J Archaeol Res

DOI 10.1007/s10814-009-9032-z

Unity and Diversity in the European Iron Age:

Out of the Mists, Some Clarity?
Tina Thurston

Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009

Abstract While some researchers continue to focus fruitfully on traditional issues,

in recent years new perspectives, some strongly revisionist, have developed within
European Iron Age archaeology, moving it from a long-static state into a rapidly
changing milieu. Studies of colonialism, imperialism, and interaction have undergone sequential shifts into new territory, while topics related to sacred activity,
political apparatuses, and the ruler-subject relationship have undergone substantial
reworking. Perspectives absent from earlier literature have emerged: gender, age,
ethnicity, and identity, and interpretations employing theories of practice, agency,
landscape, and embodiment have emerged, mirroring broader disciplinary shifts. An
overarching trend sees Iron Age Europe as a series of interactive societies with both
broad similarities and sharp regional, even local, differences, moving through time
and ever-changing relationships, influences, and trajectories. The collision of
traditional and revisionist scholarship has produced debate, some heated, but has
improved and invigorated the field.
Keywords Iron Age
Europe
Colonialism
Political development

Ethnicity
Identity
Religion
Paradigm shift

Introduction
In their 1995 introduction to the volume Celtic Chiefdom, Celtic State, Arnold and
Gibson (1995) likened the legacy of European Iron Age studies to a mist: a scholarly
mist, blown in through a fragmented approach and the lingering paradigms of
another age. Piccini (1996) also refers to this mist as a metaphor for the public love
T. Thurston (&)
Department of Anthropology, 380 MFAC/Ellicott, State University of New York at Buffalo,
Buffalo, NY 14261, USA
e-mail: tt27@buffalo.edu

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affair with an Iron Age romanticized through a millennium of folkloric literature,

peaking with the 19th century Celtic Revival movement that touched everything
from arts and literature to politics (Daverio 1998; Witoczek 2002). This tradition
continues today, sometimes called Celtomania (Brown 2006; Collis 1997a; James
1999; Sims-Williams 1998), through film and television depictions of a legendary,
heroic past (Piccini 1996, pp. 9196).
The allusion to an elusive, wavering image was in both cases a reference to the
magical mists that accompany the appearance of supernaturals in many Celtic epics
or folktales (Puhvel 1978; Sayers 1985). Reconstituted by the still best-selling
fantasy novel The Mists of Avalon (Bradley 1983), the Celtic mist also has become a
hackneyed component of the New Age idiom, used to flog everything from books on
Wiccan philosophy to Irish-inspired elevator music (Possamai 2002). For this
popular audience, the misty Iron Age is inexorably linked with quasihistorical
fiction, increasing interest in pre-Christian religions, and inspiration for fantasy roleplayers and creative anachronists. At its worst, this popular interest inspires fanatics
seeking Aryan or Celtic roots (Dobratz 2001; McCarthy and Hague 2004); at its
questionable best, it evokes images of Pythonesque peasants mucking around in
marshes and bogs (e.g., Firstbrook 2003).
It is uncommon to find political development, urbanization, or the colonial
encounters of the La Te`ne Iron Age being taught as a case study alongside the
Valley of Mexico, the Indus, or Mesopotamia in an American university or college,
for example. Few know much about it, perhaps because well into the recent past,
and in some quarters, today much Iron Age terminology is garnered from the 19th
century, with a confusing mass of named cultures and phases that describe
peoples long-pegged into narrow culture-historic holes. The literature is in
dozens of languages unknown to Anglophone readers, and in some cases still
consists of dry tracts on endless varieties of fibulae. As a result of these strange
attractorsspeculative fiction, neopaganism, and the musty premises of Kulturkreis, Volksgeist, Urheim, and 19th century diffusionismthe European Iron Age
long suffered from a lingering identity crisis.
This unfortunately obscures recent innovative theoretical trajectories for this
fascinating period of both precipitous and creeping internal change, intercultural
contact, colonialism, and imperialism, where prehistoric peoples mix with protohistoric chroniclers, and where ostensibly familiar European social patterns reside
alongside startlingly unexpected practices and cognitive structures (Champion 1987;
Hill 1989). The concept of unity and diversity has been used by a number of authors
(Hingley 2005; Woolf 1997) to describe the Roman conquest of many distinct peoples
and the nature and extent of cultural imperialism that followed, but it also is largely
applicable to the greater temporal and geographic extent of the Iron Age. Many
underlying cultural practices were shared across pre-Roman Iron Age Europe,
perhaps as a result of long-distance mobility and communications during the earlier
Bronze Age (Evans et al. 2006; Harding 2000; Kristiansen 1998; Kristiansen and
Larsson 2005; Price et al. 1998, 2004; Van der Linden 2007), where interregional
interactions were the norm; some studies indicate much earlier interactions (McEvoy
et al. 2004). During the Iron Age, a period with significantly different social traditions
and political structures, Europe was impacted and changed yet again by the historical

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events and processes unique to each region, or even each local group. This creates
opportunities for comparative and contextual studies, as it is possible to relate changes
in social substrata to other changing conditionspolitical, economic, or sacredand
evaluate the impact on their trajectories. Despite their connections, there are many
cultural singularities, making it highly productive and sometimes more appropriate to
focus on the developments within individual societies. Many authors now attempt
both approaches simultaneously. Overall, the sea change in Iron Age studies is well
described by James (2000, p. 307): The shift it outlines in archaeological
conceptions of the Iron Age (supplementing metalwork, graves and hillforts with
vast numbers of smaller settlements and entire landscapes, and far more sophisticated
interpretative frameworks) is too huge and profound ever to be reversed. Iron Age
Europe began to shed its perceived antiquarian past in the late 1980s, and a larger
audience can now find both interest and utility in current research. This review
contrasts older views with paradigm shifts and recent work over the past 1520 years.

Geographic and temporal boundaries: Where, when, and what was Iron Age
Europe?
Iron Age Europe can be defined in several ways; here we will say that Europe
stretches from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean and from the Atlantic to the
Danube River, a substantial cultural barrier between the Europeans and Scythians.
Western Scythians shared many interactions, and eventually traditions, with
Europeans, but to consider their impact would require a discussion of western
China, Siberia, Iran, and Afghanistan, difficult even within Steppe studies (Hanks
2002; but see Boyle et al. 2002; Sindbk 1999; Wells 2001).
Temporally (Fig. 1), the Iron Age is relatively brief yet includes both prehistoric
and historic cultures. It also is time-transgressive, beginning in Greece in the 12th

Fig. 1 A simplified chronology for Iron Age Europe

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Fig. 2 Roman Europe at its greatest extent, ca A.D. 100

century B.C., spreading into Italy in the 9th century and central Europe by the 8th
century B.C., and into northern Europe around the 6th century B.C.
I employ the standard temporal concept of the Iron Age: for much of continental
Europe and parts of Britain, it lasted only until conquest by the Romans (Fig. 2),
which decapitated indigenous societies, ending the era somewhat abruptly during
the late 1st century B.C./1st century A.D. The Romans never conquered Ireland,
northern Scotland, Scandinavia, the north European plain, or the Baltic region, but
other interactions created Roman eras even in non-Roman lands, lasting until the
5th century A.D. Culturally, in northern and eastern Europe, a largely prehistoric
Iron Age continued as late as A.D. 1000. The Roman and post-Roman worlds of
these peoples and their interactions with medieval Europe constitutes a subject area
outside the scope of this review.
Of course the Iron Age has something to do with adoption of iron technology.
Unlike bronze, an alloy whose production required the coordination of metals from
disparate sources or long-distance trade in ready-made ingots, iron could be locally
produced, procured, and controlled in many places, leading to distinctly changed

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political economies, patterns of trade, and a different functioning of metals within

society. Yet the Iron Age involves many other significant issues as well. To some
scholars, the Iron Age is a Celtic age; for others, this perception has come under
scrutiny or outright revision (Champion 1996; Collis 1997a, c; Hill 1995a, b, c). It is
also a time of Germanic and Nordic florescence. In traditional culture-historic terms,
one may glean a set of facts about the European Iron Age from the preamble of any
book concerning the era (e.g., Collis 1997b; Cunliffe 1997a), or from chapters in
several regional archaeological compendia (Cunliffe 1997b; Milisauskas 2002),
which often present narratives that belie many underlying scholarly conflicts and
debates.
The Iron Age can be approached from several directionsarchaeological,
textual, and linguisticdomains that sometimes provide contradictory data. At one
time this meant that one type of evidence was privileged and others explained away,
depending on the authors discipline. As opposed to doubting all inconsistencies, a
hallmark of recent studies is a willingness to investigate them as traces of conflicts
between past processes, institutions, and agendas that may be telling us something
important about the past.

Archaeological background
The Iron Age is an era of complex societieschiefdoms or states in standard
terminology. Yet this was not the first time Europe was home to social and political
complexity, and the early Iron Age should be seen as an outgrowth of processes
already in place. During the Mediterranean Bronze Age, eastern Europe saw the
development of stratified societies that lay in areas geographically linking the
Aegean and destinations to the west and north. Traditionally, the development of
socially stratified Bronze Age European societies has been attributed solely to their
interaction and trade with extant polities, such as the Mycenaeans, leading them to
emulate those neighbors, an idea that has recently fallen far out of favor
(Kristiansen 1998; Kristiansen and Larsson 2005).
Archaeologically, most scholars would agree that the roots of the European Iron
Age, and what came to be called Keltoi and Germani by the later Greeks and Romans,
are found not directly in trade with the Mediterranean, but in the opportunistic role of
central Europeans in taking up the bronze trade when their more southerly suppliers
could no longer provide it. A cultural tradition of the late Bronze Age, collectively
called the Urnfield tradition, emerged in central Europe around 1200 B.C., a bronzeworking tradition hypothesized to have filled a gap in the production and crafting of
bronze after the collapse of Southwest Asian and Mediterranean sources that had
previously provided substantial material for trade to as far away as Scandinavia.
During this gap, production and control of bronze for a European market shifted
into Europe itself, providing fuel for further social stratification there.
Eventually, Urnfield-style material culture ranged from Hungary through the
Alps to Germany, France, Italy, and parts of Spain, areas identified by many
archaeologists with later Celts (Cunliffe 1997a, p. 43), leading some to label late
Urnfield cultures between 1300 and 800 B.C. as possible proto-Celts. Others

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(Kristiansen 1998) instead characterize this distribution as a horizon phenomenon,

the differential adoption of various elements of a core Urnfield material culture
by people with different cultural identities, in several distinct areas: Aegean/Balkan,
Carpathian/Danubian, Lusatian (Poland), Italic, North Alpine, Iberian, Atlantic, and
Germanic/Nordic. Broadly shared but locally divergent styles are viewed, in this
model, as indicators of communication and exchange rather than common ethnicity
(Kristiansen 1998, p. 63).
During the same period of Greek international withdrawal, the Phoenicians
planted urban colonies around the western Mediterranean in areas that today
comprise southern Italy, Sicily, France, Spain, and around the Black Sea, reaching a
height between 1200 and 800 B.C. as iron technology was being adopted in Europe.
Phoenician settlements were followed by the colonies of the later Archaic and
Classic period Greeks. Most Greek colonies lay west of their homelands, beginning
in Italy, where indigenous Etruscans and Latins soon developed their own urbanism,
once thought to mimic the Greek polis, now characterized as related but local in
origin, flavor, and organization (Bietti Sestieri 1997).
A new culture that engaged in trade with the Greeks and Phoenicians is
traditionally said to have appeared in the 12th century B.C. on the basis of material
culture, especially metal artifacts related to horses and riders as well as other elite
ornaments and equipment. (Fig. 3). This culture (or horizon), which spans the
Bronze Age-Iron Age transition, is called Hallstatt after the type-site cemetery of a
group associated with supposed control of the salt-trading route in the Hallein
region of Austria. Artifact types similar to those found at Hallstatt eventually
appeared over broader areas of Europe, where too, according to traditional models,
elites were thought to owe their status to control of trade routes and mineral or metal
resources (although for arguments against elite control of trade, see Cumberpatch
[1995a] and van den Broeke [1995]; for arguments against elite control of metal
production, see Giles [2007]).
Much later, in the late 1st century B.C., Julius Caesar referred to Gallic and
Germanic equites (MacDevitt 2005), or horse-riding, sword-bearing elites; 19th and
earlier 20th century archaeologists immediately equated the 8th century B.C.
Hallstatt elite riders with Caesars accounts many centuries later, leading to
interpretations that saw the likely origins of Celticity in the Hallstatt period. The
Hallstatt Iron Age is additionally characterized by a mortuary complex based on
earthen burial mounds featuring the primary burial of an individual elite with large
displays of wealth, surrounded by secondary burials. These burials are often near,
but not within, enclosed hilltop sites. Elite burial offerings include apparatus used
with local mead or ale, feasting, hunting and warrior gear, four-wheeled horsedrawn wagons, and metal and ceramic tableware from the Phoenician colony at
Gadir (Cadiz) and later the Greek colony of Massalia (Marseilles) at the mouth of
the Rhone (Morgenroth 1999). Traditional theorists suggested that burials with
Greek wine vessels equaled a social addiction to imported alcohol, but Knusel
(2002) hypothesizes that locals may have used them to collect human blood. The
Hallstatt sphere foundered around 550500 B.C.; at one time changing trade routes
were cited as the primary causal factor, but burning and destruction at many sites
indicates a more complicated scenario.

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Fig. 3 One of several extant conceptualizations of the extent of Hallstatt and La Te`ne influence

Around 450 B.C., other indigenous groups, first in Switzerland, inland France,
and Germany (although this origin point is disputed by some), developed new
stylistic aesthetics, described as the La Te`ne material culture (45050 B.C.), that
later spread to other regions (Fig. 3). This period is often called the second Iron
Age as it represents many breaks with the Hallstatt era and its links to Bronze Age
traditions. The La Te`ne groups developed agglomerated population centers called
oppida by the Romans as well as enclosed sites of several different types. While
traditions varied, in general, the wagon was replaced by the chariot, burials were
less socially stratified, and an identifiable style developed, involving curvilinear and
spiral motifs, tripartite symbols, vegetation and animals, representations of bearded
male faces or heads, and significant female iconography (Green 1989, 1991, 1992,
1995c). The heartland of La Te`ne culture, equated in part with the area called
Gaul by Caesar, is considered by many to be a true Celtic culture, although the

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exact nature and extent of these people and what their ethnic affiliations were is
debated: they certainly spoke a Celtic language. Eventually, Iron Age people
indigenous to Italy, expanding ever-outward through conquest and negotiation,
came into conflict with those indigenous groups further afield; the Roman republic,
then empire, emerged from this context. By around 50 B.C., the Roman impact had
altered other indigenous cultures enough to warrant the statement that the European
Iron Age was over.

Primary textual sources

While the linguistic approach to the Iron Age is highly debated and lies outside the
scope of this article, most archaeologists use the extant historic sources. These
sources can be biased, purposefully or unintentionally (Dunham 1989, 1995; Wilkes
2007), and must be read carefully with the aid of philological analysis
(Buchsenschutz and Ralston 1986). The primary historic peoples of the European
Iron Age, recorded by the Greeks and Romans, are the Germanic/Nordic groups, the
Celtic groups, including the Celtiberians and Gauls, and the various groups of
Britons (who were never textually described as Celts). We do not know what Iron
Age groups inhabited regions where Slavs, Lats, and Balts emerged during medieval
times.
Until recently, the accounts of barbarian groups in Greek and Roman texts
were privileged above all other sources, and archaeological evidence was often
forced to fit into the template created by Classical authors (Dunham 1989). Over the
last 20 years, our understanding has been turned on its head, through new textual
interpretations and new archaeological evidence. The Greeks Hacataeus and
Herodotus, in the 6th and 5th centuries B.C., identify people initially in southern
France and then larger parts of western Europe with the term Keltoi, while Skythai
(Scythians) are described in the 7th century as inhabiting Asia Minor and the Black
Sea region. There is no evidence that these terms relate directly to indigenous terns;
as Wells (2001, p. 75) notes, they could be completely fabricated or rooted in some
true internal designation: the Skythai of the Greeks were called Saka by the Iranians
and Ashguzai by the Assyrians; similar phonemes perhaps indicate interpretations of
a self-descriptive name. This could also be the case with the term KeltoiGaul/Kel.
The Romans utilized the Greek concept of Keltoi to describe people who invaded
Italy in the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C., although how accurately or carefully they
used this term is uncertain. The early Romans also typically described any foreign
mercenaries of western, northern, or central European extraction, whom they
employed all over the Republic, as Celts. Wells notes that while this says little about
who these men were and how they saw themselves, it certainly explains how other
Europeans became familiar with the Roman way of life long before conquest
(Wells, 2001, p. 81).
Julius Caesar, encountering the inhabitants of England in 55 B.C., called them
Britons, and while noting similarities to the Celts, did not call them this. He also was
the first to call people east and north of the Rhine Germani rather than Celts. The
Greek and Roman concept of ethnicity held that if one characteristic of a people

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differed, so would most or all others (Wells 2001, p. 115). Caesars first contact was
with people west of the Rhine who had urban centers he called oppida, while those
on the far side had none; he believed this made them substantially different, which
may or may not have been the case. Certainly, many aspects of their cultures, as
described by Caesar, Tacitus, and others, were remarkably similar.
Within each of these broad cultural descriptors, Keltoi and Germani, dozens of
tribal entities are mentioned, leaving us to figure out what this actually might
have meant as opposed to what was understood by the various Classical authors who
wrote about them; one of the culture-historic passions of earlier antiquarians was
trying to tie these entities to specific geographic areas by isolating some supposed
subset of material culture, a pursuit which, for many reasons, has been almost
completely abandoned (but see, for example, Vasic 2004).

