FF:AEB_154 European Iron Age - Course Information

AEB_154 European Iron Age

Faculty of Arts
Autumn 2018

Extent and Intensity

4/0/0. 3 credit(s). Type of Completion: z (credit).

Teacher(s)

prof John Collis (lecturer)
Mgr. Petra Goláňová, Ph.D. (assistant)
doc. Mgr. Klára Šabatová, Ph.D. (assistant)

Guaranteed by

prof. Mgr. Jiří Macháček, Ph.D.
Department of Archaeology and Museology – Faculty of Arts
Contact Person: Jitka Šibíčková
Supplier department: Department of Archaeology and Museology – Faculty of Arts

Timetable

Mon 18:00–19:40 T207, Wed 16:00–17:40 T207, Fri 12:00–13:40 T205

Prerequisites

- to understand spoken and written English

Course Enrolment Limitations

The course is also offered to the students of the fields other than those the course is directly associated with.

fields of study / plans the course is directly associated with

there are 12 fields of study the course is directly associated with, display

Course objectives

- get detailed knowledge of Iron Age societies and our approaches to study them - provide expert guidance over a very wide range of theories

Learning outcomes

- students will acquire the skills to select, summarise and evaluate key aspects of the field

Syllabus

Defining the Celts.
This will start with a discussion of how the ancient peoples of the British Isles came to be considered to be Celts in the 16th century. From this initial suggestion, we will follow the impact this had in the identification of the Celts that developed using the ancient written sources, language, religion (Druids), craniology, art, and material culture (La Tène), and how these British ideas were finally transferred to the continent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Locating the Celts.
Linked with the definitions of the Celts, attempts were made to identify the origin of the Celts, initially using biblical and classical sources (Paul-Yves Pezron) from the Tower of Babel to the Indo-Europeans (Henri Arbois de Jubainville), and how these became linked with the site of La Tène. More recent attempts to locate the origin of the Celts and the Celtic languages on the Atlantic coast are equally flawed, and are still based on the ‘culture historical paradigm’ which relates to the racist interpretations of the 1930s and the concept of ‘eugenics’.
Why is Celtic Art considered to be ‘Celtic’?
Celtic Art was another innovation by British scholars in the 19th century. We will look at the first appearance of the term in the mid-19th century, and how the definition was gradually changed to include more continental material, and it final acceptance by Joseph Déchelette. We will consider the work of Paul Jacobsthal in the 1940s, and how under in the writings of authors such as Pierre-Marie Duval and Vincent and Ruth Megaw the spread of the art style was taken to indicate the spread of the Celts from southern Germany and across Europe.
Celts, Ancient and Modern.
In most books on the Celts the speakers of what are nowadays called Celtic languages are considered somehow to be the descendants of the Celts of the classical world. I shall be arguing that the Ancient and Modern Celts are largely two different phenomena, linked by language, but not geographically nor chronologically – there is a thousand year gap between the two phenomena, and virtually no geographical overlap. The definition of the Modern and Ancient Celts is different, the ways in which they are studied, and the investigation of the Ancient Celts are almost entirely in the hands of people who are not speakers of Celtic languages. The problems arise from scholars trying to impose definitions of the Modern Celts on the ancient world.
The Wessex hill-fort debate.
The debates among archaeologists on topics such as the definition of the Celts and Celtic Society mainly have their origin in the 1980s and 1990s, and were concerned with the function of hill-forts and the nature of the societies that constructed them. We shall look at the theories of Barry Cunliffe, the excavator of the hill-fort of Danebury, based in part on eugenic interpretations of the past, but also incorporating ideas from the ‘New Archaeology’ of the 1960s (central places, etc.), and the criticisms of these interpretations by myself and J.D. Hill amongst others which have had a more general impact on Iron Age studies across Europe. In part my views were coloured by my excavations on the farming settlement of Owslebury, near Winchester.
The Auvergne Survey.
Since the 1970s I have been involved in excavation and survey in the Auvergne area of central France. When I started the main interest was in historical questions like the ‘arrival’ of the Celts and location of the battle of Gergovia, and in art-historical studies mainly based on pottery. We introduced more modern questions like the nature of urbanisation, and new methodologies such as stratigraphical and open area excavation, as well as systematic field survey. It involved large-scale excavations and a major rethink of Iron Age chronology and also challenged concepts such as the ‘arrival’ of the Celts. It is now one of the best studied areas of Iron Age Europe, with major excavations on sites such as Aulnat/Clermont-Ferrand, Corent, Gondole and Gergovie. It is also an area with considerable written documentation of the Celts (Luernios, Bituitos, Vercingetorix) and where local people considered themselves to be Celts as late as the 5th century AD (Avitus, Sidonius Apollinaris).
Constructing chronologies.
In Wessex over 30 years of excavation at Danebury failed to develop a chronology better than that of Cunliffe’s doctoral thesis in the 1960s. The Auvergne also produced problems of definition of the ‘La Tène’ chronology with discrepancies between, for instance, the chronological nomenclature of the brooches and that of the pottery. This was part of a larger problem across Europe where the same nomenclature might be used, but the definitions were different, e.g. between Bavaria and Switzerland. I have suggested that we try to avoid the terms Hallstatt and La Tène, not only as ‘cultures’ but also as terms used for chronology, and I have been advocating a new approach which is based on stratigraphical groups, and where we abandon the traditional approach of ‘type fossils’ and ‘phases’ taken over from geology, and revert to a concept of ‘horizons’ and single ‘attributes’ as used in the 19th century by Thomsen and by Tischler. We have yet to apply this in the Auvergne on any scale, but I have published preliminary chronologies for the Iron Age at Owslebury.
Integrating linguistics, genetics and archaeology.
Celtic Studies deals with one of the key questions in Europe, the nature of identity, of ethnicity and the concept of ‘race’. The latest new set of data which is appearing is genetic, with initially studies of the X and Y chromosomes, but more recently with the complete human genome, and improved methods of obtaining ancient DNA. The major recent book on genetics is that by David Reich, but I am concerned with the vocabulary that he is using (terms like ‘mixed’) and the models for genetic change which are similar to those of the 1930s, though certainly he is no believer in eugenics (‘purity of race’). I shall look at a most informative research project based on eugenics, the Harvard survey of ‘Celtic’ Ireland in the 1930s and the thinking that lay behind it. The interpretations by the geneticists uses the concept of invasion as the main motors for genetic change, ignoring the other models of change that people such as myself and Colin Renfrew were developing in the 1970s using alternative models such as ‘Peer Polity interaction’ and ‘overlapping systems’ to ‘explain’ culture change, and their possible relevance to present debates.

Literature

Le pâtural, Clermont-Ferrand, Puy-de-Dôme : un établissement agricole gaulois en Limagne d'Auvergne. Edited by John Collis - Christèle Ballut - Laurent Bouby - Yann Deberge - Jon D. Lyon: Association de liaison pour le patrimoine et l'archéologie en Rhône-Alpes et en Auvergne, 2007, 340 s. ISBN 2916125019. info
The Celts : origins, myths & inventions. Edited by John Collis. 1st pub. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus, 2003, 256 s. ISBN 0752429132. info
COLLIS, John. The European iron age. Repr. London: Routledge, 1998, 192 s. ISBN 0415151392. info

Teaching methods

The lectures will take place only in October - Mondays (18-20 o´clock) and Wednesdays (16-18 o´clock).

FF:AEB_154 European Iron Age - Course Information

AEB_154 European Iron Age

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