ScienceOpen'Were the Oppida Sustainable? Examining the Persistence and Provisioning of Late Iron Age Agglomerations in Temperate Europe' - an article published by #Brepols in the Journal of Urban Archaeology (JUA) on #ScienceOpen.
📄🔗 https://www.scienceopen.com/document?vid=550a3d54-622c-476f-a190-9c70db9888f7
Were the <i>Oppida</i> Sustainable? Examining the Persistence and Provisioning of Late Iron Age Agglomerations in Temperate Europe
<p xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" class="first" dir="auto" id="d3772e66">During the last two centuries <span style="font-variant: small-caps">bc</span>, large fortified settlements known as <i>oppida </i>developed across extensive parts of temperate Europe, from France to Hungary and from Spain to Britain. Due to their significant size and socio-economic roles, the <i>oppida </i>— or at least most of them — have traditionally been identified as the first towns of pre-Roman temperate Europe. However, research over the last few decades has shown that urban centres had already developed earlier in the Iron Age, both in the form of fortified sites (the so-called ‘princely seats’) and open agglomerations. Some authors have argued that the <i>oppida </i>represented a ‘wrong step’ towards urbanization that surpassed the economic potential of Late Iron Age societies, making these settlements destined to fail. Others, contrastingly, envisage the <i>oppida </i>as the culmination of urbanization trajectories in the Iron Age. In this article, we review the question of the sustainability of the <i>oppida </i>focusing particularly on settlement persistence (i.e. how long did the <i>oppida </i>last) and the provisioning of these centres with foodstuffs and other goods. General reflections are combined with references to selected case studies from Western and Central Europe, challenging some previous notions but also highlighting gaps in our knowledge. </p>
Elena Percivaldi
Marcial Tenreiro-Bermudez
Marcial Tenreiro-Bermudez
Kara Finance
Andrea laLa
Dr Nicky Garland