A history of theory for the European Iron Age

Before the late 1970s and 1980s, most publications on the Iron Age consisted of
excavation reports or brief observational notes on single objects or finds, but few
offered discussion or conclusions of a social nature, either local or regional. After
the diffusionism of Childe had been discredited, there also was a lack of higherlevel, continent-wide attempts at comparative understanding. Nineteenth-century
collections from graves and hoards, or often just notes and sketches of misplaced
finds, were often the sole source of data. This led to a generalized perception that
life for ordinary people changed little or not at all during the late Bronze Age and
Iron Age, that social structure changed at a barely perceptible pace, and that society
could be substantively understood only through study of grave goodsa perception
promoted in the most popular archaeology textbooks of the time (e.g., Fagan 1989,
p. 87). Many phenomena extrapolated from this material culture were described as
being carried by emigrating people or invaders. In contrast to the Greeks and
Romans, Iron Age peoples were characterized as warlike tribes (Fagan 1989,
p. 87) or violent tribes who lived without the benefit of cities, writing, money, or
bureaucracies (Wenke 1980, pp. 454455). Because burial under mounds was
widely practiced, some argued that when an invading Kurgan culture swept across
earlier Europe, their warlike ideology was incorporated for millennia to come
(Gimbutas 1970). As late as 1990, American students were taught that the main
conduit for understanding Iron Age Europe was the study of axes and adzes, battle
axes, daggers, swords, spearheads, shields, and an enormous range of brooches, pins
and other ornaments (Fagan 1989, p. 477). In recent years students have found this
assessment of La Te`ne period people amended; they are now imitators of higher
civilizations to the south (Fagan 2007, p. 469).
In the mid-20th century, most archaeologists and historians also accepted the idea
of a widespread and unified prehistoric Celtic culture based on Classical texts
combined with a reading of Irish or Welsh oral traditions from the much later
medieval era. In the late 1980s, when the symposium spawning the major volume
Europe in the First Millennium B.C. was held, some Celticists were still singing the
praises of books published in the 1950s or earlier (Megaw 1985, cited in Collis

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1994), presenting Celts living across a territory stretching from Ireland to Anatolia
as a coherent people. In the 1980s, Collis (1994, p. 31) offered an unabashed
critique of this approach. He asked scholars to offload the baggage of historic texts
and direct inferences from the Mabinogion and Ulster Cycle, advocating instead the
more objective and more generalizing perspective of processual archaeology. For
the most part, whether due to this call or simply following a generational turnover,
antiquarianism gave way to the new archaeology.
For much of the remaining 20th century, Iron Age societies across Europe
Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Scandinavia, and elsewherewere studied under
a certain set of cross-cultural generalities, as familiar to a Near Easternist or a
Mayanist as they were to Collis and his peers. Elites buried in rich, monumental
graves were interpreted as rulers at the top of a local or regional vertical hierarchy, a
position they jealously defended and reinforced with centralized, coercive control of
things: labor, ideology, and production and/or trade in commodities such as metals,
salt, hides, and amber (Cunliffe 1976). Enclosed hilltop sites characteristic of this
period were labeled military elite central places that housed soldiers or sheltered
people in times of war, and urban centers, the oppida, were the strongholds of elites
that controlled the activities of attached craftspeople and traders (e.g., Cunliffe
1976, 1983, 1984; Wells 1984). In the countryside, peasant farmers produced
surplus to support the elites and their oppida (Grau Mira 2003; Molinos and Ruiz
Rodriguez 1994; Ruiz Rodriguez and Molinos 1993; Ruiz Rodriguez et al. 1991).
Peer polities created competition leading to complexity, as long-distance trade
created centers and peripheries that fueled the rise of marginal elite wannabes with
prestige goods (Frankenstein and Rowlands 1978; Haselgrove 1976; Randsborg
1980; Wells 1980b). The organizing principles of these chiefly societies (reified
by the interpretation of Iron Age elites as chiefs or petty kings) were assumed to be
either kinship based or politically based, following the ideas of Service and Fried on
the differences between chiefdoms and states (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1991; Miller
et al. 1989; Renfrew 1986; Rowlands 1987, 1994; Rowlands and Frankenstein 1998;
Rowlands et al. 1987).
Few would dispute that this standard new archaeology or processual interpretation was a vast improvement over what came before, yet in hindsight it seems
oddly in line with older antiquarian notions of what comprises civilization: seeing
hierarchy, centralization, and control, or logical courses toward them, in
everything, from the earliest farming villages to state societies. It was perhaps a
newer, more systematic way of seeking and verifying the same assumptions made
by earlier generations of scholars. No one seriously imagined that the Iron Age
could actually be different than the parameters within which it was conceptualized.
By the end of the 1980s, discourse on the Iron Age was dominated by a small
number of famous names in each region of Europe who favored primarily ecological
and standard processualist interpretations; in some national archaeologies this
continues today. This led to a lengthy suppression of critique, which, when it finally
came, was somewhat explosive. Frustration with these interpretations, and with
regionalized, nationally bounded archaeologies that did not share research agendas,
theoretical views, and neither compared notes nor communicated findings, led to a
spate of great activity, debate, and sometimes passionate reappraisal beginning

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some 1520 years ago. In the late 1980s, one could detect a few voices calling for a
reassessment; by the mid-1990s, this had become a major movement. Many authors
questioned long-held assumptions, for both broad regions and specific local
traditions, and a number of theoretical perspectives were introduced in order to
investigate new ideas, some strongly revisionist, moving into uncharted territory,
seeking to discover if a different Iron Age did indeed exist (Hill 1993; Hill and
Cumberpatch 1995).

Unity and diversity: New directions and novel approaches

It would be impossible in a review of this nature to include advances on every front
and every topic studied by Iron Age scholars. While great strides have been made in
the study of production, trade, numismatics, and more, I limit discussion to a few
interrelated topics: sociopolitical development, sacred/ritual organization, and
regional group identities/ethnicities and their subsequent intercultural interactions.
These are highly interwoven and impossible to present in a strictly segregated group
of subcategories.
I also focus on two broad trends that have parallels across the discipline. The first
is the above-mentioned dichotomy between processualists and those who have
beaten a retreat from generalizing explanatory models, ostensibly because the only
reliable generalizations were often so broad as to be meaningless, that others were
incorrect, correct only within specific contexts, or offered only incomplete pictures.
Hypothesizing, testing, and explaining, with an eye toward contrasting different
cultures, has been deposed by a move toward contextualizing local developments
within a local framework and developing more humanistic theoretical approaches.
The vast majority of archaeologists lie somewhere in the middle of the continuum
between earlier generalizing/comparative approaches and more recent contextual
ones.
Despite these differences researchers have evinced a second trend: while there is
a continuing tradition of national archaeologies, some largely unchanged since the
mid-20th century, there has been a strong move toward gathering together scattered
and diverse material, previously compartmentalized within many national archaeological traditions, published only within a mass of inaccessible individual reports,
and obscured by publication in uncommon languages. These are cobbled together
into regional overviews and reinterpreted to make sense of larger processes. While
these may be pan-European syntheses to a processualist, or limited to southern
England for a contextual archaeologist, a number of important edited volumes and
single- or multiauthor regional compendia have appeared in the last 15 years, each
in their own way attempting a kind of synthesis, either of data or of approaches.
In Spain, culture history combined with strongly processualist theorizing remains
one standard treatment (Balmouth et al. 1997; Cunliffe and Keay 1995; Diaz
Andreu and Keay 1997), although there are many exceptions discussed individually
below. An entire issue of the online journal e-Keltoi is devoted to the Spanish Iron
Age and features both familiar and newer names (Alberro and Arnold 2004). The
spread of the Iron Age debate away from Britain, where it began, and into many

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national contexts is also seen in recent German volumes, where newer ideas mingle
with older paradigms (Birkhan 2007a; Maier 2000). Several volumes reflect the
continuing French tradition for late prehistory (Audouze and Buchsenschutz 1989,
1992; Rieckhoff-Pauli 2006), proceeding from classical authors and the direct
historical approach into the past in order to understand earlier periods, a paradigm
that is still popular in much of Europe, but which has seen substantial critique (e.g.,
Hill 1989, pp. 1819). A dramatic increase in archaeology related to highway and
commercial development has, however, substantially increased the data from
French Iron Age sites (Milcent 2004). Similarly, the Slavic and Baltic national
traditions of scholarship (e.g., Bailey et al. 1995; Graudonis 1997; Tasic 2004;
Theodossiev 2005; Vasks 1995, 1997; Zoffmann 2000) are mainly culturehistorically oriented and descriptive, with an emphasis on fitting archaeological
material into the contexts of classical texts and linguistic models, although recent
critiques have begun to bring this into a more contemporary context (Cumberpatch
1995a, b). Regardless of theoretical frameworks, the wealth of detailed empirical
data is a valuable offering of such volumes.
Additionally, a number of thematic collections (e.g., Arnold and Wicker 2001;
Biehl et al. 2001; Hamilakis et al. 2002) that include European archaeology contain
important Iron Age chapters. Several encyclopedias have specifically targeted the
Iron Age, Roman, and post-Roman collapse (Bogucki and Crabtree 2004; Crabtree
2000, 2007), through which many Iron Age processes are traditionally modeled.
These reflect primarily traditional perspectives but often include discussions of
current debates.
Important methodological developments parallel general developments in
archaeology worldwide. One is the shift from the site-focused archaeology of the
early 20th century, through the regional archaeology of the centurys last quarter,
and finally to landscape archaeology that incorporates site and region, not only
assessing interactions over geographic space but the meaning imbued into the built
and structured landscape on numerous nested scales. Such projects typically attempt
to integrate data on many social phenomena into the study of long-term change.
This approach has inspired new fieldwork in many parts of Europe and has provided
some escape hatch from the legacy of the overemphasized type site, the artifact
distribution, the baffling variety of named cultures (Fig. 4), and other data classes
that long helped fragment the record. Such research may comprise wholly new
surveys of large areas (Cherry 1994; Crumley 1989; Crumley and Marquardt 1987;
Millett et al. 2000) or be reassessments of prior work through agglomeration and
retheorizing (Corney 2000; Hamilton and Manley 2001; Larsson et al. 1992; Parcero
Oubina et al. 1998). The methodological innovations of the last 15 years, combining
survey, GIS, and landscape analysis have been reviewed elsewhere (for Europeanist
discussions, see Ayala and Fitzjohn 2002; Galaty 2005; Gillings et al. 1999; Lock
and Stancic 1995).
Recent work also underscores some extremely long distance unities, such as the
cultural connections across the Atlantic facade, the Atlantic coast of western Europe
that stretches from Spain and Portugal, along coastal Atlantic France, and then to
Britain, Ireland, and Scandinavia (Cunliffe 2000, 2001; Gonzalez Ruibal 2004). This
archaeological link, which is fairly clear from the Neolithic onwards and is textually

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Fig. 4 Some traditional named cultures of the European Iron Age, not all contemporary or necessarily
agreed upon

noted for the Iron Age, has recently been supported by genetic studies (McEvoy et al.
2004) that show connections across the entire Atlantic facade as deep as the last Ice
Age. In contrast, closer examination of some neighboring regions (Harding 2006) has
recently emphasized the vast differences in both material culture and probably social
and political organization between southern and northern Britain; they cannot be
analyzed or understood within the same frameworks as in the past because large parts
of the north had a long aceramic era as well as an Iron Age that, as in Scandinavia
and some Slavic regions, lasted well into the first millennium A.D.

Changing interpretations of organizational frameworks

Perhaps some of the most significant developments lie in the area of sociopolitical
organization. If one examines primary Classical texts, it seems clear that the

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barbarian Celts, Germans, and Britons, in terms of their reported actions and
organization, were somewhat chaotic. According to modern historiographic
interpretation of the accounts of Caesar, Tacitus, Pliny, and others, the many
related groups had no overarching leaders among their tribes, and rulers frequently
appear to take orders from their subjects. If leadership, as recorded by Roman
writers, was so chaotic, how did the barbarians defeat or withstand the organized
and powerful Romans in so many instances, most notably at the siege of Alesia in
52 B.C. (MacDevitt 2005, pp. 6890) and the later battle of the Teutoburg Forest
(Wells 2003) in A.D. 9, where a group of Germani handily crushed a vast Roman
force? While the Gauls and southern Germans eventually were conquered, the major
portion of Germania, in addition to Scotland and Ireland, never was conquered.
Eventually, barbarian Europe toppled a weak and collapsing Roman Empire over
the course of the 4th and 5th centuries A.D.
Despite the textual evidence for fragile and decentralized leadership, during the
heyday of processual archaeology, chiefs of the Iron Age were uniformly
characterized as autocratically ordering all of society from the top of centralized
hierarchies. What exactly were the roles of pre-Roman Iron Age chiefs?
Beginning in the 1980s, new fieldwork and a look with fresh eyes at extant data
suggested different interpretationsa generalizing but still radically different social
theory for Iron Age Europe. These have revealed that what traditionally have been
recognized as leaders were men primarily in charge of warfare. They had some
religious functions but did not run the religious hierarchy, such as the Druidic
system described by Caesar, and they had both an elected judiciary and an assembly,
where eligible voters gathered at regular intervals to discuss issues and the trajectory
of group life and to vote on actions to be taken. The warlord was limited by their
consensus and could not act without their support. Pan-regional alliances were made
under the authority of an elected paramount when outside enemies threatened but
were dissolved as soon as possible to prevent the emergence of kings. Despite
this decentralized system of power, with its relatively weak elites, in encounter after
encounter they were able to deal masterfully with more organized, complex peoples.
Heterarchy, a term coined in 1945 by neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch to
describe the parallel pathways of neural networks, has found its way into numerous
disciplines and contexts. Archaeologists use it to describe sociopolitical systems in
which several groups or institutions horizontally share power and authority, each
equal and independent yet part of a unified organizational structure. Crumley
introduced heterarchy to archaeologists in her long-term regional work with cultural
landscapes of pre-Roman Iron Age Gaul in Burgundy, France (Crumley 1984, 1995,
2001; Crumley and Marquardt 1987). Subsequently, she used the concept to discuss
the long-term interaction of Rome and Gaul within the paradigm of historical
ecology (Crumley 1994, 2007), characterizing both Celtic and Germanic Iron Age
societies as having at least three free-standing nexuses of power: warlord/warband,
religious specialists, and a group of people eligible to vote in the assembly. This
structure, reported for both groups by Tacitus, Caesar, Pliny, Cassius Dio, and
others, has material aspects that can be detected archaeologically (Hedeager 1992).
Thus the centralized, autocratic elite, heading a hierarchy with power over the rest
of society, based on political or kin relations, has been retheorized to fall more in

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line with a less powerful and less centralized elite who had to negotiate with other
sectors of society.
Before Crumleys incorporation of heterarchy, scholars repeatedly tried to model
the Celts and Germans as hierarchies and to compare them with Rome. Once these
disorganized groups are modeled as heterarchies, with innate, often superior
(more flexible) organizational qualities, this is far more easily understood, and it is
perhaps a better sociopolitical model for the Iron Age (Dietler 1995a; Ehrenreich
1991; Ehrenreich et al. 1995; Gonzalez-Ruibal 2006; Wailes 1995). Roymans
(1990) has explored such pre-Roman social organization in Gaul and the impact of
Roman conquest on the social milieu. For Celtiberian Spain, older models of the
pre-Roman Iron Age were initially replaced with those highlighting continued
hierarchies and elite power as holdovers from the Bronze Age into the early Iron
Age (Parcero Oubina and Fernandez 2004). However, recently the idea of a more
horizontal, heterarchic society (Fernandez-Posse and Sanchez-Palencia Ramos
1998; Sastre 2002) has been proposed to better explain the contradictory data of
monumental architecture and apparently low social stratification (Parcero Oubina
and Fernandez 2004). Similarly, aspects of the same type of contradictions, as noted
for Britain by Collis (1995b) and Haselgrove (1995), also are less puzzling when
viewed from within a heterarchy model for the Iron Age. If one only looks at
traditional centralizing models, the material record seems significantly askew
(Buchsenschutz 1995), but when considering the constraints that heterarchy puts on
elite attempts at domination, the skew is predictable.
An important component of European heterarchy is evidence for the practice of
fosterage in the Iron Age (Karl 2004a, 2005a; Parkes 2003, 2005, 2006), a form of
fictive kinship common in northern and western Europe (Gerriets 1983) in which the
heads of elite households traded their children, ostensibly to be instructed in adult
ways and expectations, but with an important role as a leveling mechanism and in
assuring that alliances, decentralizing practices, and other cooperative relationships
were not breached. In light of Gosdens (1985, 1989) work on the importance of
kinship-based alliances and gift exchange as structuring principles in northwestern
European societies, this work is adding to a new corpus on social mechanisms that
may have complemented the aggressive behavior of a warrior class. Recently,
similar traditions have been studied in southeastern Europe and the Balkans (Parkes
2004).
Coevolving with the hierarchy/heterarchy framework is a more specific model
dealing with political power, termed the dual-processual continuum of power, or
corporate/network theory (Blanton et al. 1996). Garnering praise from some
European archaeologists (see Shennan 2003), Blanton et al. proposed a continuum
of modes of power, the network end dominated by centralized elite who have
monopolies on power, support that power by creating a network of relationships
with other elites, and advertise their status with all the trappings of wealth and/or
prestige. At the other end lie societies where power is devolved away from
centralizing rulers toward a more equitable distribution among groups or institutions
within society. Such societies are characterized by less elite power, or at least less
emphasis on its appearance, display, and manifestation. Blanton et al. (1996) posit
that most societies are in a constant state of tension between these poles.

