The dominant theme across much of Europe during the middle of the first millennium BC was acquisition of desirable goods and vivid florescence of decentralized complexity. We can see this in the lakeside villages like Biskupin in northern Poland, the princely seats of acquisitive elites in central Europe and the industrial production of salt in exchange for luxury goods in the Austrian Alps.
Much of this activity occurred, either directly or indirectly, as a result of contacts with the Mediterranean world, particularly with Greek trading colonies. From one perspective, the Greeks took advantage of the desire by the inhabitants of temperate Europe for luxury goods to acquire the materials, products and slaves that they did not have in the Mediterranean zone. Another point of view is that the Greeks were played like a cheap violin by barbarian elites, who sent them quantities of things that they had in abundance for expensive exotic goods. Perhaps a little of each was going on.
FOUR
ROMANS ENCOUNTER THE HIGH IRON AGE
The final centuries BC saw further transformations of the Barbarian World. Political and social structures emerged that sponsored a remarkable artistic florescence known as the La Tène style and the eventual convergence of civic life at large fortified towns. In Britain, hillforts that developed during the middle of the first millennium BC became larger and populous. Across northern Europe, the use of wetlands and lakes for ritual purposes became even more elaborate, and humans were included among the sacrifices. Finally, in western Europe, the Barbarian World was dramatically changed by the intrusion of a powerful state: Rome.
It is possible to refer to the second half of the first millennium BC and the beginning of the first millennium AD as the High Iron Age.1 Technological advances and interregional trade of the previous three millennia were now felt from the Alps to the Arctic Circle and from the Atlantic to the Urals, not just by elites but also by inhabitants of remote villages. The High Iron Age was a mysterious world of ordinary farmers, skilled craftsmen, bands of warriors and powerful ritual and political leaders.
The La Tène style
When lake levels around the Alps dropped in the 1850s revealing the pile dwelling sites discussed in Chapter One, an Iron Age ritual deposit containing an assortment of swords, scabbards, shields and ornaments was discovered at La Tène at the northern end of Lake Neuchâtel. Their distinctive decoration led to the name of the site being adopted to refer to the decorative style of the final centuries BC in western Europe. The La Tène style is based on elegant curvilinear motifs, often evoking vines and leaves as well as geometric patterns and stylized human and animal forms. Over time, it became more abstract and fluid. Mainly executed on objects of bronze, silver and gold, variations of La Tène decoration provide cultural and chronological markers.
Gold-plated bronze shield boss with La Tène decoration from Auvers-sur-Oise, France, in the Cabinet des Médailles of the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris.
Scholars consider the La Tène style to be truly artistic in its technical sophistication, expressiveness and beauty. It was inspired by stylistic elements from Greek art, particularly its ‘Orientalizing’ phase, and Etruscan designs. These reached the Barbarian World along trade routes across the Alps during the second half of the first millennium BC. Craftsmen in temperate Europe took Mediterranean models and expanded on them, like jazz musicians spontaneously improvising on a melody, allowing creativity and technical expertise to take them in new directions.
Regional La Tène styles soon developed. Perhaps the most extraordinary was the ‘insular style’ of the British Isles. On shields, the backs of mirrors and ornaments, craftsmen in Britain and Ireland took continental motifs and refined them into abstract tendrils and scrolls, highlighted with infilling. Although Roman conquest of Gaul and England caused the La Tène style to decline in those areas, it continued to flourish in Ireland and Scotland during the first centuries AD. Eventually, it was translated into the great illuminated manuscripts and other decorative arts. The exotic animals seen in the Book of Kells and ‘Celtic’ knots in traditional Irish decoration trace their roots to the La Tène style in the final centuries BC.
Fenced farmsteads
Across the Barbarian World, most people continued to live in small farmsteads. In southern Scandinavia, many settlements consisted of a cluster of farmsteads surrounded by a common fence.2 The fences served a functional and a symbolic purpose. Functionally, they protected gardens from livestock during the growing season, and during the winter they contained the animals kept in one end of the houses. Symbolically, they reflected communal identity among the households that shared the enclosure. The farmsteads were not close together, so the fence meandered around them, occasionally interrupted by gates.
