CHAPTER ONE
Attitudes to the Past

Among the earliest surviving European literature is the poetry of Hesiod, notably his Works and Days, in which he describes the hard lot of the farmer— the labour involved in tilling the land to obtain the food needed for survival in a harsh and hostile world. Hesiod lived in the Age of Iron, but in happier days, in the Ages of Gold and Silver, food was plentifully available without the drudgery of farming: it only required gathering and eating. This idealised picture still plays a part in our schizophrenic view of the past and of ‘simple societies’, be it the concept of the ‘noble savage’, or what Sahlins has more scientifically documented as ‘the original affluent society’.

The opposite view of society is embodied in words such as ‘progress’ and ‘technological advance’, popularised in prehistoric terms by Christian Thomsen’s Three Age System. Who, Thomsen argued, would make axes of stone if they knew of bronze and iron? What had started as a classification of objects in the National Museum at Copenhagen rapidly became the basis for the chronological division of European man’s prehistory. Thomsen’s idea, coupled later with the concepts of evolution and of ‘the survival of the fittest’, reflected, if not originated, the self-satisfaction of late nineteenth-century West European society—the belief that it was technologically superior and therefore superior in all other respects to ‘less advanced’ societies both past and present. This reached its extreme form in the Germanic school of Kossinna whose views on the superiority of the German race formed one of the cornerstones of Nazi ideology.

If the extremist view of the Kossinna school was rejected by the majority of archaeologists, the modes of explanation were shared, except that ‘civilisation’ was a phenomenon which spread from the south-east rather than the north-west—ex oriente lux. Ideas spread by ‘diffusion’, an illdefined process which assumed the inevitability of the march of civilisation from one region to the next, and explained the movement of ideas in terms of pseudo-history—invasions and waves of migration of peoples across Europe. The revolution in dating by C14 destroyed the foundation of this approach for some aspects of the neolithic and Bronze Age periods, and in the literature appeared terms such as ‘independent development’ and ‘autonomy’ to explain the megalithic tombs of western Europe or the development of European copper and bronze metallurgy. But for the Iron Age at least neither ‘diffusion’ nor ‘autonomy’ were adequate explanations; it was clearly a combination of the two— ideas spreading from one area to another, with individual, unique reactions which produced a varied pattern of distinctive regional cultures.

The fashion today is to talk in terms of ‘culture change’, and to study the mechanics of how this happened in each society. Though each reaction may be unique, the process and mechanics which caused those changes still follow basic rules of explanation. Trade, for instance, can initiate change, but the objects exchanged, the way the trade was organised, the people who participated, and the reactions produced, though often similar, will appear in unique combinations in every case. The economy, the environment, technology, ideology and the social structure will combine in a unique system. In each case we cannot understand one aspect of the system without knowing something of the whole. To gain this knowledge, a study of the entirety of a society is the ideal, but there are practical limitations. The archaeological record represents only a wreckage of former societies in which the archaeologist tries to recognise patterns. Even the aspects of society which we might expect to survive do not always do so. Burials may for some reason not appear or settlements are difficult to locate. Added to this is the bias of the archaeologist. Too often our knowledge is derived from ‘treasure hunting’ by clandestine tomb robber and archaeologist alike, and the obsession of certain museums for objects of ‘art’, divorced from their context, has produced a hopelessly one-sided view of, for instance, the Etruscans. They are condemned for their second-rate art, but ignored for the unique development of their urban settlements. Scholarship too readily confines itself to one aspect of a society—its art, its sculpture, its architecture, its trade—but ignores the total context. Thus we have to study the process of urbanisation, or the economic impact of trade on Etruscan society, in terms of art history derived from gravegoods from tombs.

This book has the ambitious aim of studying such reaction and change in southern and central Europe in the first millennium BC. It was the period when European civilisation took its shape, with the appearance of the civilisations of the Greeks, Phoenicians, Etruscans and Romans, and, in more shadowy form, of the Illyrians, Celts and Germans north of the Alps. It starts in a period when Bronze Age Europe, though linked by trade within itself, was isolated from the Near East with the collapse of Mycenaean Greece at the end of the second millennium. We shall see how slowly, through the intermediaries of Phoenicia and Greece, a new network appeared along which trade objects, technology and concepts travelled, gradually embracing the Mediterranean, central Europe and, finally, Britain and Scandinavia. At the end of the period much of the area was united within a common entity, the Roman Empire.

My attitudes are those of a prehistorian viewing the world from central Europe, with a grounding in geography and anthropology rather than the traditions of Mediterranean archaeology. I am more concerned with those developments which are visible in the archaeological record than written sources, so that we can make direct comparisons between, for instance, the archaic states of Greece and central France. But such aims are not easy to achieve, as the existence of historical evidence has inevitably caused classical archaeologists to lean on these rather than on the archaeology. What did an early Greek state look like in spatial terms, what were the early towns really like—our views are too overlain by classical Greek concepts of what a city and city state was like. It causes problems of nomenclature. Classical archaeologists will call ‘kings’ and ‘tribes’ what anthropologists might call ‘chiefs’ and ‘chiefdoms’, bringing out our own innate prejudice of what these words mean. The whole of the archaeology is riven with such basic conceptual bias, and I will make no claims to have escaped it myself, but so that the reader can understand better the way in which the data we are considering has been collected in the past, and how different generations and types of archaeologists have attempted to arrange it in meaningful patterns, we must first discuss the basic attitudes from which the period can be viewed.