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The corporate/network concept has enabled some bridges to be built between

processualists and postprocessualists by enabling a generalizing study of many
phenomena underscored by postmodernists, such as agency and experience,
performance and embodiment, and has found utility in the work of archaeologists
worldwide. Frameworks such as Blanton et al.s corporate/network and
Crumleys heterarchy allow postulation along continua that are less likely to
lead to narrow and presentist views.
Centralized versus decentralized conceptualizations of Iron Age society
With the realization that Iron Age societies may have been organized in wholly
different ways than once expected, other ideas have been reexamined. One of these
is the concept of the central place. Were there any such things, and if so, what
were they central to? Further complicating matters is the frequent conflation, in
extant literature, of several kinds of sites under the same rubric. One type of site that
has undergone much recent reappraisal is the hillfort. In Britain, these were
originally conceptualized as strongholds defending against continental invaders
during the early Iron Age (Hawkes 1931). During the 1960s and 1970s, New
Archaeologists asserted that they represented elite military strongholds related to the
rise of hierarchical, centralized, complex societies (Cunliffe 1983, 1984, 1991; Gent
1983; Gent and Dean 1986), a concept that soon spread across Europe; the idea that
they represent fortifications is still in evidence (Ralston 2006). Many sites with
dissimilar features were lumped into this category: walled, high-elevation towns,
enclosures around a few houses, those with empty interiors, some containing
religious features, even fortified towers. Additionally, they were assumed to have
functioned similarly through time, with any changes attributed to the ever-widening
power of rulers.
Britain, which has seen more revision than other regions, provides the best
example of new understandings. Hamilton and Manley (2001) synthesized data on
over 40 hillforts in southeast England, finding that their purpose, reflected in their
differing locales, construction, and features, can be periodized to the Early, Middle,
and Late Iron Ages, with shifting uses encompassing first the integration of many
small communities and later acting as regional ritual and symbolic foci, and latest of
all, some taking on aspects of elite centers. They also note (Hamilton and Manley
2001, p. 34) that several distinct types of hillfort-using society can be isolated just
in southeast England, and that in other parts of Britain, hillforts either were
constructed and emplaced differently or were never built.
Few such sites have ever been excavated at all; those that have are known mainly
through small tests, with only a handful having seen extensive long-term work.
Detailed examination of what was actually found at well-investigated sites in
Britain, as opposed to what was assumed, illustrates the impetus behind recent
reconsiderations (Lock 2007). In Britain, where hilltop enclosures were initially
uniformly interpreted as military-elite central places (Cunliffe 1976, 1982), it is now
confirmed that at least several of these (Bowden et al. 2005) were preceded by
underlying Bronze Age religious structures, whose ditches, and later partially
enclosing walls, were oriented toward the sunrise. These clearly had no defensive

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purposes but were incorporated into later Iron Age features. Iron Age components at
the extensively excavated site of Danebury lack elite residences in any period, and
Iron Age pits of grain, once called storage features, are so small and few that they
are now interpreted offerings to chthonic deities (van der Veen and Jones 2006;
Williams 2003). Many other small pits containing bones also are far too small to
match previous interpretations as food waste buried by garrisons of soldiers. Both
types of pit are now interpreted as ritual offerings (see below, and Fitzpatrick 1997;
Grant 1984, 1989; Hill 1995b, 1996; Poole 1995; Smith 2001; Wilson 1999); large,
single-component heaps of cattle bone in surrounding ditches are interpreted as
deposits from civic or ceremonial feasts (Fitzpatrick 1997; Hill 1989, 1995b, c;
Smith 2001), which had increasingly important political functions in Iron Age
society (Ralph 2007). This suggests that they were not military or governmental
central places but were places for assemblies, feasts, and ceremonies, perhaps for
several communities (Hill 1989, 1995b, c), possibly in roles similar to that of henges
in the Neolithic (Bradley 2003). Recent archaeobotanical work (van der Veen and
Jones 2006) supports this model. Just as importantly, sites with similar features, yet
unwalled and in nonhilltop contexts, are now coming to light in Britain, suggesting
similar purposes yet without the distinctive enclosures that originally defined a class
of site (Wigley 2002). Further work may indicate that some indeed housed rulers or
had other functions altogether. Cunliffe, who carefully excavated at the Danebury
hillfort for many years, long resisted reinterpretation of his initial findings, yet he
too eventually accepted modification of the elite-controlled central place model
(Cunliffe 1992, 1993b, 2000).
Archaeological remains of oppida, the term used by the Romans to describe both
flatland and high-elevation, walled and unwalled population centers in Britain,
France, Germany, Spain, and elsewhere in Europe, also have been reexamined.
Traditionally, oppida were interpreted as relatively uniform, elite-controlled urban
centers, with elite-attached craft specialists, reflecting a centralized political
hierarchy with control of prestige-goods trade. Currently, many (Collis 1995a, b;
Harding 2001; Haselgrove 1995; Kohler 1995; Woolf 1993) express doubt that
oppida form a class of settlement either, as new work confirms they were not
uniform in form or development. Some display urban-like settlement, while others
are lightly infilled and enclose expansive uninhabited areas (Lorrio and Ruiz
lvarez-Sanchs 1999); some were occupied for
Zapatero 2004; Ruiz Zapatero and A
long periods, others very briefly. In the earliest periods, there is little to infer any
social hierarchy within them (Almagro-Gorbea 1995, p. 175). While there is
sometimes later evidence of an upper class (Ralston 2007), none contain palatial
residences. At Manching, in Germany, fragments of funerary-type horse gear and
weaponry were taken as evidence for a resident warrior elite, although burials
themselves are lacking, creating difficulties in interpretation (Sievers 2000; Sievers
et al. 1998). Despite a desire to find elite within the town, it is instead common to
find elite villas or rich farms at the oppidums periphery or in its hinterland
(Arnold 2002; Brunaux and Meniel 1997; Buchsenschutz and Richard 1996; Menez
1997; Ralston 2007). Work at Manching and Bourges has revealed the presence of
religious specialists (Ruffier 1990; Sievers 2000; Sievers et al. 1998) through urban
cultic structures similar to Viereckschanzen, or rural enclosures that sometimes

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incorporate offerings and ceremonials (Bradley 2003; Murray 1995), perhaps

paralleling the newly recognized nonhillfort ceremonial sites in Britain (Wigley
2002). The idea that crafts production was limited to elite-controlled urban areas has
been transformed by discovery of many extra-urban, scattered workshop areas
(Augier et al. 2001; Collet and Flouest 1997), and overall the sites appear to have
been nexuses of varied activities (Milcent 2004). Given our understanding of a
typical symbiosis of warrior, religious and secular institutions, this is not surprising.
Oppida were once considered to be unique to Celtic but not Germanic groups;
Wells 2001) notes, however, that before Roman aggression, the people that Caesar
called Germani may have been equally indigenously urbanized. Roman disruptions
may have brought about a domino-like collapse of eastern oppida, the abandonment
of most cereal farming, and subsequently a different form of organization (Wells
2001, pp. 100101).
Scandinavia, a part of Germania that was never conquered, also was long
theorized through models of centralized hierarchies, center versus periphery, and
prestige goods economies (Randsborg 1980; Roesdahl 1982). There it was not the
presence of fortified sites that led to traditional models of social and political
organization but the fact that theories were based on the distribution of bog offerings
of captured weaponry and the distribution and content of elite graves, skillfully
analyzed to wield great interpretative power for the structure of the warrior-band
(e.g., Hedeager 1992). The unintentional preponderance of evidence dealing with
warrior life led some to interpret them as the top level of a pyramid-shaped society.
This parallels earlier skewing in Continental Europe due to a major bias toward the
contents of rich or monumental graves. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, new types
of data emerged from large-scale projects and syntheses, revealing that while the
warrior hierarchy was indeed important in Iron Age Scandinavia, it was not
societys only ruling sector.
The site of Gudme (an Iron Age toponym meaning home of the gods) was
initially investigated and published in the 1980s (Thrane 1985, 1988, 1994), and
interpreted as the domain of an important chiefly line in the early first millennium
A.D. The site, along with a nearby port, is now known to form a religious,
commercial, and chiefly complex so large and multifaceted that it will be published
for many years (Fabech 1994; Nielsen et al. 1994; Randsborg 1990; Stilborg et al.
1997). In Norway, court sites from the same period are found: large circular
complexes of houses with central mounded features containing hearths, ceramics,
and the remains of feasts (Munch et al. 2003). Built in a single phase and occupied
intermittently, they have no detectable ordinary households and no storage facilities.
Once interpreted as military barracks, they too have been reanalyzed (Grimm and
Stylegar 2004; Solberg 2002; Storli 2000). Located near strategically important
areas and close to elite mortuary complexes and farming estates, placenames
indicate that they were the sites of unifying social activities: judicial (assembly)
locales also used for feasting, ritual, games or competitions (Armstrong 2000), and
military functions, as well as intermittent trade. In southern Sweden, the wellpublished site of Uppakra (Hardh 2000) was a slightly later but similar settlement
with an array of high-status items, domestic structures, craftworking activity, and a
cult house with gold offerings of a type associated elsewhere with elite farms, along

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with the remains of large-scale feasting (Back Danielsson 2002; Larsson 2001;
Larsson and Lenntorp 2004). A deposit of nearly 50 spearheads was interpreted as a
votive involving warfare (Helgesson 2004).
While elite wealth is clearly apparent and there is no doubt that leaders were
making attempts to increase their social and political power, other interpretations
are now offered. The founding of such places has been suggested, alternately, as a
parallel for the reinterpreted hillforts in Britain and some oppida on the continent
(Magnusson Staaf 2003), as centers for multiple activities and different types of
actors. Such Scandinavian sites developed when oppida and hillforts were at their
peak, after a long period of more egalitarian conditions following the collapse of
local Bronze Age power structures.
There is little doubt that Nordic groups actively promoted heterarchic principles,
using the assembly and its legislative/judiciary function to counter the power of
rulers, seen through Roman and indigenous textual records, toponyms reflecting
many assembly places, and the lack of detectable centralized political authority until
the beginning of the second millennium A.D. These sites and others like them still
often are interpreted through traditional centralization models (Hardh and Larsson
2003), the data interpreted as proof that one sector (warlord) had co-opted the others
(religious and legislative) (Fabech 1994), as well as completely dominating trade
and production. Others see multiple activities within a single complex as
substantiation for the opposite view. Evidence at Gudme and Uppakra (and many
others) may one day be reexamined in the same way as at Danebury, away from
assertions of chiefly control, and instead toward places that combined warriorcentered displays, rites performed by religious specialists, and community activities.
In Spain, a long-time focus on purely descriptive and taxonomic work has led to a
situation where even though northwestern Iberia has produced the largest number
of excavated settlements, almost nothing is known about hillfort social organization (Ayan Vila 2008, p. 906). Elite-focused centralized hierarchy models continue
to be published (Grau Mira 2003; Parcero Oubina 2000; Parcero Oubina and
Fernandez 2004; Rios Gonzalez and Garcia de Castro Valdes 2001) in which oppida
are ideological expressions of an aristocratic social class that wielded the primary
authority in Iberian society, dividing the landscape into jealously guarded territories
Brunet 1998; Ruiz Rodriguez 1993; Ruiz Rodriguez and Molinos 1993, 1998; Ruiz
Rodriguez et al. 1991) and extracting support from peasants who were tightly
controlled. These interpretations are being challenged (Burillo Mozota 2005).
Extensive field projects over the last two decades can clarify some of the differences
between population centers, political sites, sacred places, and hinterlands by
disentangling elements of the formerly conflated hillfort category. Some are empty
of structures, others are turres or towers, others high-elevation towns, and some are
castros, enclosures containing houses but where no class or status difference can be
detected architecturally or in mortuary treatment. These were often labeled peasant
villages (Burillo Mozota 2005), using a medieval-derived model. Internal organization sometimes diverges from former expectations (Lorrio and Ruiz Zapatero
lvarez-Sanchs 2002), with walls enclosing religious
2004; Ruiz Zapatero and A
statuary and altars and habitations built outside (Lorrio and Ruiz Zapatero 2004;
lvarez-Sanchs 1999).
Ruiz Zapatero and A

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The material contents and spatial relationships between these dissimilar sites lead
some to now suggest that they were symbolically unifying structures that created
focal points for disparate interacting communities Fernandez-Posse and SanchezPalencia Ramos 1998; Parcero Oubina and Fernandez 2004).
Finally, accumulated data indicate that even densely populated oppida initially
contained little to infer any social hierarchy or presence of powerful rulers
(Almagro-Gorbea 1995, p. 175). Sastre (2002) applied the heterarchy model to the
Castro culture, which stretched from the late Bronze Age to the Late Iron Age,
challenging the ubiquitous concept of a hierarchic society focused on aristocrats.
Instead, theorizing that consensual inequality among relatively horizontal societies
can quickly become institutionalized and involuntary (Bender 1985, 1990; Saitta
1994; Saitta and Keene 1990), she conceptualized Castro as a segmentary agrarian
society in which kin groups and households manipulated social structures and
practices in order to benefit themselvescompletely leaving out the idea of social
class, eliteness, and other traditional explanations for the origins, maintenance, and
elaboration of inequality. For Portugal, Reimao Queiroga (2007) suggests that the
large, walled, house-filled urban centers dating to the early Roman era were in fact
built by or at the behest of Romans, and the local population was encouraged to
move to them as a way to control and acculturate a population previously scattered
in small, autonomous, and more egalitarian castros.
Others approach Iberia from the perspective that its social institutions display
corporate concepts, such as the practice of ritual hospitality (Sanchez Moreno
2001), with an impact on social and political interaction, a perspective in line with
Gosdens much cited (1985, 1989) work that stresses the importance of kinship,
alliance, and strategic gift-giving. Keay (1997) approaches institutionalized
patronage in Iberia, describing mutual obligations between sociopolitical elites
and their clients, rather than strictly autocratic relationships, transformed away from
an indigenous tradition only under Roman influence. Ayan Vila (2008) confirms that
only late in the Iron Age is Roman impact seen in changing social aspects of
architecture, and that new forms were not adopted uniformly across Spain,
representing expediency rather than a changing worldview (Ayan Vila 2008, pp.
965966). Rose (2003) also has examined the way in which Roman technologies
the use of written inscriptionswere similarly incorporated into extant symbolic
systems, becoming imbued with native meanings and inferences that reflect earlier
social concepts.
In eastern Europe, inference based on linguistics and nonarchaeological data,
inspired by idealism, nationalism, and later, communism, posited that the Slavs
originated in swamplands; poor agricultural conditions led to cooperative,
democratic social and political structures that were subject to complexification
only through contact with Rome. For many decades, Slavic archaeologists,
especially under the Soviet regime, attempted to produce work proving this
historical-linguistic confabulation in order to avoid political persecution (Milisauskas 1997a). Depending on shifting political conditions, archaeologists attempted to
play up or diminish regional roles as Roman provinces or satellites. In some cases,
Roman decolonization during Romes collapse was emphasized to correlate with the
ethnic politics of modern states. Such ideas still appear in archaeological works on

