It is often distinguished from earlier and neighbouring cultures mainly by the La Tène style of Celtic art, characterized by curving "swirly" decoration, especially of metalwork. It is named after the type site of La Tène on the north side of Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland, where thousands of objects had been deposited in the lake, as was discovered after the water level dropped in 1857.
In 1863 he interpreted the remains as a Celtic village built on piles.
From among these, Kopp collected about forty iron swords. The Swiss archaeologist Ferdinand Keller published his findings in 1868 in his influential first report on the Swiss pile dwellings (Pfahlbaubericht).
Another interpretation accounting for the presence of cast iron swords that had not been sharpened, was of a site for ritual depositions. With the first systematic lowering of the Swiss lakes from 1868 to 1883, the site fell completely dry.
In 1880, Emile Vouga, a teacher from Marin-Epagnier, uncovered the wooden remains of two bridges (designated "Pont Desor" and "Pont Vouga") originally over 100 m long, that crossed the little Thielle River (today a nature reserve) and the remains of five houses on the shore.
Another interpretation accounting for the presence of cast iron swords that had not been sharpened, was of a site for ritual depositions. With the first systematic lowering of the Swiss lakes from 1868 to 1883, the site fell completely dry.
Date-able Greek pottery and analysis employing scientific techniques such as dendrochronology and thermoluminescence help provide date ranges for an absolute chronology at some La Tène sites. La Tène history was originally divided into "early", "middle" and "late" stages based on the typology of the metal finds (Otto Tischler 1885), with the Roman occupation greatly disrupting the culture, although many elements remain in Gallo-Roman and Romano-British culture.
In 1885 the canton asked the Société d'Histoire of Neuchâtel to continue the excavations, the results of which were published by Vouga in the same year. All in all, over 2500 objects, mainly made from metal, have been excavated in La Tène.
In the east the western end of the old Hallstatt core area in modern Bavaria, Czechia, Austria and Switzerland formed a somewhat separate "eastern style Province" in the early La Tène, joining with the western area in Alsace. In 1994 a prototypical ensemble of elite grave sites of the early 5th century BCE was excavated at Glauberg in Hesse, northeast of Frankfurt-am-Main, in a region that had formerly been considered peripheral to the La Tène sphere.
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