Fernández-Götz Manuel - Paths to Complexity - Centralisation and Urbanisation in Iron Age Europe

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Front cover: 3D reconstruction of the Heuneburg at the height of its prosperity in the first half of the 6th century BC (after Fernndez-Gtz & Krausse 2013; Landesamt fr Denkmalpflege Baden-Wrttemburg)

CONTENTS

Prof. Michael E. Smith

Manuel Fernndez-Gtz, Holger Wendling and Katja Winger

John Collis

Manuel Fernndez-Gtz

Pierre-Yves Milcent

Raphal Golosetti

Vladimr Sala

Albta Danielisov

Dominik Lukas

Sabine Rieckhoff

Caroline von Nicolai

Veronika Holzer

Holger Wendling and Katja Winger

Tom Moore and Cme Ponroy

Matthieu Poux

Ian Armit, Tim Horsley, Chris Gaffney, Frdric Marty, Nathan Thomas, Robert Friel and Ashley Haye

Lars Blck, Andrea Bruning, Eckhard Deschler-Erb, Andreas Fischer, Yolanda Hecht, Corina Knipper, Reto Marti, Michael Nick, Hannele Rissanen, Norbert Spichtig and Muriel Roth-Zehner

Sabine Hornung

Jess R. lvarez-Sanchs and Gonzalo Ruiz-Zapatero

Francisco Burillo-Mozota

Niall Sharples

FOREWORD

I remember vividly the bright winter morning a year ago when Manuel Fernndez-Gtz gave me a tour of the Heuneburg. The site was officially closed for the season, and it was covered with snow. I had read some articles on the Heuneburg, and I had just listened to some presentations on the Heuneburg and other Iron Age settlements at a conference in Stuttgart that had brought me to Germany. But there is no substitute for walking over an ancient urban site. Archaeologists can learn about sites by reading reports and articles, but the experience of being there adds something intangible yet important to ones understanding. When I walk through a deserted landscape that had once been filled with ancient buildings, people and their activities, the dry professional facts about post-holes, radiocarbon dates, and potsherds come alive.

My visit of the Heuneburg brought to culmination a personal process of discovery of Iron Age urbanisation and its importance within the broad realm of urban studies. For many years I had included the oppida in the course I teach on the earliest cities. When I started teaching this class two decades ago, I presented the oppida of the Late Iron Age as an example of settlements that had a few urban traits (e.g., craft specialisation and fortification), but were not cities or urban settlements. My context of comparison was the cities of the great ancient civilisations, from Mesopotamia to Mesoamerica (Smith 2007; 2008). The oppida provided a good teaching example to explore the limits of the concepts of city and urbanism in the ancient world. But over the years, as my knowledge and understanding of comparative urbanism grew, I came to accept the oppida as urban settlements. This change was partly due to the fact that I learned more about the oppida, and partly due to my own changing concept of urbanisation and its varied forms around the world and through time.

Then Manuel sent me the draft of a paper he and Dirk Krausse had written arguing that the start of urbanism north of the Alps should be pushed back to the Early Iron Age, at the Heuneburg (Fernndez-Gtz & Krausse 2013). My first reaction before reading the paper was skeptical. I worried that a couple of craft workshops and a fancy burial or two would be used to argue for Early Iron Age urbanism. Archaeologists always want to find the earliest example of things, whether artifact types or social institutions, and such claims are sometimes based on flimsy evidence. But I found the article convincing, and so I was excited when Manuel invited me to the conference on Iron Age urbanism and society in Stuttgart last year. Most of the participants seemed comfortable with the concept of Early Iron Age urbanism, including Colin Renfrew and Kristian Kristiansen.

From one perspective, the question of whether the Heuneburg is classified as an urban settlement is not important. For our understanding of that site, it is far more important to describe and explain the particular manifestations of Iron Age life and society than to classify the settlement. The Heuneburg is clearly a significant site whose excavation extends our knowledge of the Early Iron Age, whether one uses the label city, a town, a fort, or village. But from the broader perspective of comparative urbanism, re-classifying the Heuneburg as an urban settlement has two big advantages. First, it allows data from that site and other Early Iron Age sites to contribute to discussions of the nature of urbanism around the world. Comparative urban scholars can add another case a unique and fascinating case to our sample of early urban societies. Second, archaeologists who work at the Heuneburg can draw on the concepts and insights of comparative urban studies to add richness to their reconstructions of life, society, and change at the Heuneburg.

These dual advantages of acknowledging the urban nature of the Heuneburg adding to our sample of ancient urban societies, and contributing insights to the study of the site also apply to the Late Iron Age oppida sites. Although John Collis (1984) called the oppida the earliest towns north of the Alps three decades ago, my impression is that Iron Age scholars and comparative urban scholars were both slow to acknowledge this insight. Now, in 2014, there is no excuse to leave the oppida out of discussions of early urbanism.

The overall scholarly trend in the field of Iron Age urbanisation parallels the changes in the way I presented the oppida in my university class. As more evidence accumulated and views of the nature of cities and urbanism expanded, it became increasingly clear that the Iron Age (both Early and Late) was the setting for some complex and unique urban societies in Europe.

This book appears at a crucial time. It marks the clear arrival of a new view of urbanism and social complexity in Iron Age Europe. Much of the primary excavation data have been published previously in German, French, Spanish, and other languages. While that is only a minor problem for Iron Age scholars, comparative urban scholars like me who are fascinated by these sites can typically read only a few of these languages. Much of the information in this book appears in English for the first time, and it will bring the Iron Age to a new English-language audience. To take just one example, I have long considered Manching a fascinating site, yet I had access to only a few papers in English and the short descriptions in Fichtl (2005). The chapter here by Wendling and Winger greatly extends the English-language coverage of Manching, and there are similar benefits for other sites and regions throughout these chapters.