Population movement and ethnicity

Invasion and migration have been popular forms of explanation of culture change since the last century, and this has been especially true of the Iron Age, when we have documentary evidence that such migrations happened. However, it has often been too readily invoked, and there are problems with identifying it in the archaeological record even in documented cases. Groups often symbolise themselves in terms of material culture. We can identify pottery styles that are peculiarly Greek during the Geometric and Archaic periods. Though imitations do occur, and the pottery was traded, we can use it to identify Greek colonies, or the presence of Greek potters in Etruscan cities. The problem for the archaeologist is to decide what are the significant signals in the archaeological data. Is the provision of a horse with three tails on certain Iron Age coins in Britain something of overt significance to the users of the coins, was it merely a convention, or was there an underlying relationship between users of these coins of which even they were not immediately aware?

1 ‘Celtic’ metalwork

The Gundestrup cauldron (a) was found in a bog in northern Jutland in 1891. It had been dismantled and deliberately deposited, and, like many similar finds from Neolithic to Viking times in Denmark, it is probably a ceremonial or ritual offering. It consists of a number of silver plates decorated with repoussé ornament.

The style of the weapons, and especially the fact that the horsemen are wearing spurs, suggests a second or first century BC date. The art style is not local, and it was formerly thought the cauldron was an import from Gaul or more doubtfully from central Europe. The closest parallels, however, come from Romania, for instance the somewhat earlier silver cups from the burial at Agighiol (b), and it seems most likely that the Gundestrup cauldron was made in eastern Europe.

The iconography of the individual plates has attracted a wide literature, much of it fanciful. Some of the attributes of the individuals depicted are known from religious sculptures of Roman date from Gaul. Thus the antlered figure (e) is identified with the Celtic god Cernunnos. Some of the weapons (c)—the shields, the trumpet or carnyx—are known in La Tène contexts, but to go further and call this object ‘Celtic’ is to take archaeology beyond its limits. We cannot know the language spoken by the silversmith—it could have been Celtic, or German, or Thracian or Dacian.

He has taken a wide range of symbolism of different origins. The small figure slaying the bull on the central panel (d) reminds us of the later Persian cult of Mithras, the boy riding on the dolphin (e) appears in Greek mythology, the elephants (f) hint at ideas from further east, while the wearing of torcs found on several of the plates is something by no means confined to the Celtic world.

Scale: 1:3

The problems are most acute when we consider the Celts of central and western Europe. It is regularly assumed that we can equate ‘Celts’ with La Tène culture and La Tène Art. But what do we mean by ‘Celts’? People who spoke a Celtic language, or who were members of a political group who called themselves Celts, or a physical type (blue-eyed, fair haired, etc.), or should we not expect all these definitions to correspond exactly— did all people with La Tène Art speak a Celtic language; did all Celtic speakers have La Tène Art? Without care we can be led into nonsense. In most books on ‘Celtic Art’ the Gundestrup cauldron is illustrated, on the grounds that it depicts items of La Tène material culture (helmets, shields, trumpets), and Celtic deities such as Cernunnos the antlered god. But this object was manufactured in ‘Thracian’ or ‘Dacian’ Romania, and buried in ‘Germanic’ Denmark. The scenes mentioned do not make it ‘Celtic’ any more than the bull-slaying scene makes it ‘Persian’, or the elephant makes it ‘Indian’. Though we should be aware that items such as La Tène brooches may have an ethnic significance, we must be firmly aware of alternative explanations.

Diffusion

Diffusion implies the gradual adoption of new ideas and their general spread. It is a phenomenon which we can detect in, for instance, the spread of techniques of iron working, in the adoption of coinage, of urbanisation, of the potter’s wheel, and it lies behind the layout of this book. But it is a dangerous and misleading concept. On the one hand, it can lead to false assumptions in the source and direction of diffused ideas, such as the ‘hyperdiffusionism’ of Elliot and Perry which sought to derive all concepts of civilisation, even of Meso-American civilisation, from Egypt, views based on a number of fallacies, still, unhappily, perpetuated by Thor Heyerdahl in his Ra expedition. Secondly, it is in itself no explanation of why an idea spread, why it might be adopted by one society and not another, or indeed whether it necessarily played the same role in all societies. To take a concrete example: a type of knife or dagger may be in daily use by all members of society in the area where it is manufactured; it may be traded to a neighbouring society where its rarity makes it an item of prestige; it may be traded even further, into societies where it is considered so exotic that it is only used in ritual and ceremonial circumstances. Such changes of meaning can be documented in the modern anthropological record, we must assume that similar phenomena occurred in pre-history, as for instance the bronze vessels traded from Italy to southern Germany in the sixth century BC. In other words we must study the context of any object or innovation as it occurs in a society, and try to understand the role that it played and the message that it carried. We must also understand the social and economic context. The potter’s wheel will not be adopted if there is no tradition for making fine pottery or no way in which a specialist can be supported. Towns are not something which can suddenly spring up without the necessary social, political and economic institutions to support it. Diffusion is only a description, it does not tell us why.