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Slavic origins (Curta 2001a, b). Given this situation and the focus of many
researchers on Paleolithic and Neolithic cultures (Milisauskas 1986), in several
Slavic regional compendia (e.g., Bailey et al. 1995; Dolukhanov 1996) the Iron Age
gets short shrift (but see Bogucki 1990), or accepted paradigms are reiterated.
Slavic frameworks could stand some revision, but such formerly politicized
views are only slowly being deconstructed. In Romania, the post-Roman era has
recently been reinterpreted away from earlier models of depopulation toward
evidence for the continuity of complex society (Ellis 1998). The famous Polish site
of Biskupin, a walled, nucleated settlement from the early Iron Age, ca. 800 B.C.,
might shed further light on social organization in Iron Age eastern Europe. Due to
wet preservation, a remarkable collection of perishable materials was preserved, but
the site was excavated in the 1930s in the context of Nazi conquest and later
associated with a now-discredited concept of an Early Iron Age proto-Slavic culture.
After World War II it became the focus of extreme nationalism, skewing all
interpretations (Piotrowska 1997). Current work is concerned mainly with
preservation issues (Babinski et al. 2004; Ladomersky et al. 2005).
Elite versus community approaches to the Iron Age
Increasing realization during the 1980s that little was known about nonurban or
nonelite settlement has led to a larger corpus on presumably more ordinary places:
nonenclosed towns, villages, and single farms (Gerritsen 2003). This follows a
theoretical trend seen in a wider European context. Often conceptualized as similar to
serflike medieval peasants, some now hypothesize Iron Age people as having
potential for economic and political autonomy. In 1989, Hill (1989, pp. 1920) called
on archaeologists not only to reinterpret the impressive and monumental but the
ordinary place, taking them out of the questionable presentist construction of Iron
Age peasants and into a real examination of what people were doing and why. Gwilt
(1997) presents an everyday landscape of daily life, demonstrating a shift of focus
from outside the household in daily activity areas to the house itself, paralleling a
shift in which settlements began demarcating and distinguishing themselves from
their neighbors. Gwilt hypothesizes a structuration process where changes in practice
reinforced simultaneously shifting social structures, eventually institutionalizing
new forms into new norms. Similarly, Fitzpatrick (1997) convincingly situates us
within the ordinary experience of the farm, relating the social and natural cycles of
life to everyday activities and how these might shape peoples cognition of time,
seasonality, activities, and the harvest in relation to themselves and the supernatural.
As at hillfort sites, various kinds of depositions and the arrangement of domestic
architecture at ordinary farms is now viewed as encoding supernatural beliefs
(Fitzpatrick 1997; Oswald 1997); these small sites may have been contributing
participants to intergroup religious and social activities at hillfort and oppida locales.
Another new focus of research is on the household as a unitnot only of
production but a political unit as well. In traditional models, either the elite strata
or a clan leadership controls power, production, and access to resources. The
house society theory proposed by Levi-Strauss (1987) and newly invigorated
in anthropology and archaeology (Gillespie 2000; Joyce 2000 for general

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interpretations) has been used to reinterpret the independent household, made up of

kin and nonkin members embedded in a farm, as the unit of production and the main
sociopolitical building block of society (Blanco et al. 2003; Gonzalez-Ruibal
2006, p. 157; Hill 1995b, p. 51; Hingley 1995, p. 187 for European Iron Age
examples). They may have been independent, freestanding units, largely unregulated by elites who were busy with warfare, specialized ceremonials, and some types
of trade. Into this discussion one can fit the debate over the meaning and use of
brochs, walled, tower-like sites found in Scotland, which revolves around
disagreements over whether they are residences and power bases of traditional
elites or of independent households akin to house societies (Armit 1997a, b;
Gilmour and Cook 1998; Parker Pearson et al. 1996, 1999; Sharples and Parker
Pearson 1997).
Ordinary villages were long studied in Scandinavia but often given a descriptive
treatment (e.g., Rindel 1999). Newer theories explore the fact that some were walled
while others were not and that they are a relatively late phenomenon, no earlier than
the 3rd to 2nd century B.C., and in some areas as recent as A.D. 500. Some now
theorize about social conditions that would have inhibited village formation. In
Norway, Iron Age villages were never established; individual farms were the only
settlement form. Contra purely environmental theories of the past, some interpret
them as the ideological expressions of independent households, perhaps constituting
resistance to elite domination that the demographic agglomeration of village life
enabled (Hill 2000; Lillehammer 1999), as it did elsewhere in Scandinavia
(Porsmose 1981; Ridderspore 1988). Others discuss the abandonment of houses
for unknown reasons, in Scandinavia and elsewhere (Gerritsen 1999a; for a different
period, but similar, see Tringham 1991), when their possible use-life was clearly not
over, and, on a landscape level, the dislocation of entire settlements (Jensen 1982, pp.
209210), despite unchanged agricultural or landscape conditions. Similar patterns
in the Netherlands (Gerritsen 1999a, b) have invoked empirical studies combined
with interpretive analyses on the biography of the house, from its birth to its death,
as part of an entire social system, involving everything from subsistence to ritual.
Along more traditional lines, there have been attempts to create a unity from a
large array of published material on nonelite Iron Age settlements (e.g., Audouze
and Buchsenschutz 1992; Callmer 1986); other publications represent new work
(Genin and Lavendhomme 1997; Lavendhomme and Guichard 1997). Some focus
not on individual sites but on the landscapes surrounding well-studied oppida,
hillforts, or other extraordinary sites (Buchsenschutz and Richard 1996; Callmer
1991; Crumley and Marquardt 1987; Haselgrove 1990, 1996a, b; Ruiz Rodriguez
1993; Ruiz Rodriguez et al. 1991). In Scandinavia, the magnate farm, associated
with wealthy and elite households, has been the topic of new research (Callmer
2001; Ridderspore 2003; Soderberg 2003), assessing its place in the landscape as
distinct from ordinary farms, villages, and protourban places.
As noted, no one disputes that warriors and warfare existed in the Iron Age. The
violent and aggressive activity of Iron Age rulers, which may have been inspired by
both material acquisitiveness and a quest for increasing status and power, has seen a
good deal of discussion in recent publications. Several books (e.g., Jrgensen et al.
2003; Keeley 1996; Reimao Queiroga 2003) and edited volumes on prehistoric

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warfare have appeared in recent years with extensive representation of Europe (e.g.,
Bekker-Nielsen and Hannestad 2001; Carman 1997; Gilchrist 2003; Osgood et al.
2000). A new journal established in 2005, The Journal of Conflict Archaeology,
provides a venue for Iron Age scholars. The Iron Age also is represented
substantially in Parker Pearson and Thorpe (2005), with offerings on the
iconography of warrior ideology in Iberia (Freire 2005) and the role of conflict as
an elite strategy in Iron Age society in Spain (Aranda Jimenez and Sanchez Romero
2005). Karl (2003) discusses weaponry and war vehicles, while other authors
(Bishop and Knusel 2005; Craig et al. 2005) discuss the paleopathological and
osteological evidence for Iron Age warfare and the practices such data reflect. Some
authors postulate a high degree of warfare but also note that it can be largely
invisible (Parcero Oubina 1997) and must sometimes be inferred from iconography
and defensive structures. McCartney (2006) interprets changing settlement in Iron
Age France as a distinct, materially visible response to a socialization for fear in a
warlike nonstate society, manifest in house construction, organization, and the type
of access seen within a community through time. Massive votive deposits of wellused weaponry in many Iron Age societies (Ilkjr 2002; Jrgensen et al. 2003) attest
to the fact that social elites were actively engaged in conflicts and provide
opportunities for discussion and analysis. This new spate of publications on ancient
conflict also has drawn some critical thought regarding the reasons behind the
sudden interest in this topic (Gilchrist 2003; Vandkilde 2003), namely, the global
political climate of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Theorizing the sacred

Along with other significant revisions to our conceptualization of the Iron Age,
religious and ritual activity has been recharacterized (Maier 2006), not only
theoretically but with revised philological understandings of Greek and Roman
accounts (Hofeneder 2005). Since a number of scholars now believe that religious
elites or specialists may have had important parallel powersperhaps even
corulershipalongside secular leaders within heterarchically organized Iron Age
societies, the study of rituals and rites, through artifacts, structures, and landscape
relationships, has taken on new meaning.
The archaeological study of religion often has focused on the obvious: the
monumental, the public. Recent studies have tried to newly include private and
personal practices and those embedded in daily routines (Jonuks 2005). Iron Age
religious practice was once understood through normative models as mainly largescale display-oriented ritual focused on bending the commoner to elite will. Today,
many authors note that the conduct of ritual activity appears to be in some cases
public but in others well blended into the domestic sphere; the existence of
nonhierarchic traditions such as shamanism and individual or household practices
has been recognized along with more formal traditions.
Deconstruction (e.g., Goody 1990) of the long-cherished idea of innate human
religious dualities (Durkheim 1995; Eliade 1964, 1965, 1969, 1978), has finally led
to reconsideration of the degree to which people divided the sacred from the

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profane, the ritual from the ordinary, or if they did so at all (Bradley 2003;
Fitzpatrick 1992). The unusual patterning of garbage deposition and the arrangement of domestic architecture at ordinary farms is now viewed as encoding
supernatural beliefs (Fitzpatrick 1997; Oswald 1997); Iron Age agriculturalists are
newly imagined as individuals who saw few divisions between ritual and daily
practice, who may have experienced deity in everyday activities, as among many
contemporary peoples (Bradley 2003; Oswald 1997).
A growing sophistication is reflected in the shift from study primarily of
structures or artifacts to identifying the process of ritualization over time
(Bradley 2003, p. 12). Some have argued for a transition between ritual modes: the
co-option of previously open ritual practices and their transformation into elitecontrolled, exclusionary systems. Others argue against this; we have already noted
the reinterpretation of pits and structures within some hillforts. Social theories
surrounding religious syncretism also have been introduced into the study of the
widespread cultural mixing and melding seen throughout the Iron Age.
The archaeology of death
The quest to draw meaning from the rituals surrounding death has long preoccupied
archaeologists. The monumental burial, found in various forms across Iron Age
Europe, with its prominence in the landscape and wealth often contained within,
captured the imagination of earlier generations. Roman descriptions of Celtic
sacrificial practices similarly spawned endless early treatises, as did speculation
about the representation of supernaturals on various artifact classes. While mounds,
grave goods, and bloody druidic rites are perhaps the oldest and stalest topic within
Iron Age archaeology, many new takes on the context and meaning of death and
afterlife ritualsbuilt and natural locales, offerings, sacrifice, funerary feasting, and
othersincorporate a series of new approaches. Several large overviews of Iron
Age religion or its form among the Celts have appeared (Aldhouse-Green 2001a, b;
Brunaux 2000; Marco Simon 2005; Sopena 2005), while others treat more specific
areas or topics.
Parker Pearson (1995) has noted that more traditional archaeologists are now
acknowledging the critique of both functionalist explanations for mortuary ritual as
well as the now-recognized possibility that the rich and powerful can disguise the
status of their dead for social, political, or ideological reason, while the poor may
surround themselves with privileges for the afterlife that were not theirs while
living. Additionally, there may be change in burial practices and in the relationships
between the living and the dead over time, within the same culture (Parker Pearson
1993, 1996; Parker Pearson and Richards 1994). Recently, Whitley (2002b) and
Pitts (2003) have continued the debate over the status of ancestors in past societies.
Whitleys observation that archaeologists disproportionately model ancestor
worship as a structuring mechanism of past societies is reflected in the Iron Age
literature; Pitts notion that it has proved a useful and fertile ground for building
new frameworks is also true. Archaeologists continue to struggle with these issues,
seeking new lines of evidence to test interpretations.

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The burial mound itself has been removed from the antiquarian realm and is
being used to answer more contemporary questions about kinship and religious
practice and how they interfaced with other aspects of life. The development of
aDNA studies has provided insight on whether groups buried around the primary
chiefly burial in Hallstatt Iron Age mounds were kin groups or political
followings; per traditional interpretations, this would give clues as to whether Iron
Age polities were chiefdoms or states (Arnold 2002; Arnold and Kaestle 2002;
Arnold and Murray 2002). Preliminary results indicate that the osteological sexing
of some burials was in error and that there may have been demographic exchanges
between different Hallstatt regions, perhaps through fosterage, intermarriage, or
slavery (Arnold and Kaestle 2002). Arnold (2002; Arnold and Wicker 2001) has
approached the built landscapes of the dead as mortuary communities that reflect
relationships among the living and between the living and the dead, especially the
shift from small, single-elite mounds to large communal burials for some order of
social unit whose type is as yet unknown. Changes in the location of mound
cemeteries in relation to settlements probably reflect social and political changes.
The ostentatious display of many ancestors in monumental tombs may have been a
keen reminder of past and present relationships as one approached a settlement site
(Arnold 2002, p. 132), much as megalithic avenues might have forced people to see
certain vistas and think about them in particular and intentional ways.
Iron Age materials found inside Neolithic chambered tombs appear to be ritual
substitutions for bones or objects removed from the megalithic context, indicating
that Iron Age people were using or curating objects or remains that had ritual value
(Hingley 1996), perhaps with notions of ancestry. Iron Age burials in Scandinavia
also have been found with anachronistic grave goods taken from earlier contexts,
perhaps to co-opt the power, authority, or mystique of earlier groups, similar to
Hingleys (1996) findings for Britain. This does not necessarily indicate continuity;
the reuse of the ancient or mysterious can simply support or amplify later
unconnected practices. Some changes may be less political and more purely
religious, such as shifts in the conception of how the living interact with those
already in the afterlife, or new burial treatments were developed that may have been
aimed at keeping the dead in their graves and away from haunting or bringing ill
fortune to the living (Arnold 2002, p. 131).
Offerings and sacrifices
Many researchers continue the longtime tradition of studying sacrificial practices
and the deposition of votive or other offeringsobjects, animals, and peoplein
special contexts. Most agree that human subjects were a rare but regularly offered
sacrifice. The most extensive treatment of human sacrifice is perhaps the work of
Aldhouse-Green (2001a, 2005; Green 1998a, b), which uses ethnographic, textual,
and archaeological data to examine such practices across Europe in the later Iron
Age. Unlike many other authors, Aldhouse-Green (2001a) discusses not only Celts,
about whom there are Roman accounts, but various evidence for the Germanic/
Nordic regions, as well as Roman and Greek practices. Brunaux (1988, 2000, 2001)

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also surveys many topics associated with sacrifice, but largely restricted to Celtic
contexts.
Bog bodies such as Lindow Man, Tollund Man, and Grauballe Man (Briggs
1995; Turner 1996; Turner and Scaife 1995; Van der Sanden 1996) in Scandinavia,
Germany, the Netherlands, and Britainboth Celtic and Germanic regions
display signs of ritual dispatch similar to what classical authors relate. Examples of
decapitated or dismembered bodies are found across Europe (Wait 1995, pp. 494
495) and at Anatolian Gordion, where a Celtic colony is well attested. Gordion
recently yielded several areas with skeletal material from multiple male, female, and
juvenile victims of violence (Selinsky 2005), in manners textually described as in
sacrificial ritual (Dandoy et al. 2002, p. 47): strangulation, beheading, stabbing, and
blunt force, some thrown in pits, others carefully arranged as clusters of human
bones from bodies that had been dismembered. The remains, comingled with animal
bones, were then carefully rearranged, sometimes in symmetrical patterns, on an
outside ground surface with shallow depressions. Similar combinations of bound
or dismembered people of various ages and sexes, animals, and grain have been
found in Britain and France (Aldhouse-Green 2001a, 2004b; Brunaux 2000,
pp. 1418; Cunliffe 1983, 1992, 1993a, pp. 282283; Delattre 2006; du Lesley
2000, pp. 913; Lambot 1998, 2000; Milcent 2004). Conversely, Craig et al. (2005)
examine fragmented human remains, often interpreted as the result of intentional
arrangement or mixing, as perhaps representing the effects of dismemberment in
warfare rather than as a religious rite. Other more local or specific studies of human
offerings and excarnation rites have been made by Carr and Knusel (1997).
There are many archaeological examples of animal sacrifice across Iron Age
Europe (Green 1992; Ross 1995), reflecting feasts, celebrations, or religious
ideologies. Specific beliefs of some kind are represented in some practices such as
the gendering of animals placed in human graves as offerings (Jerem 2003, p. 544)
or the repeated mixing of specific species (Fitzpatrick 1997; Jerem 2003, p. 544).
Many sites display small pit features containing bones of certain animal species
combined in repeated ways, which have been called ABGs, associated bone groups
(Wilson 1999); these features, once interpreted as ordinary trash pits, have now been
reassessed. Many ABG species match textual descriptions of animals important in
Iron Age sacrificial contexts: bulls (Brunaux 1988, p. 15), horses (Aldhouse-Green
2004b; Jerem 1998; Poole 1995; Wilson 1999), and dogs (Aldhouse-Green 2004a;
Cunliffe 1983; Poole 1995; Wilson 1999), especially when compared with pits that
much more clearly resulted from food preparation (Hill 1995b, 1996). Some large
cattle-bone middens at hillforts and other sites of social activity, now interpreted as
resulting from feasting events, are also linked to practices subsequent to animal
sacrifices (Fitzpatrick 1997; Hill 1989, 1995b, c; Ralph 2007; Smith 2001).
Similarly, pits of grain once described as storage features are now interpreted as
offerings to chthonic deities (Cunliffe 1992, 1993a, p. 283; 1993b; van der Veen and
Jones 2006; Williams 2003). Grant (1984, 1989) discusses ABGs appearing within
offerings of grain; many of these, located in structures or sites that appear to have
special purposes, also contain ceramics and other small artifacts thought to be part
of offering rituals (Fitzpatrick 1997; Poole 1995; Smith 2001).