Houses in northern Europe were mainly ‘three-aisled’ long-houses, with two rows of interior posts and exterior walls made from wattle, daub and turf, 15–30 metres (50–100 ft) long. Around 200 BC, Grøntoft in Denmark contained nine longhouses and a barn. Later, during the first century AD, the nearby site of Hodde had up to 27 houses, with some situated just outside the fence. A similar trend towards settlement nucleation is seen in the Netherlands. Bronze Age and early Iron Age settlements there have been characterized as dispersed and ‘wandering’,3 meaning that farmsteads were not rebuilt on the same site but were abandoned and relocated some distance away. By the High Iron Age, however, farmsteads began to be clustered together and to be rebuilt, suggesting multigenerational occupation.4
Reconstructed Iron Age roundhouse at Butser Ancient Farm, Hampshire.
In the British Isles, roundhouses continued as the norm, with a range of 5–15 metres (16–50 ft) in diameter. Wattle and daub walls (or stone in northern and western areas) were surmounted by conical pitched roofs. Each community was composed of several houses, with regional variations in the architectural details. As on the Continent, fences and enclosures demarcated farmsteads and structured community space. In the west of England, wetland settlements at Glastonbury and Meare have been studied for over a century.5 At Glastonbury, over forty houses were found, with up to fourteen occupied at any one time before the settlement was abandoned about 50 BC.6
Although High Iron Age economy was a mix of farming and herding, domestic animals were especially important, not only for meat, milk and hides but also as the foundation of wealth and accumulation. Ownership of livestock became a pathway for social advancement during the final centuries BC. It enabled participation in the consumption economy connected with imports of Mediterranean products and eventually the introduction of coinage in western Europe.
Heterarchy
For many years, scholars assumed that ancient societies proceeded from an early stage of egalitarian social relations through increasingly hierarchical structures with more and more levels. In hierarchical systems, decisions at higher levels affect lower levels, and lines of authority run clearly to a paramount leader. Despite considerable evidence for social differentiation, however, it is difficult to fit High Iron Age societies into such a scheme of cultural evolution.
Instead, it seems possible that social arrangements in the Barbarian World corresponded more to a condition that could be called ‘heterarchy’,7 in which there were varying pathways to status, power and influence. Relationships among households, clans, tribes and other social units were no less complex but were not tiered in the same way as a hierarchy. Practices of authority and deference were fluid and situational, perhaps more unstable over time.
A heterarchical system does not mean there were no leaders. The desire to achieve power through wealth and status is always motivation for individuals so inclined. It simply means that leaders may have been only one point of authority rather than an all-powerful apex, and individuals and communities had other sources of power and influence, which were adapted as times required. Sacrificial rituals needed priests (perhaps the Druids described by Caesar) to mediate between mortals and gods, while military adventures were led by individuals with distinction in fighting.
It is difficult to prove the existence of heterarchy, but it must be considered as an option given that evidence for paramount leaders who combined political, ritual and military functions is so slim. During the High Iron Age, characterizing social arrangements as heterarchy explains how the Romans who encountered barbarian groups were unable to fit them into their understanding of how civilized society should function. Barbarian society was complex but differed from the Roman social system in its ability to accommodate equivalences and differences in social standing and to distribute authority among multiple individuals.
Trackways
The bogs of northern Europe were obstacles to movement, not just for people, but especially for wagons and carts. Prehistoric people in wetland areas constructed wooden ‘trackways’ that became increasingly sophisticated over time.8 They are preserved in waterlogged peat and found during cutting the peat for fuel or drainage. Important trackways from the last few centuries BC are found in northern Germany and adjacent areas of the Netherlands, lake basins in southern Germany such as the Federsee and in Ireland.