The spread of the knowledge of iron working, especially the technology which allowed the production of functional tools and weapons, shows a classic pattern of diffusion, and other examples can be clearly identified in the archaeological record during the Iron Age. The ideas mostly emanated from the technologically and socially more advanced areas of the Near East and the east Mediterranean. We must, however, beware of assuming that all advances necessarily moved in a westward and northward direction. For instance, fortification techniques in the first century BC spread from Britain into neighbouring areas of the continent; bronze swords of early Hallstatt type may have spread in the seventh century BC from Britain towards central Europe. Indeed, in certain aspects central Europe was technologically more advanced at various periods in prehistory than the Near East, as in the production of long bronze swords at the beginning of the late Bronze Age, or the high-quality iron work which was being produced in the Alpine region in the second and first centuries BC.

However, the majority of technological innovations do have their origin in the Near East. The use, for instance, of the potter’s wheel is something we see appearing in Greece around 1050 to 1000 BC, and then appearing alongside other evidence of Greek contact in central Italy in the period about 750 to 700 BC. Thence it spread into northern Italy by around 700 BC, and we find its first introduction into central Europe at the major trading centres of the Heuneburg and Mont Lassois around 550 to 500 BC. Not until the end of the second or beginning of the first century BC did this new technology reach southern England, and other areas such as northern Britain and Scandinavia were not to adopt the potter’s wheel until the Roman Iron Age, if not even later. In this particular case the adoption of a more advanced technology was hindered by the low level of economic development in various societies, which did not have the institutions which could support specialised industries. It is also connected with the organisation of society, especially the presence of an elite clientele who could form a market for highquality goods

The most far reaching and complex of these diffusion patterns is that associated with the socalled ‘orientalising’ process visible in the artistic styles of the Mediterranean and central Europe. This was connected with the trade patterns which emanated from the developing civilisations of the Near East, Greece, North Africa and Italy. It is characterised by the adoption in local art forms of floral motifs, such as the lotus bud and palmette, and animal motifs whose origin can be seen in the Near East. Most obvious are the various mythical beasts, often mixtures of various animals, or animals and humans, such as the sphinx, the winged horse, centaurs, fawns, chimaeras and gryphons. With these ideas also moved technological information, especially in the production of beaten bronze metalwork on which many of these artistic motifs are depicted. But artistic change may reflect more fundamental changes within society, and we find that the same creatures appear in myths explaining the nature and structure of Greek society—such as the role of the sphinx in Thebes, or the minotaur in Athens—to confirm the dominant position of certain of the leading families.

Trade

Trade falls into three main categories: longdistance, inter-regional, and local. It is the longdistance trade that is easiest to detect in the archaeological record because foreign and exotic goods are readily identified from more local objects. By inter-regional is meant the exchange of goods often over long distances, but within a similar cultural milieu, and which may involve objects which are similar, at least in outward form, to local products. In the case of pottery, for instance, it may only be the composition of the clay which betrays a foreign object.

The motivations for trade varied, and, though there is obviously a general economic context within which trade is going on, to understand the nature of prehistoric trade we must try to identify which sectors of society were engaged in the trade, and what their motivations might have been. Within the general economic context, it is the lack of basic raw materials which will motivate trade in the first place. Certainly by the end of our period we can identify societies which cannot exist without trade in some form or another, not merely for raw materials, but even for their basic food supplies, and into this category come some of the Greek cities like Athens, and later, Rome. The major cities of the Near East, especially those of the Mesopotamian Plain, were equally reliant upon trade for their very existence; although food was no major problem, all other raw materials especially metals and wood had to come from outside the Mesopotamian Plain. But the pattern is not quite as simple as one might imagine, as often the trade was not controlled by the large city states and empires where the need and the wealth resided, nor necessarily in the source areas of the raw materials. It is not uncommon for peoples peripheral to the main trade route to gain control of it and to act as middlemen—a characteristic we find in the trade networks of both the Greeks and the Phoenicians.

This brings us to the question of who within society was engaging in trade. Trading is an activity which is carried on by individuals for two reasons— either to acquire wealth, or to acquire status. In societies where hereditary power is based upon land ownership, as in the classical societies of Greece and Rome, an independent class of merchants who are acquiring wealth by trade and industry can represent a threat to the ruling class, and various alternative strategies have been adopted in the past to counteract this problem. In some societies, for instance, external trade is left in the hands of foreign merchants, who must pay tolls to the state, and who may be restricted in their movements to specific ports or trading centres, but who, by being foreigners, represent no threat to the power structure within the society. Foreign influences themselves can be capable of undermining society, and in certain cases, as with the Phoenician sites of Tyre and Sidon, neighbouring powers such as Assyria were willing to leave them independent, so that all foreign trade could be channelled through them—the so-called ‘ports of trade’. China provides a modern parallel, with the independent ports of Shanghai and Hong Kong, but a ‘port of trade’ need not necessarily be a coastal site; it can be a neutral inland site on the boundary between two conflicting states. An alternative is to attempt to emasculate the merchants’ political power by restricting office to the landowning class. Although the wealth may be gradually absorbed by intermarriage into the upper classes, in Rome for instance, the senatorial class—the traditional landowners—were forbidden to engage in trade, whereas the merchant class—the Equestrian order—were not eligible under the constitution of the Republic for election to the senate.