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Animal sacrifice also has been studied in terms of dispatch based on cutmarks,
breakage, and disarticulation patterns, method of offering (consumption, cremation/
burning, burial, excarnation), and seasonality as an indicator of annual rituals, such
as in the case of red deer sacrifice (Jerem 1998, 2003). Others have studied the
partitioning of animals after death, the use of their remains as deposits in burials and
domestic areas, and their display in sanctuaries and shrines (Grant 1989; Hill 1996;
Jerem 2003; Parker Pearson 1996; Wilson 1999). The persistence of such
depositions, even after Roman rule was established in the provinces, has been
discussed by Fulford (2001). Marco Simon (2005, pp. 317319) offers interesting
discussion of Romano-Celtiberian inscriptions that detail the offerings, the events
they were held at, and to which indigenous deities they were to be given.
Ritual hospitality and feasting are important sociopolitical strategies (Salinas
2001; Sanchez Moreno 2001), often with religious overtones. Alcohol was probably
a primary component of secular displays of generosity necessary for Iron Age leaders
in the maintenance of their roles and their relationship with the community,
important in the performance of sociopolitical feasting (Arnold 1999; Dietler, 1990,
1996, 1999; Dietler and Hayden 2001; Rausing 1997). Alcoholic beverages also were
mind-altering substances used in rites and rituals when religious elites entered the
trance state described by Classical authors and indigenous myths. The equipment for
drinking and beverages is included in elite burials (Witt 1996) and in nonburial ritual
depositions of various types (Pitts 2005), perhaps as dedications to deities.
Many studies concern deposition of weapons, wealth, or status objects in
religious contexts, which for many decades in Europe were classified by type rather
than the context of the finds (Osborne 2004), creating a void in the study of where,
how, and why they were deposited. Much research addresses ritual disposal of
offerings in water or bogs, but sometimes on land, which may be related to afterlife
beliefs or to the presentation of the objects to the gods or ancestors (Bradley 1988,
1990; Cool 2000; Crawford 2004; Hedeager 1999; Pitts 2005; Woodward and
dal weapons sacrifice site,
Woodward 2004). Of note is a study of the Illerup A
dating to around A.D. 200 (Ilkjr 2002). There, through the material (weapons,
booty, some runic inscriptions, and personal effects of defeated soldiers) and its
context, a picture is drawn of Iron Age Scandinavia, of the organization of military
groups, of intergroup relations within the region, religious beliefs, and relationships
between the Roman world and Scandinavia, beyond the Rhineland frontier yet still
within the sphere of interaction. An even more encompassing edited treatment
(Jrgensen et al. 2003) approaches the entire corpus of weapons offerings sites, how
water was conceptualized as a gateway to the supernatural world, and RomanGermanic relations.
Votive objects can be unusual objects or simple domestic materials. Iron Age
deposits in Scandinavian bogs were clearly ritual depositions; some preserve riches
or weapons, but some contain farm tools and wooden plates and bowls that would
have held simple food offerings (Becker 1971; Thurston 2001, p. 104). Other simple
offerings associated with house foundation construction are not often recognized as
such (Paulsson-Holmberg 1997).
Concerned with a need for source criticism, a number of authors have challenged
the status of some reputed hoards and the difficulty of distinguishing votive deposits

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from wealth repositories and caches of treasure that were unintentionally abandoned
(Aitchison 1988; Fitzpatrick 1992, 2005; Johns 1996). Others have attempted to add
categories, for example, asking whether new cremation rites and urn burials in
Roman Britain constitute votive offerings of the dead themselves (Williams 2003),
perhaps as part of their commemoration. Oestigaard (2000) goes further, suggesting
that different treatments of sacrificed human bodies (raw, cooked, and burnt)
represented the offering of a varied cosmological feast to the deities, related to
social rules on appropriate victims and their presentation to the gods on behalf of the
community.
Buildings, landscapes, and structured religions
Although Celtic, Germanic, and Nordic groups are often understood as holding
rituals at natural places such as groves and lakes (Green 1992; Wilson 1999), this
was not always the case. Evidence for shrines or ritual buildings has recently been
published in Scandinavia (Callmer 2001; Fabech 1994; Larsson 2004), where many
feel that over time religious practice was more and more governed by secular elites
than by religious specialists. This is seen in the transfer of offerings and votives
from long-used natural places to the compounds of political leaders: small
structures with offerings, in the form of depictions of deities pressed from thin
sheets of gold, are often found directly adjacent to elite compounds (Lundqvist et al.
1993; Watt 2004). In a similar vein, for southern Britain, Smith (2001) attempts to
demonstrate that despite reinterpretations of the hillforts themselves, ritual
enclosures in British hillforts represent co-option of ritual by elites as a part of
their ongoing efforts to take control of society. This can be achieved by examining
the builders less obvious intentions of marking religious differences and controlling
the sacred by clearly differentiating it from the everyday (Izzet 2001), perhaps using
the sacred to structure growing social differences within a society that was
becoming more politically complex.
A type of structure once considered to clearly represent ritual architecture,
enclosures called Viereckschanzen, recently has been questioned by some skeptics
(Venclova 1993). These rectangular earthwork enclosures in Germany and
Bohemia, with parallels in France, the Netherlands, and Belgium, were classified
as shrines in the 1960s and 1970s based on limited excavations. Reanalysis indicates
they are less similar than once thought and they appear to have varied functions
(Bradley 2003) such as feasting sites (Murray 1995), elite farms, areas to store food
for redistribution, or even shifting over time from sacred to ordinary uses (Venclova
1993, 1997, 1998). Arnold (2002, p. 132) notes that Viereckschanzen are often
closely associated with earlier mound cemeteries near enclosed hilltop sites. Others
are content to call them special-use structures that were not as separated from daily
life as previously believed (Bradley 2003; Bruck 1999).
This debate hinges on the definition of sacred or ritual space: some archaeologists determine religious activity by an exclusive use of structures or areas for
rituals, accompanied by clear votive objects (Venclova 1993). But as noted above,
recent thought considers the revelation that many societies practice less separation
between ritual and daily life and that a fusion of the ritual and domestic

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characterizes much Iron Age settlement (Cavers 2006, p. 389); those tending the
offering place also may have lived there and maintained their own households.
While Romans may have later influenced conceptualization of temples or shrines as
places reserved only for special activities, this may be incorrect for much of the
Iron Age (Bradley 2003; Bruck 1999).
The debate over what constitutes sacred space spills over into the question of
who directed activities at such locales. One strategy is to identify them; headdresses,
miniature weapons, and bronze ritual spoons found in British male and female
mortuary contexts as well as hoards may indicate druid burials (Fitzpatrick 2007).
Some authors integrate understandings of how religion functions, both practically
and symbolically within society. One research thread follows the ways in which
ritual practitioners direct participants through landscapes (both built and natural)
that are conceptually integrated with a belief system, a perspective well known in
Neolithic studies, now used for both the Bronze Age and Iron Age (Izzet 2001;
Tilley and Bennett 2001). The study of ritual landscapes ranges from locational
analyses of their organization across space to phenomenological studies of how they
would have been experienced (Newman 2007; Parcero Oubina et al. 1998; Tilley
and Bennett 2001). In addition to religious structures, there is evidence that
cosmology may have played some role in the architectural and structural
organization of chiefly complexes as a whole (Soderberg 2003). Theorists
incorporating embodiment and performance approaches ask: Did they sing and
dance at such places? Did they use public processional performances or private
ceremonies? What do such variations mean about society and does practice change
through time? Work ranges from descriptive analyses of processional materials
(Pare 1989) to phenomenological or cognitive studies of the experience and
meaning of public ritual performances (Newman 2007; Oestigaard 1999; Paasztor
et al. 2000). A recent study of ritual enclosures in French late Iron Age sites (Verger
2000) takes a holistic landscape approach, attempting to identify all parts of a local
sacred landscape and rejecting a more standard French approach using classical
textual sources as a main interpretive tool (e.g., Ralston 2007); Milcent (2001) has
approached regional mortuary data as a funerary landscape (although again, see
Robb [1998] for a critique of the sacred landscape concept).
A research area closely related to phenomenology is that of social memory and
commemoration, the study of how people collectively recognize an agreed-upon
past for their political unit, kin group, faction, or other perceived category, and how
they honor or resurrect the past for many purposesreligious, political, social.
Several archaeologists have examined if and how this phenomenon can be seen
archaeologically in Iron Age Europe (Blake 1998; Bradley 2002; Gosden et al.
1998; Lillios 1999; Prent 2003); they also see a debate as to the use and misuse of
the concept between Last (1998) and Mullin (2001), who suggests that the concept
of social forgetting regularly explored by ethnographers should also be of interest
to archaeologists. Thus studies of the structure and practice of organized religion in
Iron Age societies have become more multifaceted and are no longer hypothesized
as merely a function of competing polities, factions within polities, or as integrative
institutions necessary for the maintenance of newly urban cultures (Izzet 2001).

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Other religious systems

Institutionally organized or structured religions coexisted with other forms in the
European Iron Age. Several scholars assert that shamanism, or shamanic-like rites
and rituals, continued along with other more structured religions, and recent years
have seen an increase in the study of such data. This is now fairly well accepted for
Scandinavia, where seidr, a shamanistic tradition practiced by women, was later
described textually as requiring a folding seat and carved staff, which are indeed
found in some protohistoric womens burials. Textual sources also reveal that seidr
was practiced by transgendered males, for whom the term ergi was reserved (Blain
and Wallis 2000) and for whom Odin, in his transvestite and seidr-practicing
incarnation (Hedeagar 1997; Tangherlini 1990), was patron (Solli 1997, 1999). They
are probably depicted on Iron Age picture stones from Sweden as ritual-performing
figures with normative male beards but womens clothing and gestures (Andreeff
2006). Shamanic beliefs also are indicated by textual fragments of ritual songs and
inscriptions on amulets with references to personal spirit guides (Shkala 1990; Strom
1990). In both Celtic and Germanic art styles, transformation motifs involving
animals and humans are common (Aldhouse-Green 2001b; Aldhouse-Green and
Aldhouse-Green 2005; Fitzpatrick 2007; Lindstrm and Kristoffersen 2001).
The study of druids also has seen renewed interest. Their formal priesthood
may have been more of a Roman ethnocentrism than an Iron Age reality, or perhaps
it was only in the late Iron Age context of conflict with Rome that druids became
highly organized and specialized, preceded by more part-time or casual practice
(Fitzpatrick 2007). Where druids and temples are attested, some scholars have a
harder time imagining a complimentary shamanistic practice, and the idea that these
systems could have coexisted among continental groups has been sharply critiqued
in some quarters. Despite this, shamanism among the Celts and Britons is now an
important topic of inquiry, addressing questions of whether freestanding shamans
practiced synchronically with more organized groups, or if druidic practice included
shamanistic trances, narcotic use, and possible creation of entoptic art (AldhouseGreen 2001b; Aldhouse-Green and Aldhouse-Green 2005; Creighton 1995; Green
1998c). Shamanism also may be reflected in the ubiquitous imagery of the space
where the bard finds himself before the event of the vision in Celtic myths
(Balinis teanu 2003, p. 74).
With the understanding that sacred activity was not always structured by a
religious hierarchy, archaeologists seek evidence for domestic rites and rituals in
community or household contexts. By studying the development of community
ritual, one can glean something of their social or political integration (Bradley 2003,
p. 12). Domestic architecture and associated features have been reexamined
(Fitzpatrick 1997; Oswald 1997; Stalbom 1997; Ullen 1994, 1996) for embedded
beliefs about deposition, space, direction, and time. The ceremonial functions of
hillforts are reflected in farmstead features that suggest feasting, and similarly
consistent structured depositionsABGs of birds and mammalsmust reflect a
domestic ritual context. The orientation of doors and village enclosure openings,
combined with the orientation of nearby burials, indicates that some patterns
apparently encode beliefs shared across broad areas (Fulford 2001; Oswald 1997).

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Recent studies in France (Verger 2000) show a similar pattern: in addition to clear
shrine structures normally studied in French sites, there are many indications of
ritual patterning in ordinary communities.
Bradley explains the ritualization of the domestic sphere within the bounds of
ordinary life as reflecting the fact that rituals grew to accompany important events
and emphasized key transactions in ancient social life (Bradley 2003, p. 20) such
as harvest or sharing food; they grew to have religious meanings encompassing
fertility and continuity but were placed in a public sphere and may have included
performances (Bauman 1986; Schechner 2002; Sedgwick and Parker 1995; Turner
1969, 1986).
In the past, the focus on formal processes and places caused researchers to
overlook alternative formats, domestic contexts, and seemingly utilitarian practices
that may conceal ritual meanings. Thus the organization of both more or less
structured religious practices has been studied through new analyses of built
environments, from homestead to temples, shrines, or ritual enclosures, to extensive
mound groups or cemeteries, to whole landscapes, in which ritual and other
elements are studied in an integrated manner.
The huge literature on Roman provincial religion is outside the scope of this article
but a few notes on early interactions are offered. Reflecting the hallmark of the later
Iron Agecolonial and imperial interactions between the Mediterranean and
Europesyncretism has been the focus of much recent writing (Haussler 2001;
Webster 1997), both as created by indigenous people and as used by Rome as a
strategy for integration through interpretatio, or the purposeful pairing of Roman
deities with local supernaturals (Webster 1995a, b). Earlier concepts of syncretism
that assumed a peaceful blending have been rejected, invigorated through study of
historic imperialism in which syncretism masks conflict or helps negotiate unequal
and unsatisfactory sociopolitical conditions (Webster 1996, 1997). Studied through
inscriptions and the iconography of statues, reliefs, and other religious art, syncretism
is seen primarily as an active process controlled by local people more than an
imposition by Rome, despite the existence of the interpretatio policy. Derks (1998)
suggests that while such processes may have played an integrative role in areas closer
to Roman heartlands, in outlying areas such as the northern reaches of the empire, it
may have created a culture of resistance rather than compliance. Romano-Celtic and
Romano-German traditions are further deconstructed by Haussler (2001), who
suggests that all cultic and ritual traditions within Roman Europe were the result of
centuries of amalgamation of various indigenous traditions, interwoven by long-term
contact, and Mediterranean ideas that were the culmination of a mixed culture that
incorporated traditions from all over the empire. Thus early provincial Latin
inscriptions and material culture, often used to interpret pre-Roman beliefs, may be
worthless for understanding anything except their actual cosmopolitan contexts.

Interaction theories
Warfare and conquest, as occurred during the Roman expansion, is one mode of
interaction between neighboring and distant peoples but not its only context. One of

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the most active areas of research, past, present, and probably future, relates to the
role of various interactions in the development of politically complex societies.
Why did Iron Age Europeans manifest as materially different than the Greek and
Roman state societies in terms of centralized leadership, while displaying evidence,
such as in mortuary practices, for elites who commanded substantial wealth and
influence in their communities? Were they indigenously complex or did they
become so through interaction with outside groups, or some combination of these
factors? Should such ideas, through postcolonial theory for example, be done away
with entirely? These questions have been examined in different ways and with
different means over the last 30 years.
As noted, the ways in which Iron Age people differed from neighboring empires
is in part explained through the heterarchy concept, which illuminates the ways in
which decentralized societies function in relation to rival states, and by corporate/
network theory, which might demonstrate how differences can be characterized
between the internal gestalt of Mediterranean groups on the network end versus
their more corporate counterparts elsewhere in Europe. Yet the clear interaction of
indigenous Europeans with other regions must have had impacts.
In recent years, the drivers of cultural change have been substantially retheorized
away from standard 20th century interaction theories. Core and periphery,
domination and resistance, the prestige-goods economy, and world systems theory,
popular throughout the 1970s and 1980s, continue to find utility but also have seen
substantial critique and are no longer the only perspectives. Many of their
underlying assumptions have been questioned and rejected, creating a new focus on
local developments, continuity, and the selective adoption of new ideas, even under
conditions of colonialism. This shift was ushered in together with the agency
concept, which has permitted archaeologists to theorize not only dominant groups
and empires but independent and/or smaller-scale polities, once seen only as
receptors of more advanced cultural traditions. Many studies focus on groups
(and individuals) within local European frameworks as vigorous actors in the
rejection, acquisition, or merging of cultural repertoires.
The earliest modern archaeological concepts of European interaction with distant
civilizations through trade, diffusion, and migration were those of Childe (1936,
1942). Even in the 1970s, many carryovers from earlier impressionistic studies were
still rife in the literature; for example, the concept of Hellenization, presumably
the process by which non-Greek peoples were made more or less Greek and
acculturated or assimilated into Greek culture and language (Hannestad 1993;
Momigliano 1975; Sherratt 1995, 1999 for reevaluations). For later periods it was
recast and promoted as Romanization in which a type of cultural imperialism, on top
of political imperialism, was assumed, where the adoption of all things Roman at
the expense of all things local was a given, and where the progress of imperialism
was considered a top-down process only (e.g., Fulford 1992).
The revisionist cutting edge of the 1970s and 1980s thus comprised the
application of processual concepts to these interactions. Beginning in the era of the
New Archaeology, many turned to the concept of the prestige-goods economy
(Blanton and Feinman [1984] and Earle [1987] in the general literature;
Frankenstein and Rowlands [1978], Haselgrove [1987], Hedeager [1987, 1992],

