The cauldron had been taken apart and laid in the bog, most likely as a votive offering, in a region far from where it was made. Its imagery draws on the Celtic world, but its material and technique point elsewhere, and reconstructing how it reached northern Jutland is a matter of hypothesis: it may have travelled as loot, as a gift, or through the movements of the Cimbri. The plates were found stacked inside the base, allowing the vessel to be reassembled, and it is now among the most studied objects of the European Iron Age.
At 69 centimetres in diameter, the Gundestrup Cauldron is the largest known surviving example of European Iron Age silverwork, constructed of silver, partly gilded, with tin solder and glass inlay decorating its elaborately figured interior and exterior panels; the imagery includes a horned figure widely identified with the Celtic deity Cernunnos, warriors, animals and a scene of what appears to be ritual sacrifice or transformation, though the precise narrative the panels together tell remains a matter of scholarly interpretation rather than settled fact. No comparably large or elaborately worked silver vessel of the same general period survives from Denmark itself, reinforcing the case that the cauldron was manufactured elsewhere and reached its bog deposition site by trade, gift exchange or plunder rather than by local production.