An alternative was for the ruling class themselves to keep very tight control over trade, but this could only be done when the trade was not so extensive that control was impossible. It also depended on limiting the channels whereby trade entered the country. This was clearly easiest where connection was by sea, so that trade could be forced through a small number of ports. But the trade routes over the Alpine passes, or along the major river routes such as the Rhône, offered equal opportunities. Such centralised control is, however, a relatively rare phenomenon in the areas which we are considering. There is evidence that it may have existed in the late Bronze Age in Greece and Crete, with the Minoan and Mycenaean palaces controlling the trade and redistribution of goods by means of a developed, literate bureaucracy. In less developed forms we may detect centralised control on the sites of the late Hallstatt period of the sixth century BC, sites such as the Heuneburg and Mont Lassois in western Europe. Yet other examples may be the late Iron Age trade centre on the Magdalensberg in Austria, or the port site of Colchester in England. In these cases the trader may again be a foreigner, and this is the most likely in the cases I have cited; alternatively he could be a low-class individual, who merely acted as transporter for goods on behalf of members of the aristocracy.

So far we have been assuming the existence of a group within society whom we can class as ‘merchants’, but this assumption is only applicable to the more complex societies that existed by the late Iron Age. Other mechanisms can be used to explain long-distance trade, for instance ‘down-the-line’ trade whereby goods pass from community to community on a reciprocal basis along kinship channels, or through trading partnerships. Alternatively, trading may only be an irregular activity, on a seasonal basis, but possibly more erratic, through the instigation of an individual, as for instance happened in Viking society. Under these circumstances, individuals could travel considerable distances. One possible example is the trade link which developed between the central Rhine and the southern Alpine valleys in the early La Tène period in the fifth century BC.

Inter-regional trade was probably organised along very similar lines to that of the longdistance trade we have been describing, except that in the Iron Age the mechanisms of down-the-line trade and seasonal trade were more likely than trade through a specialised merchant class. Social links of a political and family nature were much more likely between societies sharing similar cultures, and presumably languages, and would be capable of producing all the basic commodities that might have been necessary to sustain a given society. For Temperate Europe, at least, long-distance trade was generally not necessary, except to acquire luxury goods like wine and silk. Otherwise these areas were largely self-sufficient through inter-regional trade.

It is, therefore, perhaps not surprising that the main stimulus for long-distance trade came from the Mediterranean and from the Near East. True, within Temperate Europe there had already existed in the late Bronze Age a system of contacts which extended from central Italy in the south up to Denmark in the north, which resulted in close similarity over a very wide area between prestige items such as beaten bronze cups and buckets. But it is not clear to what extent individual objects were moving, or were merely local imitations. It seems most likely that this was down-the-line trade, with reciprocal arrangements between members of the upper classes of late Bronze Age society. It is very different from the Iron Age trade between the classical worlds of Greece and Etruria with central and western Europe, where the goods—be they fine pottery, textiles, or more especially wine—could not at this stage be imitated locally, and where, in certain cases at least, the Greek and Etruscan trade seems to have been in the hands of full-time merchants.

In the late Bronze Age there had existed in the East Mediterranean a trade system in the Mycenaean world which linked together the Near Eastern civilisations of Mesopotamia and the Anatolian highlands with Greece and the central Mediterranean, with ramifications which were even influencing central and western Europe. But this had collapsed by about 1000 BC. In the succeeding centuries we see the appearance, first in Cyprus and Greece and then again extending on into Italy and eventually central Europe, of a trade system largely under Greek and Phoenician control which first supplied the Near Eastern markets, and then became essential for the developing classical cities of the Greeks, the Carthaginians and the Etruscans. This trading system was to reach Greece by about 900–850 BC, Etruria by 800– 750 BC, southern Germany by 700–650 BC, and Britain and Scandinavia in the first century BC. Though the emphasis changed from one period to another (for instance, a switch in the seventh/sixth centuries BC from the development of a western market to a development in the fifth century of the Black Sea ports by the Greek cities), nonetheless— this interchange between the Mediterranean world and Temperate Europe was to remain a major theme throughout the Iron Age, culminating in the Imperial conquest of much of the area by Rome at the end of millennium.