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Shennan [1982], Wells [1980a, b] for European Iron Age examples) to explain the
connections between interregional interaction, wealth, and power. Such models,
with their implicit oppositionscore/periphery and domination/resistance (Champion 1989)characterized the relationship between indigenous Iron Age Europeans
and the Greeks (Dietler 1989) and then Romans as a prestige-goods-dependent
economy (Cunliffe 1988; Frankenstein and Rowlands 1978; Haselgrove 1987;
Rowlands et al. 1987), placing first Hallstatt then La Te`ne groups in the position of
periphery, with their leaders reliant on imports to bolster their primitive or inchoate
political ambitions.
The eras typical economic model for the Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age
hypothesized the development of an administrative hierarchy to control production
of various commodities such as salt and metals (Alexander 1982) or to administer
trade and centralize distribution (Frankenstein and Rowlands 1978; Sherratt 1972, p.
535, Wells 1989, 1996a). In terms of interaction with the Romans, G. Woolf (1997,
p. 340) notes that the New Archaeology assumed Romes primary economic goal
was to reduce its own costs while increasing its revenue, an idea rooted in 20th
century capitalism rather than in the expansionist impulses of the ancient world. To
study this, archaeologists typically measured locally made artifacts against imports
from Italy.
Kipp and Schortman (1989, p. 379), using the example of RomanEuropean
interactions, suggested that the intrusion of a marketplace facilitates the consolidation of chiefly power and helps transform it into state power through the creation
of political economies of trade and the coercive force to protect it. The protection of
trade also enables rulers to assemble military forces that can then be used for other
purposes (Hodges 2000). This theory describes the trader initially as the servant or
messenger of an elite. While rare items may initially be controlled through interelite
trade, they often eventually can be bought and sold by anyone with money (Kipp
and Schortman 1989), changing the power of luxury imports to bestow elite status,
but opening the door for elites themselves to become risk-taking entrepreneurs in a
quest for personal wealth rather than prestige (Kipp and Schortman 1989, p. 375).
Such ideas helped build a political economy model that was applied liberally to Iron
Age groups throughout Europe.
G. Woolf (1997, p. 339) points out that like many modern proponents of
globalization, such theorists contended that an impoverished local culture was being
replaced by something new and improved. In Spain, for example, before the 1990s
the complex organization of a robust urbanized society was typically attributed only
to interaction with various entities such as Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans,
although upon examination, the data point to an earlier, already established tradition
(Parcero Oubina and Fernandez 2004).
In the great archaeological tradition of overly direct extradisciplinary pilfering,
much of this new theorizing came from an assumption (G. Woolf 1997) that modern
colonial processes could be used as analogs for those in the ancient world (e.g.,
Bartel 1980; Dyson 1985), and that when Rome began to intrude into neighboring
regions, the anthropologically described process of colonial acculturation was
occurring (Okun 1989). The horizon concept also was liberally, though tacitly,
applied through the notion of self-Romanization, in which local leaders sought out

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symbols of Roman life to better fit into and take advantage of the Roman hierarchy
(Millett 1990a, b). G. Woolf (1997) notes that these were vast improvements over
earlier ideas but still problematic, mainly due to their assumption, as with earlier
ideas of Hellenization and Romanization, that the era pitted one ethnic group against
another in a cultural conflict: Celts versus Greek or Romans, as if such nationalistic
concepts existed in the ancient world, which today most would hold as unlikely
(G. Woolf 1997, p. 340).
By initially placing barbarians in the role of passive prestige receptors, prestigegoods studies paved the way for the slightly later and highly popular incorporation
of world systems theory (e.g., Schneider 1977; Wallerstein 1974; for European Iron
Age examples, see Bilde and Engberg-Pedersen 1993; Cunliffe 1988; Gunder Frank
and Thompson 2006; Kristiansen 1994; Nash 1987; Wells 1996a). World systems
theory also initially placed barbarians in the periphery/dependency category
(Randsborg 1992) and soon became a primary explanatory model for the interaction
of Europeans with Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans. Early, literal applications and
the subsequent overuse of the concept were followed by more considered and
nuanced interpretations of this theory (Wells 2005). A look at the Greeks
themselves as peripheral to other world systems also has been offered (Morris
1996).
The use of world systems theory, core/periphery, and domination/resistance
models linking the social and political development of European society almost
exclusively to trading interactions has been extensively critiqued, in some cases
self-critiqued by those who had liberally applied them. However, the appearance of
exotic materials far from their origination points can be seen through other lenses. A
major development over the last 15 years has been an increasing incorporation of
perspectives once considered exclusively postmodernthe study of identity,
agency, ethnicity, and the local context and historical contingency of the
recordinto the study of interaction. This represents a substantial shift toward
convergence of scholarly traditions within Europe (Rowley-Conwy 2001) and some
earlier transatlantic divides, at least for North Americans working in Europe.
Alternatives to the prestige-goods model are found in arguments that goods and
raw materials flowing out of Europe and toward the Mediterranean (furs, amber,
metals, cloth, slaves) were as important for the status of Mediterranean elites as
those goods flowing to European leaders were to them. Several authors have argued
that trade in both directions was equal in volume and impact (Briggs 2003; Wells
1996b), especially furs, amber, and precious metals sought by Mediterraneans and
controlled by indigenous groups, e.g., the Tartessians in Spain (Gamito 2005).
Several authors have proposed that Europe was/is peripheral only in Roman eyes
(Sherratt 1993) and that the Celtic and Germanic spheres formed their own
economic cores (Boenke 2005; Briggs 2003; Gunder Frank and Thompson 2006),
which in turn interacted with a Mediterranean core, thus equalizing them in many
ways and explaining why continental Europeans might have been less concerned
with aping the Greeks and Romans and more likely to selectively borrow from
them. Studies at some oppida show that a large portion of trade was local rather than
long distance, even for elite-associated materials (Cumberpatch 1995a; Gebhard
1995; Gebhard et al. 2004; van den Broeke 1995). For France, Dietler (1997a, b)

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found that while major colonies had a large impact on their immediate regions,
many smaller Mediterranean trade enclaves had lesser impact and different sets of
interactions with locals, introducing the concept of commensality as an alternative
descriptor for the relationship between Iron Age communities and classical cultures
(Dietler 1996, 1999). Some indications of trade with Rome may not in fact represent
interaction at all. The appearance of Roman ornaments in areas later associated with
the Balts, typically purported to show local dependence on foreign prestige items,
has been argued convincingly (Sidrys 2001) as reflecting payments by more
southerly barbarians to those in the north for cheap raw amber materials that were
then fashioned by middlemen into trade goods bound for the Roman market.
One continually evolving and expanding theme is how, in addition to economic
exchanges, variously structured interactions impact not only one but all interacting
groups. Many have introduced evidence that Mediterranean culture was substantially or equally impacted by the cultures of Celts, Celtiberians, Germans, and
Britons. Following a trend seen in general archaeological theory (e.g., Lightfoot and
Martinez 1995; Schortman and Urban 1992), Romans were especially influenced by
outsiders at frontier locations such as trade or military outposts far away from core
regions (Cabrera 1998; Carroll 2001; Freeman 1993; Kurchin 1995; McCarthy
2005; Millett 1990a, b), since their everyday needs (including sexual encounters)
would have been drawn from local contexts (Allison 2006); Wells (2005) review
article addresses this on the Roman Danube frontier. That the individual identities of
Roman soldiers, drawn from all over the empire, from Scotland to Syria, appear to
have often been in contrast to their identities as state representatives is a condition
recently explicated through archaeology and inscriptions (Hope 2003). This
rethinking also has led, in recent years, to a reassessment of the nature of preRoman Italy, indicating that extant groups of the Italian peninsula were already
highly complex and engaged in economic exchanges with northern Europe by the
late Bronze Age. When in the Iron Age the Roman state began to rise, it was in the
context of many already complex urban societies such as the city-states of Etruria
(Biette Sestieri 1997).
Finally, some have proposed that imperial culture not only eventually subsumed
pre-Roman provincial cultures but earlier Roman culture itself (G. Woolf 1997).
Although the spread of Roman culture involved conquest, it also involved
hegemony, leading to a pan-imperial culture that was diverse over its vast extent,
rather than the subjugation of one ethnic group or national community to that of
another (G. Woolf 1997, p. 341). As the empire encompassed more distant exotic
places and ever more foreign ideas, an emergent synthetic tradition spread backward
over the empire to its core, altering or eradicating what earlier Romans would have
recognized as their own traditions. Imperial Rome is here seen as a system of
structured differences varyingly based on region, class, social status, age, and
gender (G. Woolf 1997, p. 341).
Roman impact is not the only interaction being reassessed. Small (1999) points to
unresolved issues of integrating textual and archaeological data among classicists as
the primary obstacle to a better understanding of earlier Greek and Phoenician
interactions in Europe. For Spain, Aubet et al. (1996) have argued that many
communities failed to be integrated into the systems of eastern Mediterranean

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colonizers, sometimes resisting, sometimes simply disregarding them. New

evidence points to high levels of internal trade between local Iron Age groups on
Sicily, who display relatively light influences from neighboring Greek colonies, in
what is usually considered to be a period where external trade contacts and colonial
Greek impacts were overwhelmingly significant to indigenous people (Kolb and
Speakman 2005; Leighton 2005). Similarly, numerous new studies describe
evidence that the Greeks did not dominate local populations (Burgers 2005) but
established egalitarian relations with locals (Fitzjohn 2007); some have discussed
whether colonists were more influenced by their host cultures than by their own
homelands (De Angelis 2003; Hall 2004). Babic (2002) has argued that in some
contexts, what have been read as cores of emerging barbarian elites may not be
cores or elites at all. Greek wealth or prestige objects appearing in Balkan princely
graves of the early Iron Age may not denote particularly high status for those buried
with them; they have a fairly broad distribution and may represent a more horizontal
society responding more uniformly through general contact rather than special elite
control of trade or objects of power (Babic 2002, p. 81). Whether such objects were
the result of gift exchanges or represent the agency of acquisitive and power-seeking
individuals within the Balkan communities is still a topic for research (Babic 2002,
p. 83).
The reexamination of trading impacts also has led to a reassessment of slavery in
Iron Age Europe. Several authors examine how indigenous concepts of unfreedom,
which differed substantially from Roman traditions, were transformed through
intercultural contact that drew entrepreneurial Celtic groups into a slave trade with
different notions of dominant/subordinate social relations (Taylor 2001). Nash
Briggs (2003) discusses the impact of slaves as contributors to domestic economies,
especially those of elite households. Additionally, recent work has examined the
material culture and iconography of enslavement and its use in conveying political
and social agendas (Aldhouse-Green 2004b, 2005).

Internal models of cultural change

Instead of attributing most or all cultural change to external contact, some authors
apply agency, practice, and structuration concepts to situate forces of change in the
competing internal agendas of various groups, classes, and factions within society
through creeping or sudden shifts, which are then quickly normalized over
generations into new conventions. This stems from what some see as a correction of
the tendency to reduce social and political development following intercultural
interactions to dependency models.
While Bourdieu (1977) introduced the idea of the agent, the roles of agency,
identity, ethnicity, and the shared nature of meaning in cultural production was
further developed by Giddens (1979, 1984) through structuration theory, in which
he unified the concepts of agency and structure. These ideas were first suggested as
relevant to anthropology and archaeology by Ortner (1984), who saw more than a
catch-phrase in the idea of duality of structure and the perspective that both
societal rules (structure) and human practices (agency) form the context for human

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cultures. The original idea of practice and structure within communities has more
recently been theorized across communities (sterlund and Carlile 2005).
Practice and structuration theories are useful for describing how individuals
shape, and are shaped by, the social worlds they inhabit through a constant recursive
process involving daily life, materiality, and meaning. Agency theory considers the
role of groups (or individuals) who use whatever means they might have to take
actions that influence, provoke, or initiate social change. It thus removes the
assumption that barbarians were passive receptors of a superior Greek or Roman
culture. Instead, as active agents they are now often viewed as having managed
the penetration of people and ideas from other contexts. Recent work on interaction
is based on the realization that individuals display multifaceted identities, each
expressed in different daily contexts, that people and groups can be culturally
ambiguous, and that there can be selective or balanced interactions.
Another inroad to understanding substantive changes in group agency and internal
change and conflict over time has been the incorporation of space and place into both
practice and structuration theories, an approach that originated in the work of
Swedish geographer Hagerstrand (1982, 1985) and was disseminated by Pred (1984,
1986). This work effectively ties the concepts of what archaeologists confront as
artifacts, features, sites, and landscapes to sociological theories of materiality and
meaning. Similarly, changes in landscape use and the maintenance, establishment, or
abandonment of things, places, and other archaeologically observable phenomena
can be interpreted by archaeologists through practice and structuration theory
(Bender 2002; Derks 1999; Gerritsen 2003; Thurston 1999, 2001). Applied to the
Iron Age, this produces a more sophisticated view of how and why people might
incorporate foreign categories of both ideational and material things into their daily
livessome utilitarian, some social or political. The popularity of deconstructing
dependence and theorizing selective adoption and transformation of Mediterranean
culture led to studies indicating that even in terms of style, outside influence was
sometimes minimal (Dietler 1995b; Randsborg 1992, p. 17) and has been
overinterpreted by certain classicists and those using their paradigms.
In the context of interaction between two very different groups, for example, La
Te`ne peoples and Romans, there are many such markers to observe and interpret.
While cultural meaning is impressed onto artifacts and features, these can be
couched within the study of changing site use and shifting landscapes and compared
against differing sociopolitical regimes over time. This provides a way for highly
intangible elements to be linked to the material record: through peoples interactions
with other people and material things, some domains become institutionalized while
others become fluid. Material culture may reflect some of these shifts.
The role of artifacts, imbued with important symbolism and sometimes power, has
recently been explored in this context (Aldhouse-Green 1998b; Gosden 2005).
Objects, and whole classes of objects, can be monitored through time as proxies for
change in the power of particular iconographies and styles or for continuities from
times past, and then they can be interpreted within local and regional contexts, both for
their own messages and the practices, institutions, and belief systems they represent.
Recent studies assert that material evidence tells us there were periods when Iron
Age groups were remarkably declarative of their own traditions, even during

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periods of intense interactions (Morris 2003; Morris et al. 2002). Wells, who earlier
focused on prestige goods and world systems, has been prolific on this subject
(Wells 1998, 2001). Drawing on the concepts of tribalization (Ferguson and
Whitehead 1992) and agency, he has pointed to the use of material culture as a
proxy for the study of interactions. He suggests that social and political stratification
may have been the result of interaction in the tribal zone (Ferguson and
Whitehead 1992) and the propulsion of weak local elites into positions of more
centralized power through the necessity of dealing with entities like Rome.
Similarly, Roymans models the development of Batavian identity as significantly a
product of interaction with Rome (Roymans 2004). This dovetails with earlier
resistance models from anthropology and other social sciences (Colburn 1989;
Comaroff 1985; Okihiro 1986; Scott 1985, 1990) and its incorporation into
archaeological theory (e.g., Miller et al. 1989).