Running for over 2 kilometres (1¼ mi.) in Co. Longford, the Corlea trackway is one of the best studied in Ireland.9 It is a road of oak planks about 4 metres (13 ft) long laid across parallel runners of oak and ash up to 10 metres (33 ft) long on the bog surface. Planks were pinned in place with stakes driven through holes in the ends. It required a coordinated effort to build, considering the need to fell oak trees, split them into planks, transport them to the work site and lay them next to each other. It is estimated that obtaining the 400 or so trees needed to make the 6,000 planks and associated runners and other parts required the clearance of 25 hectares (62 acres) of woodland. From tree-ring dating, we know the timbers were felled in 148 BC. Although the Corlea trackway is just over 1.6 kilometres (1 mi.) long, it was a crucial connection in a major east–west route across the peatlands of central Ireland.
Reconstructed Iron Age trackway in Corlea Bog, Co. Longford, Ireland.
Building trackways may have been just as important as using them. Wooden vessels at Corlea suggest that work parties were fuelled by feasting and drinking. There was also a connection between the use of bogs for ritual activities. Spear shafts, mallets, yokes and pieces of unused wheels are found near trackways in Ireland, while carvings interpreted as human effigies were discovered at Corlea and at Wittemoor in Germany. Bogs are dynamic landscapes, and most trackways were rarely maintained for long. The Corlea trackway, for example, may have been used for ten years or less.
Water, sacrifice and human victims
Ceremonialism and the importance of watery places are running themes throughout the narrative of the Barbarian World. During the first millennium BC, sacrificial ceremonies took new turns. One was the interplay between warfare and sacrifice. The other, and more intriguing, was the ritualized killing of people and their deposition in bogs.
Some of the most memorable and evocative evidence for ceremony, sacrifice and violence during the High Iron Age comes from bog bodies, dozens of human corpses found in peat bogs of northern and western Europe.10 Their skin, internal organs and hair have been preserved due to the unusual qualities of peat bogs, acidic wetlands where vegetation grows faster than it decays and undecayed plant matter accumulates, often reaching considerable thickness. Peat was widely used for fuel where it was abundant, although today its main use is in gardens. In Scandinavia and the British Isles, peat was once cut by hand, whereas today large machines shave away layers of compressed vegetation and load it onto conveyor belts.
Bodies can be preserved in peat almost indefinitely until discovered by peat-cutters or found in pieces on conveyor belts. Waterlogged peats are poor in oxygen and do not contain the microorganisms that promote decay. A body has to be submerged quickly, however, lest decay set in while it is still exposed to the air. The acidic water in bogs is also inhospitable to microorganisms. Finally, a chemical produced by sphagnum moss, sphagnan, not only retards decay but actively promotes preservation. Sphagnan depletes calcium in a body, giving bacteria less to feed on. It is also a tanning agent. This is why the skin of bog bodies often looks like dark brown leather, and the bones are deformed or even missing.
The first recorded bog bodies were found in the eighteenth century, but they were thought to be recent victims of drowning or exposure. Subsequently, archaeologists realized that these were prehistoric corpses. During the twentieth century, many came to light in the Netherlands, northern Germany and especially Denmark. The global Depression in the 1930s, the Second World War and hard times after the war meant that peat was a cheap and easily obtained fuel for heating and cooking. When a hand, foot or head was found, archaeologists were often notified.
A woman’s body found in 1938 in a bog at Bjældskov near Silkeborg in Denmark was about 25 years old, with her hair braided and tied in a pigtail. Her body was wrapped in a sheepskin and a cowhide cloak. Yet Elling Woman, as she is known, did not die peacefully. A groove around her neck showed that she had been strangled, either by hanging or garrotting, perhaps with a leather rope found nearby. Thus began what might be called the Golden Age of Bog Bodies.