Local trade systems have been very much less studied because there has always been a tacit assumption that we understood the mechanics of local exchange. It is only with the work of Polanyi and Sahlins that we have realised that the mechanisms of barter and especially the market are relatively new innovations, and that other mechanisms which can still be found in our own society were very much more important if not exclusive in early societies. The first of these was ‘reciprocity’—the exchange of goods between individuals of a balanced nature whereby gifts are given to fulfil obligations of a social or familial nature. Such exchange can be found within all societies, be it the partitioning of a dead animal by a hunter, or the social exchange of tobacco and alcohol or giving of Christmas presents within our own society. Secondly there is ‘redistribution’ whereby an individual or institution acts as the focus of the exchange. Some societies have an individual who is free to obtain status by means of exchange, the so-called ‘Big Man’ or, if it is a status inherited by birth, the ‘Chieftain’, though this varies from an individual who is merely tolerated by his society to situations where power is also concentrated in his hands. Gift-giving is then a right expected by the chieftain in the form of tribute, with little reciprocal return. These forms of movements of goods are personalised, taking place between individuals who share other connections of social, political or familial nature. ‘Barter’ is a form of exchange which implies that there are no other relationships, and can only take place when there are individuals who wish to engage in direct exchange of goods, a form of exchange which was probably much rarer than has often been assumed.

The advent of market exchange for the first time allowed impersonal exchange to take place, usually using some medium of exchange, of which coinage is the most common form, though other items such as shells or food stuffs have been known to perform similar functions. Polanyi has suggested that the beginning of a market-style economy was a late feature, which appeared in Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, beginning in the classical towns such as Athens, where coins were being produced for state purposes such as paying for military or jury service, but which was rapidly developed for use for impersonalised exchange. But we can assume that coinage was probably never produced in ancient societies to facilitate exchange. The earliest coins we possess from Asia Minor are all of high values, of gold and later of silver, which could only have been used in a limited set of circumstances, for the payment, for instance, of tribute or bride wealth and for other political or social needs. The use of coinage spread rapidly throughout the Greek world, and by the third century BC had spread to much of Temperate Europe as well; but wherever it was adopted, the early stage is represented by these high-value coins, and only at the end of the Iron Age in Temperate Europe were lower-value coins being minted. Again we can assume that they were not made to facilitate exchange, as no issuer would have seen much immediate return for encouraging trade in this way, and the use of low-value coins for direct exchange is probably in all of these areas a matter of secondary usage.

It is difficult to distinguish between the different kinds of exchange at a local level. It is essential to know something of the social and economic organisation of the society; are there, for instance, individuals who seem to be much wealthier, and who may have been acting as the centres of exchange systems? Some clear examples of this exist in the archaeological record, such as the rich burials associated with Mont Lassois and the Heuneburg. But it may be easy to confuse such rich burials with those of a land-owning elite, who may have played no part in the exchange, other than that of being the eventual recipients of the traded goods. Another problem is the identification of ‘central places’ where exchange could and did take place. Though the role of the Greek and Roman towns in this respect is well documented from later sources, we are less clear about the role of sites such as the hillforts of central and western Europe. These sites could have been the centre of exchange, but likewise they could have been peripheral, with exchange passing through members of the upper classes of society, who may have been resident elsewhere than on the hillfort. Our only hope in identifying ‘central places’ lies in the recognition of special items such as weights or unusual concentrations of items traded from a larger distance. The nature of local trade systems is going to be a major area of research in the next decade.

Social structure

The simplest level of band applies primarily to hunting-gathering groups and does not concern us in Iron Age society. Neither should Service’s second level of social integration, the tribe, except that this is a term used traditionally to describe many European societies in the Iron Age which had not reached an advanced level of state organisation. Anthropologically, the tribe is an egalitarian organisation based upon lineages, bound together by other social institutions (‘soda-lities’) such as age-sets and secret societies which cross-cut lineage affiliations. The third level is the chiefdom which is organised in a social hierarchy or pyramid structure based on lineages. Social status is inherited, and power based upon authority. But it may be worthwhile distinguishing simple from complex chiefdoms, the latter with more tiers in the hierarchy, larger geographical territory, and, as we shall see in the next section, a rather different form of spatial configuration. Complex chiefdoms lead on to archaic states, a division not easy to make on purely archaeological grounds, in which institutionalised offices appear, with power invested in them to impose the will of the state by force. Positions may be inherited, as in kingship, but magistrates are often elected. Groups of states may be linked together to form leagues, as in Greek and Etruscan society, but where one state achieves dominance and exacts tribute from the others, as Athens did from the Delian League in the fifth century, the word Empire might be more applicable. Properly, however, this term should be used for a state organisation which unites a number of different territorally based ethnic and cultural groups, as did the empires of Macedonia and Rome.

These various levels of social integration are associated with developments in the roles of individuals, though the terminology developed by Fried does not correspond exactly with Service’s classification. At the simplest level, status is egalitarian, within the limitations of age, sex, and personal ability; ranked society is based essentially upon achieved status by an individual through his position within a lineage or a sodality; stratified society is based upon inherited status, as is typical of many chiefdoms and archaic states. Within the classes of social complexity there is often a centralisation based upon individuals. At the tribal level it might be epitomised by the ‘big men’ of New Guinea society— an individual who acts as a nodal point for exchange within a region, and who, though of great prestige, does not necessarily have any other status within society. The role may be passed from father to son, but each individual has to establish his own prestige. At the chiefdom level the central individual is the chief, of complex chiefdom the paramount chief, while the terms king, tyrant or dictator might be reserved for the state level, and emperor for the multinational state. This avoids confused terminology, for instance, for the translation of the Greek word âáó1ëåõs (basileus) as ‘king’ as it is used by Greek historians for everything from chief to emperor, and immediately prejudices our concept of the level of early Greek society. All these terms, however, are only used in a generalised way—there are many different forms of chiefdom or early state, and the terminology and classification will not tell us how any individual society actually functioned, though it does suggest what may be the key features we should be investigating.