Identity, ethnicity, and socially constructed affiliative groups

If we accept that indigenous Europeans were not completely unequal partners in
interaction, who accommodated change and accepted the new in relative proportions according to need, interest, or opportunity while also maintaining their own
traditions, we immediately face issues of identity and ethnicity. Determining the
impact of interactions with other peoples, states, and empires depends on
investigating indigenous identity and the archaeological data that may mark it.
Archaeological studies of identity and ethnicity were first attempted by 19th- and
early-20th-century scholars with erroneous and sometimes disastrous results. False
assumptions about the nature of how ethnicity is materially expressed were
combined with nationalist and racialist ideologies that hypothesized a variety of
ancestral European homelands or hearths. These ideologies, and the archaeology
that supported them, found full expression under fascism and communism, a subject
explored in recent publications (Arnold 1990, 2006; Arnold and Hassman 1995;
Galaty and Watkinson 2004; Kohl 1998a; Milisauskas 1990, 1997a).
In the 1960s, debates on ethnicity within cultural anthropology influenced many
archaeological frameworks. Out of these perspectives, the paradigm most attractive
to Iron Age scholars was Barths (1969) widely disseminated approach, which
viewed ethnic groups as evolving in relative isolation, stressed differences, and
incorporated expectations that such isolation would produce distinct groups of traits.
Barth, in his study of modern human communities, referred to things like
mythology, kinship, dress, music, and foodways; archaeologists translated this into
mortuary customs, house plans, and the form and decoration of artifacts, expecting
each group to look like a well-defined trait package. Yet among ethnographers, this
approach was challenged soon after it was proposed (Cohen 1974, 1978; Epstein
1978) and it continues to attract criticism (Banks 1996, pp. 1416; Cohen 1994a, b,
p. 120; Eriksen 2002, p. 79).
Despite the critiques of Barths isolationist approach as a naive theory of
ethnicity, most archaeologists working in Iron Age, Germanic, or Celtic studies
ignored or were ignorant of both the critique and debate. Barths ideas soon were

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used to account for or explain stylistic differences or sharing. When an art style was
shared, it was an ethnic trait and pointed to an ethnic group; when it differed it was
an ethnic boundary.
While Barths model was undergoing critique among ethnographers, Hodder
(1977, 1978, 1979) was carrying out and publishing the results of his ethnoarchaeological work in the Baringo district of western Kenya, where he studied the use of
material culture among the Tugen, Njemps, and Pokot. Hodder found that there was
little correspondence between language, religion, ethnicity, and material culture.
Within societies, the patterning of artistic motifs or decorative patterns, or even
utilitarian artifact types, is equally likely to represent the communication of internal
differences in the status, age, and gender as any other affiliation. Similarities that
would typically be interpreted archaeologically as clear ethnic markers were equally
or more likely to mark trade, interaction, emulation, or even aesthetic preferences.
These ideas formed a main tenet of Hodders contextual archaeology (Hodder 1977,
1978, 1979, 1982, 1989, 1990; e.g., Kimes et al. 1983) and have been valuable in the
study of many regions (e.g., Madsen and Simms 1998; Stone 2003; Thackeray
1989). They are particularly pertinent to Iron Age studies where there are many
questions about the relatedness of indigenous groups and their interactions with
each other and outsiders.
This work grew parallel to the New Archaeology of the 1970s and 1980s, which
deemed it impossible or unnecessary to seek archaeological evidence for selfdesignated categories like ethnicity and identity (although see Schmidt [1983] and
Schortman [1989] for exceptions). Americans working in Europe remained
concerned with indicators of ecological, economic, and political organization and
change. In Europe, where the new paradigm originated, the archaeological study of
ethnic and other kinds of identity was already being explored in Shennans 1989
edited volume, Archaeological Approaches to Cultural Identity (Shennan 1989) that
included a global array of authors but few North Americans. Approaching issues of
identity theoretically and methodologically, the contributors raised new specters:
what constitutes evidence? Is archaeology any more reliable than indigenous myths?
How can we dodge the dangerous tendency to reconstruct the past in our own
image? These ideas that so irritated American scholars at the time (e.g., Redman
1991; Watson 1990, 1991) generated reviews of major European works that took
either the irate tack or an utterly dismissive approach (e.g., Fotiadis 1998) for many
years. This can be compared with reviews of such works by Europeanists in
America, such as Milisauskas (1998), or Wells (1997), who delivered both critique
and praise in a serious manner (but see Kohl [1998b] for a thoughtful review from a
non-Europeanist). Times have changed: it is no understatement to say that identity
and ethnicity have been topics of much interest to North American archaeologists
over the last decade (Gleason 1983), and studies around the identity and ethnicity of
groups, factions, and even individuals are now fashionable.
For Iron Age Europe, the focus on local and subregional traditions has enlivened
the study of ethnicity and cultural identity within this broadly interacting region.
Ethnicity is so apparent (although often misinterpreted) in Roman textual records
that it cannot be ignored. As noted, the long-enshrined notion of Romanization has
largely been expunged, and more time is dedicated to understanding continuity from

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pre-Roman into colonial times as well as multiethnic amalgams of the Roman era.
In the 1990s, self-Romanization was a popular incorporation of the horizon or
interaction sphere model, yet it also has been questioned; it assumes that Iron Age
elites valued [glory] mainly for its convertibility into political success with its
consequent material rewards (G. Woolf 1997, p. 340), something that is highly
doubtful in light of current understanding of Iron Age warrior ideologies.
While ethnic identity continues to articulate with the research of many scholars,
social identities within interacting regions also has been an active area. Some of
these comprise gender studies. The hierarchies once supposed to have controlled
Europe were almost exclusively male; these have undergone some revision to
include textual suggestions of matriliny or matrifocal practices in some groups and
the contributions of ordinary and elite women to European societies. Other
important work on identity includes the construction of male gender identities,
alternative genders, age and youth, and the unfree. If the ethnographic literature is to
be a guideline, these groups, long-absent from consideration of the past (Scott
1997), formed powerful blocs as senior sociopolitical arbiters or authorities and as a
huge and well-exploited junior labor force that was also the target of enculturation
and the vehicle of structuration. Finally, we find several new studies of the roles of
the unfree in economic, social, and religious life.
Ethnicity
The three vast cultural groupings long assumed by traditional Iron Age archaeologies, i.e., the Germans, the Celts, and the Romans, were long viewed as coherent
ethnic groups. While the study of Germanic ethnicity was long deemphasized
following World War II, the debate over Celtic identity has been heated. For the
large, continuous areas that Celts were traditionally presumed to have inhabited,
Hodders Baringo studies on the linkages between material culture, ethnicity,
religion, and language would eventually have a tremendous impact. Celtic people
were believed to have originally stretched over much of the continent, while the
Romans were understood to have incorporated much of this Celtdom by the end of
the 1st century A.D.
The Romans were studied through a wealth of texts and the modern acceptance
of ancient propaganda on what it meant to be Roman. It took a long time for
Romanists and Celticists to consider that empires are multiethnic by nature and that
antique authors were subject to historiographic agendas. Today, many classical
archaeologists, philologists, and historians have overcome this deficit, make good
use of the social science literature, and are likely to review archaeological data
separately from textual sources.
On the other hand, the historic and archaeological records of the Iron Age also
were liberally infused with the mythos and mystique of the Celts, built up over
centuries of romanticism and tinged with politics that introduced passionate
emotions over the Celtic consciousness. Both scholars and the public have
contributed to what has been described as Celtomania (Collis 1997a, p. 196;
Pereira-Gonzalez 1999; Sims-Williams 1998), a potent combination deeply
ingrained and perhaps reified to some extent among many Celticists. As opposed

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to the imperial Romans, who are a dead historical entity by almost any stretch,
the history and prehistory of anyone called Celtic has relevance for many living
Celtic-speaking people or those with Celtic heritage. As has been long debated and
understood, the use, misuse, and manipulation of prehistory by any and all parties,
and the existence of multiple alternative pasts, has tremendous implications for
events and conditions in the present.
In a worldview that was building accretionally throughout the 20th century, by
the mid-1980s there was a general Celticist consensus about a pan-European Celtic
culture that had once dominated Europe (e.g., Ellis 1990). Given the changing
archaeological paradigms then emerging, there was soon a backlash. Partly an
outgrowth of the critique of Celtic identity issues in the disciplinary debates of
literature and history (e.g., Lloyd 1985; Witoczek 2002), it began as a growing
doubt as to whether the Hallstatt horizon, or the later seemingly more distinctly
Celtic La Te`ne phase, actually represented people with shared ethnicity, and if so,
whether that ethnicity was one and the same as the Celtic ethnicity described by the
Greeks and Romans. Additionally, if there had been such a thing as Celts in the preRoman era, was an entity that defined itself as Celtic primarily limited to Gaul, parts
of Iberia, and other regions with which Caesar was familiar? Perhaps the shared
styles, aspects of religious beliefs, and even the Celtic languages that were clearly
widespread were more akin to the conditions around Lake Baringo (Hodder 1977)
than representative of a unitary ethnic identity.
A number of archaeologists began to question Celticity altogether (Champion
1987; Hill 1989; Merriman 1987), proposing that the Greek term Keltoi was merely
an ancient ethnocentrism that describes many different non-Greek and non-Roman
groups under one erroneous rubric. Were the literate Greeks, and later Romans,
simply labeling as the other all Europeans beyond the Mediterranean littoral?
Similarly, in describing their societies, did they do so only within the context of
their own familiar worlds (Champion 1985; Dunham 1989, 1995; Gwilt 1996)?
Even more significantly, archaeologists asked if Celtic style and other supposed
unitary traits really were all that similar over large regions (Parzinger 1995). The
famous Gundestrup cauldron, a Celtic artifact found in Germanic Denmark, has
graced the covers and pages of endless books on Celts. It was once believed to have
shown pre-Roman Celtic deities (Green 1995b, p. 468) but has recently been
reinterpreted as an import of Thracian or even South Asian manufacture (Bergquist
and Taylor 1987; Kaul et al. 1991; Taylor 1992). Some specific stylistic motifs
associated with La Te`ne Celts are shared by Germanic groups of the same era who
have never been considered Celtic (Hulthen 1991). Dietler (1997b), in his summary
of Mediterranean interactions with southern France, noted that this region is
recognizably neither Hallstatt nor La Te`ne during those respective eras.
Archaeologists in Europe had long maintained that there were local variants of
Iron Age material culture: the Villanovan culture of central and northern Italy, the
Castro culture on the Iberian peninsula, the Billendorf, Milograd, and Pomeranian
cultures in eastern Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Ukraine, and
on ad infinitum (Fig. 4). Previously, most of these were considered to be small-scale
packages within the greater trait package imagined as Celtic. Revisionists assert that
a reexamination of material culture in light of new ideas on ethnicity might indicate

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that previous lumping could benefit from some splitting both temporally and
spatially, proposing that there are differences between people who share a group of
related languages, people who share material culture, and people who self-identify
as an ethnic group with an acknowledged shared history, origin, or traditions.
The discussion of these concerns opened a floodgate of critique. First was the
enormous geographic extent of the traditional Celtic culture area, which stretches
from northwestern Britain and the Atlantic facade through eastern Europe to
Turkey, where in Galatia migrant Gauls did indeed settle in historic times. In the
absence of a Celtic empire, which certainly did not exist, how could such distant
regions, over many centuries, share more than the vaguest of cultural connections,
perhaps only remnants of shared heritage rather than a unified culture? Or, could
Iron Age Europeans, like modern Arabic speakers across the Islamic world or
Spanish speakers in the Old and New Worlds, have shared a language and possibly a
religion for historic reasons yet had different ethnicities, traditions, and local social
and political organization?
As the debate progressed, some more fully embraced the critique (Hill and
Cumberpatch 1995) and rejected the entire idea of Celticity, seeking to embed local
archaeology within local contexts, leaving aside attempts to force all interpretations
of material culture, for example, at the British hillfort, into a mold of Celtic social
structure cobbled together from various sources. Other scholars, while acknowledging difference, still proposed that even in Britain, where Celts were never
described in antiquity, there was some level of conscious Celticity, perhaps as an
effect sometimes referred to as cumulative Celticity (Hawkes 1973) that supposes
an epiphenomenal ethnicity developing in later times rather than a primordial
ethnicity held over from earlier times. Karl (2008) has advised that those more
separatist among Iron Age archaeologists are too reactionary and should step
back from an utter rejection of a Celtic culture in Britain, at least at some level.
Many Celticist archaeologists also now recognize that ethnic boundaries are
fluid, blurred and mutable; language cannot be used to define populations with any
precision; specific artifacts [sic] and settlement types can spread through channels
other than those of their use by ethnically definable groups (Green 1995a, p. 6).
The complexity of Celtic ethnic identity has been well surveyed (Morse 1996).
Taking the broadest possible definition of ethnicity, as it is studied among
contemporary people, Megaw and Megaw state (1994) that the mention of ethnic or
political entities by classical authors must have some basis in reality, and they
examine ethnographic manifestations of ethnicity to assess how prehistoric
identities might be understood. They point out a distinction (Megaw and Megaw
1994) between earlier attempts at analyzing the traits associated with Celtic art and
a new direction of reading it for cultural content. They hope that a clearer
understanding of who the Celts were can be obtained by ceasing to continually
compare La Te`ne artifacts with classical material culture to assess degree of
influence, and by introducing ethnographic analogies that illuminate the various
ways that identity and ethnicity manifest within cultures.
Another argument leaves the ethnicity of people aside but posits a clearly Celtic
system of sociopolitical structure that can be studied (Pittock 1999). Similarly, Karl
(2004b, 2005b, 2006) argues against Celtoskepticism along these lines, stating

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that too much of political organization and law is shared in common across Iron Age
Europe to be coincidental; this of course can be explained by other than ethnicity,
since similar structures also are shared by Germanic-speaking peoples. One can
argue that this sociopolitical structure exists but is better defined as an Iron Age
structure since it transcends anything narrowly called Celtic (Thurston 2009). Karl
(2005a) also has posited that the widespread elite practice of exchanging their
children and youths may account for similarities in material culture and social
institutions across large, continuous regions.
Others (Megaw 2005; Megaw and Megaw 1994, 1995a, b, 1996, 1997, 1998,
1999) have argued vigorously against what they see as political aspects of an antiCelticity stance, suggesting that English archaeologists are trying to deny and
undermine the identity of modern indigenous people oppressed by English
conquests of Ireland, Wales, and Scotland and to support the suppression of Celtic
minorities in modern Spain and France.
While some view the Celtic debate as a dull squabble among the English and their
neighbors, it in fact reflects an important general question in archaeology of whether
archaeologists continue to misuse various concepts of ethnic identity and whether the
archaeological culture is still a viable concept. Kohl (1998b) questions the utility
of such debates. Although he pioneered the concept of critical theory in archaeology,
he notes that it does not take the archaeologist very far in terms of trying to make
sense of moot and mute material remains and that the emphasis on the imperfect
correlation between identity and material culture does not lead us out of the
interpretive quandary occasioned by this more sophisticated perspective on
ethnicity (Kohl 1998b, p. 173). Due to these and other considerations, many
scholars now make a clear distinction between their discussions of Celtic language
speakers, Celtic materiality, or references to Celtic or other ethnic identities (Koch
2007).
For reasons other than the ethnographically visible issues raised by Baringo, the
issue of whether Iron Age Germanic groups had ever formed a united, selfconscious ethnicity and what that might have comprised had already been explored
and rejected due to the actions taken by the Nazis based on the scholarly findings
of Himmlers Ahnenerbe that linked with the assertions of Kossinna and his peers
(Gamble 2000; Harke 1992, 2000, p. 378). This resulted in a reluctance by most
German archaeologists to deal with the topic at all. Much was published on social
analyses of grave goods, mortuary contexts, and the like, but the goods were
interpreted primarily as marking individual or family social status or wealth and
economic power (Harke 2000). Not until very recently has this begun to change;
German archaeologists (e.g., Burmeister 2000a, b; Siegmund 1999, 2000) have
recently begun to return to the study of regional groups and migration and are
proposing interpretive approaches involving social factors such as kinship, ritual,
and gender in the political process rather than descriptive or quantitative tracts on
artifact types or skeletal material (Harke 2000). Harke (2000, p. 376) suggests that
this was influenced by the work of colleagues in Scandinavia. Scandinavians were
less inhibited by recent European history and conceptualized the Germanic tribes as
something like segmented lineages, where each group saw itself as distinct, but
when threatened by outsiders could quickly link up with others deemed closest to

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them. When threatened by truly alien elements such as the Romans, they were
hypothesized as able to use a segmentary-like system to overcome almost any
internal divisions and unite against common enemies for short time periods. The
question of how and why this worked was approached more through the paradigm
of structural Marxism (Hedeager 1992) than what was developing in Britain as the
contextual archaeology of Hodder.
The archaeology of ethnicity in areas later inhabited by the Slavs and Balts was
somewhat impacted by the issues the Germans have grappled with; they were more
affected by the long reign of communism in the relevant regions, first by preventing
intellectual cross-fertilization between scholars of different regions and, second, by
the communist imposition of guidelines for what constituted proper socialist
interpretations. Despite almost superhuman efforts by some remarkable scholars to
overcome the system, the creation of a hierarchic bureaucratic structure within
universities and museums effectively suppressed ideas that were contra these
agendas or that simply did not interest or convince those in power (Galaty and
Watkinson 2004; Milisauskas 1986, 1990, 1997a, b).
In eastern Europe, some national schools of archaeology are still debating how one
can clearly and reliably trace modern ethnicity to Iron Age people through direct use
of classical sources like Strabo (e.g., Serb to Illyrian [Vasic 2004]) through material
culture, a practice punctuated by sporadic critiques (e.g., Oana-Marghitu 2003 on
Romanian archaeology). In the Baltic region, much work is critical or revisionist of
similar earlier research traditions (Erdosi 2002; Ilves 2004; Vedru 2004), perhaps due
to their close ties with many theoretically progressive Scandinavian researchers. As
noted previously, the Iron Age, as constructed by scholars in modern Slavic regions,
was initially almost entirely constructed from 19th century linguistic works that
postulated an Iron Age proto-Slavic culture based on place names, Slavic vocabulary,
and (mis)reading of classical authors. Some contemporary linguists (e.g., Matasovic
2005) are still concerned with proving when such languages, and thus cultures, came
into existence in the region. Much Iron Age archaeology from regions that were to
become Slavic in the first millennium A.D. are characterized as prehistoric Slav, and
field data and linguistic assertions must be carefully teased apart.
Again, these seemingly local problems tie in to discussions on the role of the
public in archaeological debates as an undeniable stakeholder in various visions of
the past (Bender 1998). For this large and diverse group, few ideas stemming from
these debates have penetrated or they have made little impact except to provoke a
dismissive stance from self-styled amateur historians and antiquarians, Celtomaniacs, and neopagans that most Iron Age researchers have encountered. The impact
of traditional or fantastic interpretations and the lack of revision in the presentation
of the Iron Age to the public was the subject of Piccinis (1996) critique of the
television and film industry. We may never overcome this tradition; it has already
been with us for several centuries and may outlive us.
Recent insights on ethnicity and identity
Neither critique of naive ethnic constructions nor some adherence to older models
has led to stagnation in the area of ethnicity and identity studies, and authors