After the Second World War, peat cutting in Denmark and northern Germany continued intensively. In 1950, another body was found about 70 metres (230 ft) from Elling Woman. The block of peat containing it was cut out and taken back to the National Museum in Copenhagen to be excavated carefully. This bog was known locally as ‘Tollund’, and thus the superbly preserved corpse of a man 40–50 years old became ‘Tollund Man’. Like Ötzi the Iceman, Tollund Man became a celebrity and even today is probably the best known of the bog bodies.11
Like Elling Woman, Tollund Man also died from strangulation. The braided leather rope was still around his neck. Except for a leather belt and conical leather cap, he was naked, curled up in a crouched position. Tollund Man’s face is strangely serene, as if he accepted his fate peacefully. After eating a final gruel of barley, wheat and flax, he probably walked down the valley path to his fate in the bog.
Upper body of Windeby Boy on display at the Archäologisches Landesmuseum, Gottorf Castle, Schleswig, Germany; the textile band around the head is a modern replacement for the original.
The year 1952 was a banner year for bog bodies, perhaps because peat-cutters were alive to the possibility that a corpse or body parts might appear, necessitating notification of archaeologists. Peat-cutters working near Windeby in northern Germany noticed human limbs on their conveyor belt and traced them to a spot in the bog. Investigation showed that there were actually two corpses. One was an elderly man whose bones had completely decalcified (perhaps because of his age) and his body pressed flat. The other was a remarkably well-preserved body of what was thought to be a teenage girl, naked except for a leather collar and a strip of cloth over her eyes. Her blond hair had been shaved on one side of her head. Apparently Windeby Girl met her death by drowning. A large stone and some branches had been used to hold her down. There is a recent twist, however. Closer examination revealed that Windeby Girl was probably Windeby Boy, a malnourished and sickly lad.12
Torso of Huldremose Woman with her skin preserved but bones demineralized; we know that her final meal was rye bread.
That same year, peat-cutters at Grauballe, about 18 kilometres (11 mi.) from Tollund, found another body. This time, the block of peat was taken to the Moesgård Museum in Aarhus,13 and Grauballe Man was carefully freed. He was lying on his chest, naked, with his left leg extended and his arm and right leg flexed. There was no mistaking the cause of his death around age thirty: his throat had been slashed from ear to ear. Grauballe Man’s stomach contained 63 species of plants. His hands did not show evidence of hard work, so he was probably not a farmer. Nonetheless, he suffered from periods of nutritional stress and had a degenerative spinal condition.
After the 1950s, discoveries of bog bodies became less frequent, largely due to declining use of peat for fuel. Suburban sprawl and its gardens, however, revived peat cutting during
the 1980s. In the British Isles, peat extraction is a big business. In 1984, a worker at a peat plant at Lindow Moss outside Manchester tossed a block of peat towards a co-worker. A human foot popped out when it hit the ground. Imagine that moment. More of the body was back at the cutting site. It was a man about 25 years old, 1.7 metres (5 ft 6 in.) tall, with a beard and moustache, naked except for a band of fox fur on one arm. His trimmed fingernails suggested a life without physical labour. Lindow Man died several violent deaths. He had been struck twice on the skull and garrotted. To make sure he was dead, his throat was slashed.14
The year 2003, like 1952, was a good one for bog bodies, this time in Ireland. Two bodies were found 40 kilometres (25 mi.) apart in the central Irish boglands, Clonycavan Man in Co. Meath and Oldcroghan Man in Co. Offaly, not far from the Corlea trackway.15 Oldcroghan Man was very tall, standing about 2 metres (6 ft 6 in.) in height. Like Grauballe Man and Lindow Man, his smooth and well-manicured hands suggested that he was not accustomed to manual labour. His fingernails indicated that he had eaten a meat-rich diet, although his last meal, as with many of the Danish victims, was a gruel of grains and milk. He died between 362 and 175 BC. Clonycavan Man, on the other hand, was very short, standing 1.57 metres (5 ft 2 in). Radiocarbon dating indicates that he died between 392 and 201 BC. His hair is spectacularly well preserved and styled with a gel of pine resin. This pomade came from pines that only grow in Spain and southwestern France, reflecting long-range connections along the Atlantic seaboard.
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