It is at the level of the individual that the archaeologist may best be able to operate, as his status within society may well be fossilised at his death in terms of the burial rite. Different levels of organisation may be identifiable in spatial terms, as will be discussed in the next section, but settlement evidence can be ambiguous, and key sites may be missed, whereas the more ubiquitous burial evidence may allow us to predict the existence of undiscovered sites. Burials, however, have their own drawbacks. Archaeologists assume that status is indicated by gravegoods, grave-structure and siting of the tomb; the problem is that each individual may have many statuses, and which is being symbolised? Is a grave with many pots a person who was himself wealthy, or one who had many relatives each of whom gave a pot? Sometimes several statuses may be symbolised—in sixth-century southern Germany gravegoods may indicate both wealth, age, and marital status; in the male Germanic cemetery of Gross Romstedt trade/social status, and rank within the military hierarchy, may both be indicated by different sets of gravegoods. Such details are not available for the majority of areas, even the basic divisions of age and sex, and so we are forced back to assuming that rich gravegoods mean rich individuals, and directly comparing one society with another, though as we should realise from our own society, a lack of gravegoods does not mean poor people—ideology plays a role as well.

Though anthropologists commonly issue warnings about exceptional cases, the archaeologist’s experience with large numbers of burials shows that there is usually considerable standardisation of burial practice within individual societies, and patterns are visible. Large numbers of wealthy gravegoods represent a deliberate, ostentatious destruction of wealth, presumably by those wishing to inherit the dead man’s status, a combination of ‘potlatch’ and ‘rite of passage’ (ceremonial activity to mark an individual’s change of status— birth, initiation, marriage, death, etc), in cases where inheritance may not be entirely ensured or where power needs to be reaffirmed. Adult gravegoods with young children may likewise imply inherited rather than achieved status, but every case needs arguing within its own cultural context, and such studies are generally rarely available.

The general trend throughout the first millennium is for social differentiation to increase, though this was by no means a simple unilinear trend—north of the Alps the richest prehistoric burials belong to the sixth century BC, and there is no evidence of anyone with wealth comparable to these individuals for several centuries. Where social differentiation was taking place, we must ask what is causing it, and what the basis of elite power may be. In Greek and Roman society the basis of power was land, and though money might be invested by these elite in production and trade, in Roman society at least the senatorial class was debarred from engaging in such sordid activities. The Hallstatt chieftains, on the other hand, may well have gained ascendancy by monopoly control of trade, for those of La Tène A production of raw materials may be the key, and military conquest is a fourth possibility, but normally combinations of all four may be found, as in medieval feudal society when local power rested in control of land, and regional and national power in military force. Checks on absolute power might exist, as appears to be the case in Archaic Greek society, when military control by an individual or class was impossible, as warfare depended on putting large armies of citizen soldiers in the field.

Spatial organisation

The organisation of trade and production, the social structure and the complexity of a society all combine to show themselves in one way which archaeologists can identify, in terms of spatial organisation. These are based on geographical models, in what anthropologists term ‘regional analysis’, which attempts to understand the economic and social functioning of an area as a whole.

The first question to ask of any society is what evidence is there for centralisation of any sort-concentrations of wealth, population, industry, trade, ritual, ceremonial and cultural activity, everything that can be termed central-place activities. At the lowest level of social organisation this may not be easy to identify. In the fourth and third centuries BC in central Europe, for instance, there is little difference detectable in terms of wealth or size between one settlement or cemetery and another, though there was certainly craft specialism, implying that individual sites may have had their own speciality, like the production of bronze fittings for chariots and harness at Gussage All Saints in Dorset, or that specialists would be called in when needed to superintend some specialist activity. We cannot envisage each village as a separate independent entity, but social, religious or political activities which helped to bind together a tribal group may not always be identifiable in the archaeological record, and without documentary evidence we may not realise their precise significance, like, for instance, the major shrines of Greece at Delphi, Delos, Olympia, Dodona and elsewhere, which gave the Greeks a sense of ethnic unity, but little more.

Even when we can identify evidence of communal activities, we must be careful not to assume that other aspects of society may also be centralised. A hillfort, for instance, represents a group response to the need for defence, it may even have had a permanent population within it, but it does not necessarily mean that industry or trade were centred in it, or that the elite members of society were resident within it. The geographer’s concept of ‘central place’, though useful for interpreting ancient societies, holds dangers, and should only be used in situations where urban communities are fully developed, as it can lead to false assumptions about the level of social organisation that has been achieved.

At the ‘chiefdom’ level of society we should be able to identify some sort of social hierarchy, at least in terms of relative wealth of sites, and possibly in terms of population concentrations, and increased specialisation of industry, and generally denser population than at the tribal level. Agriculture may become more specialised, new farms established where they need only exploit one specialised environmental niche, acquiring other necessary foodstuffs by trade rather than producing it themselves. It can also lead to permanent occupation of marginal land which could only be exploited seasonally before, such as summer grazing areas. Chiefdoms will most naturally arise where the environment and topography is diverse.