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continue to approach the topic from various perspectives (Jones 1999). One of the
most influential works, in both Europe and elsewhere, has been Jones (1997) The
Archaeology of Ethnicity, which rejects both the characterization of ethnicity as too
complex to study and the idea of ethnicity as merely a functionalist category marked
by a set of objects or symbols. Acknowledging that ethnicity is a highly contingent
phenomenon in which multiple identities overlap, within the context of colonial
encounter between Britain and Rome, Jones advocates study of specific types of
locales, characterizing different social, religious, political, and economic groups,
further analyzed in terms of public and private spheres of activity. The study
demonstrates that Roman culture was differentially adopted and that people
expressed British or Roman identity differently in different contexts.
Along these lines, Siegmund (1999, 2000) asserts that artifacts are the wrong, or
at least not the best, unit of analysis for determining ethnic identity in mortuary
contexts. He instead shifts study to an entire cemetery as a unit of analysis, focusing
on burial ritual as a whole rather than on objects as offerings. Diepeveen-Jansen
(2001) has asserted that unlike most earlier interpretations, late Hallstatt and early
La Te`ne rich burials do not reflect a culturally determined social structure that can
be interpreted for elite roles and relationships; rather they reflect peoples use of
objects to make territorial statements during periods of social transformation. Other
important reconsiderations of the relationship between material culture and identity
are found for Iberia (Daz-Andreu 1998; Daz-Andreu and Tortosa 1999) where, in
revision of or addenda to traditional Spanish culture-historic traditions, attempts are
being made to create a more sophisticated understanding of the links between the
style and decoration of artifacts, cultural identity, and other social categories such as
gender, age, and class.
Recent discussions of ethnicity are not limited to only pre-Roman identity but to
the period of Roman preconquest interaction (e.g., Hingley 1999; Scott and Webster
2003). Wells (1988, 1995) adopts Hodders notion of material culture as an active
bearer of identity and ethnicity, especially the critique of overly simplistic attempts
to link peoples or cultures to distributions of certain classes of archaeological
materials. Especially well suited to the debate over classical descriptions of
barbarian peoples and the material record, this approach is a complement to rather
than a replacement for more pragmatic economic or political studies of interaction.
Wells (1999) also considers local reactions, in both Celtic and Germanic areas, to
the introduction of Roman overlordship. He sees a strengthening of local identities
in the face of Roman hegemony, measured by increasingly marked indigenous
burial customs and continued use of pre-Roman material culture, especially in times
of relative hostility between indigenous Europe and Rome. In contrast to some
classes of Roman material that were quickly integrated into local assemblages, other
forms are accepted into local repertoire but transformed into distinctly barbarian
interpretations.
Similarly, in Mediterranean France, locals were very slow to adopt Roman
culture (Dietler 1997b) and were resistant even after conquest. As they reconsider
the idea of Romanization across the Romano-Celtic world (Hingley 1999; Webster
1995b, 1997), many scholars have noted that acculturation is often uneven;
ethnographically, syncretic art and formal norms are as likely to represent resistance

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as assimilation. Carroll (2001) discusses Roman assimilation of the Germans,

especially the differential adoption of Roman traditions. Another monumental study
of this topic was undertaken by Woolf (1998), who rejects not only the idea of
Romanization but also of resistance, since it incorporates what he sees as flawed
concepts of domination and dependency (Woolf 1998, p. 22). Instead, Woolf opts
for a more contextualized understanding of how aspects of Roman traditions were
absorbed and used for local purposes and how they functioned in society. People
may have been largely unaware of any insidious Roman influences penetrating their
local cultures, and later people merely accepted hybrid traditions as their own
known universe (Woolf 1998, p. 20).
The turn from generalizing social theories toward historicity and an explicit focus
on embedding data within regional or even local traditions has led to many new
ideas on other kinds of culturally constructed identities that I summarize briefly
below. Many are relatively new or emergent areas. Had this review been written a
decade ago, interest in such ideas would have been limited. This is no longer the
case.
Embodiment
As Joyce (2005) has recently pointed out, The bodyas metaphor for society, as
instrument of lived experience, and as surface of inscriptionhas come to occupy a
central place in contemporary social theory and within archaeology. In one sense,
embodied archaeology seeks to convey the lived experience of past people in a way
that is not imbued with presentist views; in another sense, it attempts to discuss
ancient multivocality and its correlates in a heterogeneous past. Different ways of
adorning, mutilating, presenting, and experiencing the body indicate membership in
culturally constructed categories of many types, all of which can change through time.
Embodiment approaches are much inspired by anthropological and sociological
thought. Turner (1984) described human society as somatic; the body is discussed
as a nexus of practices surrounding religion, virtue, comfort, and gender, which
Turner approaches in part through interpreting iconographic and monumental
images of the body in various eras. This has been furthered by many authors,
notably Shilling (1993) who discusses the socially constructed body in various
ways: the body as physical capital through its ability to work or labor, the body as a
locus for and expression of social inequality, and its central role in the mannerisms
of self-identity and the traditions surrounding death.
Embodiment has found utility in the archaeological study of gender, which has
moved beyond the original issue of reintroducing women into the human past (Gero
and Conkey 1991; Wright 1996) and is now utilizing anthropological advances (e.g.,
Moore 1994) that include the cultural construction of both femininity and
masculinity, gender ambiguity, and homosexuality (e.g., Dowson 2000; Hamilakis
et al. 2002), all in turn shaped by other socially constructed categories: ethnicity,
class, religion. Influence also has come from visual studies, such as work by Berger
(1980, 1981, 1982, 1990, 1999), who is concerned with ways of telling and
ways of seeing that transcend the external and aim for immersion in the daily
lived experience of the oppressed (Dyer 2001, p. xi).

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Colonial interactions have been studied through the perspective of embodiment,

seen archaeologically in the way people publicly presented themselves, reflected by
changes in the cultural practices surrounding the body. Body beliefs are often
culture bound, and their change or persistence can be signs of other processes. The
elaboration of the flesh by Iron Age Europeans was once attested solely through
classical textual references but is now being investigated archaeologically. Birkhan
(2007b) has attempted to reconcile the overused textual record with archaeological
data on body art. Carr (2005) examines material evidence for body painting and
tattooing as a multifaceted practice that encompassed gender, identity, and ethnicity.
Olivier (1999) has taken an embodied approach to Hallstatt burial mounds,
analyzing them as a series of time-embedded events experienced by the deceased
and the living. This approach also has been used in Scandinavia (Oestigaard 1999;
Oestigaard and Goldhahn 2006), where burial within an urn or a mound, usually
considered as only a receptacle, might have symbolized a whole sequence of
embodied events representing the personhood of the deceased that may have been
interlocked in the minds of the peers who carried out their mortuary treatment.
Hill (1997) investigates the Romanization of the body through the incorporation
of a foreign hygiene and toilet ritual into British life and the institutionalization of
Roman ways of presenting the self, not only among some elite group but across a
wide spectrum of social classes and contexts. This subtle change in practice was
enabled by Roman imperialism and (recursively) further enabled changes in other
aspects of social structure. This was accomplished through a complex mixture of
imperial cultural hegemony, the impact of newly available objects that materialized
institutions of Roman life, and the personal motives of many individual agents who,
en masse, shifted social reproduction significantly. This subject is the topic of
Eckhardt and Crummys (2006) examination of Romano-British toiletry artifacts in
the Roman tradition, yet unique to Britain, as evidence of a syncretic embodied
identity not entirely Roman yet substantially different than the indigenous.
Gender
One area producing a large body of new work on Iron Age Europe has been gender
archaeology. The study of gender in the European Iron Age has seen contributions
that encompass many standard and new topics and debates. Some authors continue
with traditional areas of study, such as grave offerings, to examine both the status
and the power of prehistoric women, occasionally to reassess their everyday roles
(Bietti Sestieri 1992; Srensen 1987; Whitehouse 1998). Derks (1993, 1997)
examines both gender and age as social structuring principles in cemetery
populations; others (Gebuhr 1997) have compared similar mortuary evidence with
Roman texts such as that of Tacitus. Allinger (2007) examines Celtic symbolic
systems for evidence of gendered iconography, while for broader reaches of
northwestern Europe, Aldhouse-Green (2004a) addresses symbolic animal iconography and its relation to various kinds of identity, including male and female gender,
in indigenous pre-Roman and Roman contexts.
Female roles have been addressed through ancient DNA studies of primary and
secondary mound burials in search of evidence for related versus nonrelatedness of

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interments. Arnold has used aDNA studies combined with the application of
ethnographic models of male versus female migration patterns (Arnold 2005;
Arnold and Kaestle 2002) to suggest political alliances over long or short distances,
cemented by marriage or concubinage. Alt and Vach (1995) used inherited
odontological traits to discover at least one family mound of the Hallstatt Iron
Age, in which close kinship only along the female line suggests matrilocal
exogamy.
The possibility of female leaders and rulers of what may have been matrilineal
societies in Celtic regions and in Britain has been suggested, especially by Arnold
(1991). Arnold initially questioned earlier interpretations of the chiefly late Hallstatt
burial at Vix as male, leading to its current acceptance as female, and also inspired
others to reassess the correlation of gendered grave offerings with biological sex
(Effros 2000; Vida de Navarro 1992). Arnold also proposes that in certain periods
when local men outmigrated as mercenaries for Mediterranean states, women took
on chiefly roles (Arnold 1991, 1996). A differing but somewhat complementary
analysis of Vix is offered by Knusel (2002), who provides detailed analysis of Vixs
health and age, proposing that Vix was a ritual specialist with substantial social
power, but not necessarily a woman chieftain.
Other work has been concerned with domestic (A. Woolf, 1997) rather than
mortuary evidence. Hingley (1990) considers the role of gender in his work on the
household as a central institution, while Therkorn (1987a, b) attempts to study
gendered activity areas. If one expands the Iron Age for northern Europe and the
Slavic regions a bit further into the first millennium to include the still largely
prehistoric late Roman and early post-Roman eras, this increases the number of
studies significantly, incorporating work that examines the economic, social, and
religious roles of Anglo-Saxon and Viking women through both conventional and
innovative approaches (Jochens 1991, 1995, 1996; Lucy 1997, 1999; Morris 1991;
Stoodley 1999a, b, 2000).
Robb et al. (2001) use paleopathology to test expectations that physical stress
was increased in those with poor or no grave offerings; this work yielded some
unexpected results. Both richly and poorly furnished women suffered equally from
ill health and physical stress, while there was more differentiation among males;
perhaps women of all classes experienced hard lives, while men with warrior status
rarely showed physical trauma of any kind. Perhaps the roles for some elite males
were more symbolic than sometimes modeled, leaving injury and death to soldiers
of lower status. In addition to modeling rich versus poor, for Greece, temporally
shifting relations between male and female gender roles have been surveyed (Morris
1999).
There have been a number of publications that focus on exactly what constituted
male identity in the Iron Age, through reinterpretations of who and what is
represented in rock art (Bevan 2006) and grave offerings (Parcero Oubina 1997;
Potrebica 2001; Vaitkunskien_e 1995; Vida de Navarro 1992; Whitley 2002a), in
some cases including texts (Morris 1999). One may refer to work dealing with the
same subject for the late Bronze Age as relevant to Iron Age studies (e.g., Thorpe
2004; Treherne 1995). Several authors suggest that male gender was differently
conceptualized and negotiated in Iron Age Europe than presentist paradigms have

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suggested; they seek to overturn a predominant approach that is overly focused on

male warrior culture to the exclusion of other types of maleness. Evidence for
gender categories such as third/fourth genders that might represent ritual gender
shifting or homosexuality have been explored for Scandinavia (Blain and Wallis
2000; Solli 1999).
Age
Recently, ageyoung and oldhas become the subject of many publications,
conferences, and symposia (Moore and Bevan 2004). Childhood and children as
social actors in the past are new topics of interest. Transitions in the life course (the
aging process) have been patently ignored despite the huge impact they have
ethnographically in the structuring of social relations as well as economy, religion,
and politics. Perhaps this phenomenon is an outgrowth of current generational
attitudes about how childhood experiences impact adult outlooks and hence society,
as well as a current understanding that in many parts of the modern world children
constitute a significant labor force (Kamp 2001, 2005; Schwartzman 2005) and
fulfill military functions (Boyden and de Berry 2004; Mazurana and McKay 2001).
In addition to numerous journal articles, several volumes on gender and childhood
include offerings related to Iron Age Europe (Crawford and Shepherd 2007;
Lillehammer 1989; Moore and Scott 1997; Sofaer Derevenksi 2000). Childhood has
specifically been addressed by several conferences and workshops in recent years,
all of which had substantial representation of Iron Age materials (e.g., Dommasnes
and Wrigglesworth 2008).
Some topics currently being studied are childrens participation in society as
heirs of elite lineages and their roles as apprentices (Karl 2005a) and laborers. Nash
Briggs (2003) discusses the unlooked-for impact of women and children slaves on
the economies of Gaul and Italy, not only as valuable commodities sold at premium
prices but as economic contributors to general domestic economies and the ability
of elite households to produce. Robb et al. (2001) discovered that in Iron Age Italy
childhood across status classes was not physically difficult, but at the onset of
adulthood, life became physically stressful for the poor; this was probably related to
changing labor requirements. Children also have been studied as political entities
through their role in fosterage (Karl 2004a, 2005a; Parkes 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006)
and as sacrificial offerings (Aldhouse-Green 2001a; Mays 2000, 2001; Scott 1991,
1993).
Other researchers address not only youth but age as a social factor. Burmeister
(2000a) attempts a detailed look at age, gender, and status in Hallstatt burials,
finding that people in midlife (2040 years old) of both genders, but particularly
women, had the most mortuary prestige goods, while some subset of males retained
status into old age. This creative use of older data is commendable; however,
Burmeister has been critiqued for oversimplifying assumptions about gender, i.e.,
associating female status at midlife only with fertility (Arnold 2002), and for
oversimplifying the roles of age and gender as direct correlates of status (Karl
2004a). Karl (2004a, 2005a) examines the interplay between youths and elders
during the practice of fosterage and apprenticeship. Gowland (2006) also provides a

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look at evidence for age or elderhood in the Iron Age, noting that age must be
equally incorporated into our understanding of social roles, as has gender.

Conclusions: Out of these mists, some clarity?

The last 20 years of European Iron Age archaeology have seen both a continuation
of traditional areas of research and a questioning of traditional interpretations of
political, social, and religious organization, i.e., the division between the sacred and
profane; the roles of women, men, and other genders, elite and nonelite, and old and
young within their societies; the implicit expectation of hierarchic relations between
rulers and subjects; the constitution of ethnicity and identity; and the idea that
relative relationships of core and periphery structure the interactions between
neighboring societies. In fact, there are few research topics about Iron Age Europe
that have not been reexplored, and the future holds promise for both traditional areas
of study and new directions.
Many newer ideas have roots in intellectual traditions broadly recognized by
some Europeans but not well known in North America, at least not among
archaeologists. Such problems have plagued the Anglophone versus continental
European scene as well as the trans-Atlantic debate in the past. Some scholars
embrace or at least consider new frameworks and paradigms; others willingly adopt
ideas from disciplines where concerns closely parallel our own. The unfamiliar idea,
especially from outside of our own disciplinary milieu, is sometimes reviled by
those who see little or no relationship between archaeology and sociology, art
history, or literary studies. Those holding differing theoretical perspectives often
engage in bouts of mutual criticism. While some find this divide impossible to
bridge, for many others a synthesis does not seem too difficult.
This divide parallels new understandings of the European Iron Age. G. Woolf
(1997, p. 343) described Iron Age Europe as having two key components: a
broadly common cultural vocabulary from which each society drew and the
highly local scale of the groups that chose their own selection and combination
from that range. According to Woolf, Europe was not a single large vague area of
shared culture or ethnicity, but it did share features across a wider Iron Age
European culture that is undeniable yet difficult to define (G. Woolf 1997, p. 341).
Shared aspects include technologies (including metallurgy), agricultural practices,
architectural conventions, warfare strategies, the general shape of cultic and
religious behaviors, and some aesthetic traditions. He notes that while ecological
diversity led to some broad regional differences in subsistence and architecture,
other differences represent choices rather than the result of constraints and were not
merely a factor of distance decay, as some such differences are manifest between
peoples in close proximity (G. Woolf 1997, p. 342). Broad differences include the
adoption of literacy and coinage to which all were exposed but only some
responded, stylistic motifs and mediums used for art, monumentality, and defensive
structures.
This issue also has been addressed by James (1999, 2000) who discusses
sometimes perplexing indications of simultaneous continuity and discontinuity,

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especially in relation to practices and ideologies adopted only by political and/

or religious elites during their rise, presumably for purposes of legitimation, while
ordinary people largely continued with their ancient indigenous lifestyles and
traditions (James 2000, p. 307).
It is in the understanding of the appropriate scales and textures for framing and
studying Iron Age issues that we may be better informed: different scales of time
and space are appropriate for the study of different problems (Bintliff 1991; Knapp
1992; Smith 1992). So, too, is the wide variety of theoretical approaches now
actively pursued for Europe, some engaging large-scale, comparative questions and
others more local and more historicist in nature. Hopefully, as James (2000, p. 307)
has noted, for both our understanding of the past and the ways in which we study it,
the recent shifts are too huge and profound ever to be reversed.

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