The economy of the La Tène culture communities based on the example of research from Upper Silesia

Abstract The results of excavations show that the La Tène culture community which inhabited the microregion of the contemporary village of Samborowice (Upper Silesia, Poland) in the Iron Age did not differ from its brethren from the area of Moravia and the middle basin of the Danube. Our intention is to try to identify the most important features of local economy based on newly acquired archaeobotanical and archaeozoological sources. The results from Samborowice in the form of a set of cereals characteristic of La Tène culture settlements from Central Europe suggest that the set of remains being analysed comes from a period when changes to the selection of cereals had yet to occur. The population in this period of history applied a model of economy based on agriculture and livestock rearing, with cattle being the most important animals, followed by pigs and small ruminants interchangeably.