The complex chiefdom has rather different spatial characteristics. If an individual’s power is based on his position in a lineage rather than control of land or industrial production, he will rely on payment of tribute from those under him, in return for protection and other often minimal assistance. A chief in turn will owe allegiance and pay tribute to the paramount chief. In this situation transport costs are kept to a minimum if the chiefs’ residences are close to that of the paramount chief, though not necessarily on the same settlement. This clustering around the main site forms a marked contrast to the situation we shall encounter where there is competitive marketing. The settlements of Hallstatt D such as the Heuneburg represent the classic European example of this phenomenon, but it could possibly explain the clusterings of settlement which characterise the earliest phase in the development of Greek and Etruscan towns.

With the appearance of urban settlements, there are three sorts of central-place system which we may expect to encounter. The dendritic system is a term properly developed for exploitation of a peripheral area by means of a linked system of nodal points. The primary town is usually a port, linked to one or more secondary centres, themselves connected to tertiary points. In its developed state it is a product of colonial exploitation for the export of raw materials and agricultural produce to a ‘core area’ (in recent times western Europe or north America), and can lead to a collapse of native institutions and poverty in the hinterland, as in the best-documented case in northern Guatemala. The system is controlled from outside, though individuals, especially in the primary town, may acquire a considerable wealth because of their external contacts, and the town dwellers are often ethnically separate from the surrounding rural population.

Such systems in simpler form are readily distinguishable in the Mediterranean in the first millennium BC, though they varied in their level of exploitation. The relationship between the Greek colonies of southern Italy and Sicily clearly fit this pattern, with the subjugated natives in some cases virtually slaves. However, a less exploitative version was more common, for instance the links of Marseilles with its hinterland, or possibly Colchester in the early first century AD. At the other extreme is the port-of-trade, which may even have been beneficial to its hinterland in introducing luxury goods to undeveloped areas (as Hengistbury Head in southern England), or necessary trade contacts to major empires, as the Greek entrepôt of Naucratis in Egypt.

The second group are the solar central places, usually major administrative centres, which possess a monopoly for their surrounding area, in terms of marketing and trade facilities, and often industrial production as well. Characteristically they are very large, especially in comparison to towns in more developed competitive systems. Early Etruscan towns may have fallen into this category, but the classic examples in Iron Age Europe are the oppida of central and western Temperate Europe,which are often much larger than their Roman and medieval successors—Manching for instance had a densely occupied area twice that of Roman London, itself one of the largest Roman towns north of the Alps.

In both the dendritic and solar central-place systems, access to market is restricted by the lack of subsidiary centres. At a more developed stage competitive central-place systems appear, with the appearance of subsidiary centres offering more localised market facilities for the agricultural population. Often attempts are made to suppress this development, as for instance in late Saxon England where laws were introduced to restrict market transactions to authorised sites and thus maintain monopolies, but usually the economic forces prove too strong. There are various competitive central-place systems, which differ in the siting of the subsidiary centres, and in their relationship to the primary centres. In the market principle the secondary centres will develop at the points furthest from the major centres, as it were filling in the gaps, and this is likely to evolve from the solar central-place system. The second is the transport principle, where the secondary sites appear on the routes mid-way between the primary centres, presumably a development of the dendritic system.

To what extent competitive systems had come into existence before the Roman period is unclear, but a competitive system may well have been developing in Etruria, and presumably based on the marketing principle. Over most of Temperate Europe, however, it was an introduction of the Roman period. The only detailed analysis is of southeast England, and relates to the second-third century AD, when the hierarchy and spacing of the settlements forms a classic case of the ‘transport’ principle, caused by the imposition of the Roman road system.

The appearance of urban ‘central places’ was one of the major innovations in Europe of the first millennium BC. Even if we reject centres such as the Heuneburg as truly urban, despite the concentration of wealth, trade and industry on them (the social structure would have prevented the full development of exchange as we know it on later sites), we still have a number of different urban types; administrative centres, market centres, colonies, and entrepôts for long-distance trade including ports-of-trade. Each of these classes would have its own characteristics in terms of who was resident, what public amenities were present, and in the spatial layout of the town.

The administrative centres might be expected to conform to the concept of the pre-industrial city. At its centre the administrative buildings-forum, basilica, major temples—and around it the courtyard dwellings of the social elite who provided the priests, magistrates and administrators who ran the city. Around this, arranged in residental quarters according to ethnic origin, occupation and wealth, would be the lower echelons of society— traders, merchants, artisans, and, on the outskirts, the urban poor who provided labour for the menial unskilled tasks. This extreme pattern— the reverse from that found in industrial and post-industrial cities, where the rich live in the periphery and the poor around the central business area—may have only been fully developed in major urban agglomerations such as Rome. In smaller towns, such as Roman civitas capitals where no-one lived far from the centre of the city, a different pattern might emerge, with the artisans clustered along the main access routes, and the wealthy in the secluded areas off the main roads.

