This beautifully produced addition to the Amsterdam Archaeological Studies series is based on Fernández-Götz's 2012 PhD thesis. It offers a regional synthesis of social change during the Iron Age in north-east Gaul, in the tradition of Kristian Kristiansen (e.g. Europe Before History (1998) and ‘Household economy, long-term change, and social transformation: the Bronze Age political economy of northwestern Europe’, Nature and Culture 2.2 (2007), 161–75) and Nico Roymans (Tribal Societies in Northern Gaul. An Anthropological Perspective (1990) and Ethnic Identity and Imperial Power: The Batavians in the Early-Roman Empire (2004)). The volume brings together a critical reading of historical sources with the latest archaeological evidence and techniques, and incorporates approaches from ethnoarchaeology, anthropology and sociology.
The first main section (ch. 2) presents a general survey of recent approaches to the archaeology of identity. It works as a stand-alone piece as much as an introduction to the volume, covering ethnicity, gender, age and social status, as well as offering a wider discussion on identity and power. The second part (ch. 3) deals with ethnicity and socio-political organisation in Iron Age Gaul. Drawing predominantly on Classical sources, but also offering insights drawn from anthropology and sociology, F.-G. describes the organisation of Gallic society from the small to the large scale. Beginning with the extended household, he considers in turn the pagi and the civitates. Finally he critically examines the existence of larger ‘macro-ethnic categories’ such as Gauls, Belgae, Celts and Germans. The emphasis is very much on the dynamic and fluid nature of these social structures.
The stand-out contribution of the book comes in the last of the three major sections (chs 4–9), which presents a diachronic analysis of social change in north-east Gaul, focusing on the Middle Rhine-Moselle region, from c. 600 b.c. to a.d. 70. F.-G. takes a narrative approach, incorporating historical sources with both settlement and funerary archaeology. He begins by examining the phenomenon of increasing social hierarchisation in the funerary record from the sixth to fourth century b.c., accompanied by the development of increasingly large, fortified hilltop centres (106). He interprets this as local centralisation of power among competing small-scale communities, attributed to internal factors, primarily a rise in both population and ‘social density’ (i.e. the frequency of personal and group interactions), ‘making it necessary to negotiate and organise collective affairs at a wider level’ (118).
From the mid-fourth century b.c., the process of hierarchisation and centralisation appears to stop, with many cemeteries abandoned and the decline of the hilltop centres. Drawing heavily on pollen evidence, F.-G. argues that there was a genuine population decrease, with long-distance migration the most plausible explanation (though he emphasises that this would represent ‘a partial, not total, exodus’, 130–1). He convincingly argues that migration in this period (which is well attested in Classical accounts) was a ‘fundamental regulating mechanism’ (140), a kind of pressure-valve for relieving social tension. In times of increasing social density and political centralisation, the fission of groups and movement away of part of the population could have acted to regulate power relations and reduce social inequality. This explanation for the cycles of centralisation and decentralisation seen in Europe north of the Alps is one of the strongest elements of the book. F.-G. argues that these societies were to some degree inherently resistant to hierarchy and state formation, with periods of increasing centralisation being followed by demographic decline, rather than consolidation of power. This pattern of course changes towards the end of the time period examined in the book, with the rise of oppida in the second century b.c. and the appearance in the Classical sources of references to state-like entities such as the civitas of the Treveri. F.-G. again looks primarily to internal causes for this centralisation, such as demographic growth and new production technologies, although he also cites climatic improvement.
It is hard not to see the book's focus on endogenous factors in centralisation as a pendulum swing away from earlier approaches that emphasised exogenous influences and processes of ‘tribalisation’ on the Roman frontier. In F.-G.’s model, interaction with Rome becomes purely an accelerant ‘which would, at most, have stimulated pre-existing processes of social hierarchisation’ (114). While the argument is refreshing, it seems to negate the question of why societies that had so long resisted greater centralisation developed state-level organisation just as they were drawn closer into the orbit of the Roman world. It would have been interesting to see more consideration of whether expanding Roman influence might have played a part in knocking off-balance the oscillation between centralised and decentralised societies that F.-G. so eloquently establishes earlier in the book.
Overall, this is a highly accessible introduction to the Iron Age societies of north-east Gaul, which deserves to be read widely by archaeologists and historians alike. It also adds significant depth and richness to our understanding of cycles of social and demographic change in prehistory. The volume is beautifully produced, as is typical of the series. My only gripe is the paucity of colour pictures, maps or charts, with some of the greyscale maps in particular (e.g. figs 4.7 and 7.6) being very difficult to interpret.
