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Originally posted by Patroklos
Hardly, the only thing in store for the Gauls without Roman intervention when it happened was being conquered and subjugated by the Germanic tribes. It had actually already started (Ariovistis).
Hardly, the only thing in store for the Gauls without Roman intervention when it happened was being conquered and subjugated by the Germanic tribes. It had actually already started (Ariovistis).
Robert Bedon, "La naissance des premières villes en Gaule intérieure durant la période de la Tène finale" (195-214), brings us back to the problem of the true Roman meaning of the term 'oppidum' as applied to the urban phenomenon in the Gallia Comata and offers an interesting typology of the oppida in this region (196-199) as well as a review of the chronology and historical context of their founding. The Roman conquest, entailing the destruction or damage of a number of them, was in fact just the beginning of the period of the greatest flourishing of the Gallic oppida. The ultimate integration into the Roman province did not trigger the urbanization of this region, which had started already during the late La Tène period, but only 'Romanized' the previously existing urban settlements. In his turn, Jean-Paul Guillaumet, "De la naissance de Bibracte à la naissance d'Autun" (215-225), presents a very rare case where we can compare two successive capitals of a given region (the civitas of the Aedui): the Roman town Augustodunum (Autun) inherited its population from the Gallic oppidum Bibracte. Although earlier excavators at Bibracte envisioned it as an exemplary Celtic town, more recent discoveries show the extreme complexity of the Celtic urban phenomenon. Perhaps the most striking thing is a recently discovered open site, which can tentatively be considered a place of the assembly of the Aeduan citizenry (220).
Recent excavations at Maiden Castle show it not have been a fortress with an attached population, but a large civilian settlement with fortifications.
A slightly different emphasis.
One of the problems when dealing with the pre-Romanized population of Europe is that (in the case of the Celts) they had no written language of their own (although inscriptions have been found left by Celts who used Latin and Greek) and thus the 'history' tends to be a little one-sided, with many earlier historians simply taking what the 'non-barbaric' Greeks and Romans said about the Celts at face value.
Consider the Celtic Sack Of Delphi- often recounted as a savage invasion by the barbarous Celts who were then overwhelmed by the Aetolian peltasts.
And yet somehow enough survived this onslaught to found a kingdom in what is now modern day Turkey, Galatia:
In an article last year in the British journal Anatolian Studies, English and Turkish scholars said the Galatian communities established in the third century B.C. constituted ''a new, significant and increasingly important geopolitical entity within Asia Minor'' and this ''can hardly be attributed to a marginal, and politically, socially and economically unsophisticated people.'' On the contrary, they wrote: ''The fact that their polities survived to be incorporated into the Roman empire would indicate the existence of highly developed social structures bound together by shared value systems. The European Galatians successfully adapted to their new environment, changing it and being changed by it.''
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