The market centres and entrepôts might be expected to form a different pattern. The elite landowning class would presumably not be resident, and political control of the town would lie in the hands of the wealthy merchant class. We would not expect the same range of public buildings— only those required for economic functions such as the market place—and for the administration of the town itself, and religious buildings too, but not the senate house or major buildings. These institutions, however, are those that we associate with a fully developed town, and one problem we shall have to consider is how and when these various institutions came into existence, though they are not questions we can always answer due to a lack of work on urban origins, especially in Greece and Etruria.

The basic characteristic we must expect of true urban sites should be variability: a wide range of different social groups present, from rich patrician to poor plebeian, a wide range of activities—trade, industry, religion, and ‘culture’(theatres, baths etc)—and possibly also ethnic variability, such as the Italian trading quarters on the Magdalensberg, or Jewish ghettos in medieval towns. We might expect to find evidence of guilds, which express themselves spatially by the concentration of individual crafts in specific areas of the town, as for instance in classical Athens, or at Manching. The nature and variability of early towns is a subject which has been little explored.

Chronology

As this book deals with trends and processes, a precise chronology is hardly necessary, though even for periods relatively late in the first millennium we cannot date within a century or so. All the dates used in this book are derived from historical documentation—dates provided by written records initially of Assyria and Egypt, but increasingly of Greece and Rome. These still provide more precise dates than scientific methods such as C14, though in the next decade tree-ring dating (dendrochronology) is going to revolutionise dating of the central European sequence.

The relative sequence in each area is derived from such methods as typology—the gradual change through time of pottery styles, ornaments such as brooches—supported by association in grave-groups, hoards or other deposits, or by stratigraphical sequences from long-lived sites. These are then given absolute dates by cross-dating either by the occurrence of imports from dated sequences elsewhere, or by exports occurring on historically dated sites, or preferably both.

The late Mycenaean period is fairly well dated by correlation with the Egyptian sequence, and by associations of Mycenaean pottery with the settlement of the Philistines in southern Palestine. After this the relative sequence of Proto-Geometric and Geometric Greece is well established, especially in Athens, based on the developing geometric styles of painted pottery which give the period its name. Between about 1100 and 750, however, contacts between Greece and the out-side world were meagre, and absolute dating for this sequence is a matter of informed guesswork, until the earliest occurrence of exported pottery on historically dated Near Eastern sites such as Hama in Syria. From the end of the eighth century the major sequences of Corinth and Athens can be given greater precision, based on the earliest pottery from Greek colonies with known foundation dates. The idiosyncracies of style of individual potters provides even greater precision in the black—and red-figure wares of late Archaic and Classical Greece of the sixth and fifth centuries, allowing us to date individual vessels within a few decades.

The central European sequence both for the late Bronze Age and for the Iron Age is based primarily on the development of metal objects, and for the Bronze Age this includes Italy as well. Broad sequences applicable over wide areas from Scandinavia to Sicily have been established, but absolute dating relies on the Greek sequence. The occurrence of swords of central European type in Mycenaean contexts allows the beginning of the sequence in the thirteenth-twelfth centuries to be dated, but then there is a gap until the Greek colonisation of Italy—the colony of Cumae founded c. 750–730 BC overlies a cemetery with bronze types related to those of central Europe.

The nomenclature for central Europe used in this book is based on that developed by Reinecke for southern Germany earlier this century. He used the nomenclature of the Scandinavian scholar Hildebrand, who identified the stylistic differences in the weapons and ornaments from the Alpine sites of Hallstatt and La Tène. Reinecke recognised the continuity of the earlier Iron Age with the preceeding ‘Urnfield’ Bronze Age, and applied the term ‘Hallstatt’ to both: phases C and D specifically refer to the Iron Age. The sequence for the Bronze Age is essentially established from hoard finds, for the Iron Age from burials, mainly from Hallstatt itself and from Bavaria and from the La Tène cemetery of Münsingen in Switzerland. Scholars have successively redefined and subdivided these periods, and for some phases such as Hallstatt D, it is almost possible to talk of individual generations. The sixth and fifth centuries are especially well dated by means of Greek and Etruscan imports.

2 Chronological table

After about 400 in both the Mediterranean and central Europe the chronology is much less precise. The elaborate Greek painted wares disappear, and the simpler mass-produced plain wares of the Hellenistic period are not so readily diagnostic nor do we have new Greek colonies to give us absolute dates. In central Europe initially, imports are unknown anyway, and when they reapppear, are not readily dated. The horizontal stratigraphy of the Münsingen cemetery allows a fair amount of precision in the relative sequence, which can be applied with lesser or greater confidence from Romania to Britain, based on similarity of brooch types over the whole area. But absolute dating is not precise within a century until we reach the second half of the first century BC. Not until after 30 BC do datable coins become common in the archaeological record, and from 20 BC samian ware appears first from Arrezzo in Etruria and later from southern Gaul, which not only bears elaborate decoration but the stamps of individual potters and firms. These in turn occur on Roman forts in Germany which can be assigned to specific campaigns, with the result that dating within a decade, even five years, becomes a possibility on all classes of site where samian is found.