alps based on finds of brooches from graves in the south of Germany.

[6] Despite missing an older Dendro-date for HaC, the convention remains that the Hallstatt period begins together with the arrival of the iron ore processing technology around 800 BC.

In the mine workings themselves, the salt has preserved many organic materials such as textiles, wood and leather, and many abandoned artifacts such as shoes, pieces of cloth, and tools including miner's backpacks, have survived in good condition.

[26] Older assumptions of the early 20th century of Illyrians having been the bearers of especially the Eastern Hallstatt culture are indefensible and archeologically unsubstantiated.

Major settlements are known as 'princely seats' (or Fürstensitze in German), and are characterized by elite residences, rich burials, monumental buildings and fortifications.

The large monumental site of Alte Burg may have had a religious or ceremonial function, and possibly served as a location for games and competitions.

In the central Hallstatt regions toward the end of the period (Ha D), very rich graves of high-status individuals under large tumuli are found near the remains of fortified hilltop settlements.

There are some chariot or wagon burials, including Býčí Skála[42] and Brno-Holásky[43] in the Czech Republic, Vix, Sainte-Colombe-sur-Seine and Lavau in France, Hochdorf, Hohmichele and Grafenbühl in Germany, and Mitterkirchen in Austria.

Powerful local chiefdoms emerged which controlled the redistribution of luxury goods from the Mediterranean world that is also characteristic of the La Tène culture.

[46] By the later Urnfield (Hallstatt B) phase, some swords were already being made and embellished in iron in eastern Central Europe, and occasionally much further west.

[51] The remarkable uniformity of spoked-wheel wagons from across the Hallstatt region indicates a certain standardisation of production methods, which included techniques such as lathe-turning.

[54] The planks of the Hohmichele burial chamber (6th c. BC), which were over 6m long and 35 cm wide, appear to have been sawn by a large timber-yard saw.

[55] The construction of monumental buildings such as the Vix palace further demonstrates a "mastery of geometry and carpentry capable of freeing up vast interior spaces.

Remarkably, this is almost identical to the length of a measuring stick found at Borum Eshøj in Denmark (0.7855 m) dating from the Bronze Age (c. 1350 BC).

Animals, with waterfowl a particular favourite, are often included as part of other objects, more often than humans, and in the west there is almost no narrative content such as scenes of combat depicted.

The origin of the narrative scenes of the eastern zone, from Hallstatt C onwards, is generally traced to influence from the Situla art of northern Italy and the northern Adriatic, where these bronze buckets began to be decorated in bands with figures in provincial Etruscan centres influenced by Etruscan and Greek art.

[67] The processions of animals, typical of earlier examples, or humans derive from the Near East and Mediterranean, and Nancy Sandars finds the style shows "a gaucherie that betrays the artist working in a way that is uncongenial, too much at variance with the temper of the craftsmen and the craft".

[68] Except for the Italian Benvenuti Situla, men are hairless, with "funny hats, dumpy bodies and big heads", though often shown looking cheerful in an engaging way.

[70] Hallstatt culture musical instruments included harps, lyres, zithers, woodwinds, panpipes, horns, drums and rattles.

[75] Inscriptions engraved on situlas or cauldrons from the Hallstatt cemetery in Austria, dating from c. 800-500 BC, have been interpreted as numerals, letters and words, possibly related to Etruscan or Old Italic scripts.

[74][76] Weights from Bavaria dating from the 7th to early 6th century BC bear signs possibly resembling Greek or Etruscan letters.

[77] A single-word inscription (possibly a name) on a locally produced ceramic sherd from Montmorot in eastern France, dating from the late 7th to mid-6th century BC, has been identified as either Gaulish or Lepontic, written in either a 'proto-Lepontic' or Etruscan alphabet.

[78][79] A fragment of an inscription painted on local pottery has also been recovered from the late Hallstatt site of Bragny-sur-Saône in eastern France, dating from the 5th century BC.

[80] Another fragmentary inscription on pottery was found in a princely burial near Bergères-les-Vertus in north-eastern France, dating from late 5th century BC (at the beginning of La Tène A).

It would also seem to represent the first co-occurrence in the Celtic world of a funerary archaeological context and a contemporaneous linguistic qualification as ‘royal’.”[82] According to Verger (1998) the 7th-6th century BC inscription from Montmorot "is at the beginning of a still limited series of documents attesting to the use of alphabetic signs and the use of writing in Eastern Gaul during the entire period characterised by the appearance, development and end of the Hallstattian 'princely phenomenon'.

"[83] The monumental burial mounds at Glauberg and Magdalenenberg in Germany featured structures aligned with the point of the major lunar standstill, which occurs every 18.6 years.

[86][87][88] According to the archaeologist Allard Mees, the numerous burials within the Magdalenenberg mound were positioned to mirror the constellations as they appeared at the time of the summer solstice in 618 BC.

Parts of the huge necropolis (which originally consisted of more than 1,100 tumuli) surrounding this settlement can be seen today near Gleinstätten, and the chieftain's mounds were on the other side of the hill, near Kleinklein.

Damgaard et al. (2018) analyzed the remains of a male and female buried at a Hallstatt cemetery near Litoměřice, Czech Republic between ca.