GREG WOOLF

RETHINKING THE OPPIDA

Summary The appearance of large sites known as oppida, and generally

qual$ed as urban or proto-urban, is a central feature of all accounts of late
Iron Age Europe. But the category of oppidum groups together sites that are
very diverse in morphology, scale and Jicnction, and excludes other sites that
share many of the same features, but lack fortijications and/or are located outside
the supposed heartland of the oppida civilisation. Few oppida seem to be at
the centre of differentiated settlement networks of the kind usually associated
with urbanism, and few display a higher level of intra-site zoning than do rural
farms or hamlets. A reassessment of late La T h e settlement, focusing on its
technological and cultural unity, contributes to an analysis of late prehistoric
Europe which stresses the contrasts between the social trajectories of temperate
European and Mediterranean societies.

Central to all interpretations of the archae- occupational specialisation.

ology of the late La Tene period, the final, pre-
Roman Iron Age of much of temperate Europe,
are the sites known as oppida. There is a broad
consensus that the term refers to a coherent
category of site, as distinct from ‘open settle-
ment’ and ‘farm’. The titles of recent published
discussions make it clear that the oppida are
widely regarded as urban, hence Oppida: the
beginnings of urbanisation in barbarian
Europe (Cunliffe and Rowley 1976), Oppida.
Earliest towns north of the Alps (Collis 1984),
Farms, villages and cities. Commerce and
urban origins in late prehistoric Europe (Wells
1984) and Towns, Villages and Countryside
of Celtic Europe (Audouze and Buchsenschutz
1991). Less agreement exists about the precise
functions of oppida within late LaTkne society,
but their appearance is often held to indicate
political centralisation, industrial growth and
My argument is that this interpretation of
the settlement archaeology of late La T h e
Europe is at best unhelpful, at worst false. The
oppida do not constitute a useful analytical
category as they are too diverse in scale, form,
function and chronology to be susceptible to
any but the most general interpretation. Worse,
most definitions imply a fundamental distinc-
tion between fortified and unfortified sites that
is misleading: many ‘oppida’ have much more
in common with some open settlements than
they do with some other fortified sites. Nor
is it useful to describe the oppida as ‘urban’:
to some extent this is a matter of definition,
but late Iron Age settlement does lack many
features normally associated with urbanisation,
such as a differentiated settlement hierarchy,
large scale intra-site zoning of activities and
clear evidence of central place functions on the

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 RETHINKING THE OPPIDA
highest order settlements. Worse, by focusing
on urbanisation, researchers have tended to
concentrate on the slight similarities with
mediaeval towns and classical cities, while
neglecting those features of La T h e settlement
that are unique and important.
The best writers on the period are well aware
of the variability subsumed in the category
‘oppidum’ and the distinctive features of late
La Tkne settlement (e.g. Collis 1984, 6-8;
Champion 1987, 103). Why, then, has the
quest for urban origins dominated approaches
to late La T h e settlement? Interest in general-
ised models of social evolution in the seventies,
together with a sociology of urbanisation that
privileged western forms, probably played a
part at the theoretical level. Possibly too, the
rhetorical attractions of the claim to be investi-
gating the first European towns have influenced
the ways that research has been presented. My
own contention is not that the subject is unim-
portant. On the contrary, I will argue that these
settlements have much more to offer than
simply evidence for a short lived and abortive
recapitulation of social processes better under-
stood elsewhere. A proper appreciation of what
was unique about late La T h e settlement has
implications not just for our understanding of
the Iron Age, but also for the long-term history
of Europe and for our understanding of the
spatial structure of complex societies in
general.
Rethinking the oppida begins from a con-
sideration of the diversity and unity of late La
T h e settlement. Taking this diversity into
account is essential for understanding the social
processes which created the sites grouped
together as oppida (as well as others). I shall
argue that what is common to all these sites
is the way in which they were constructed -
and the fact that they could be - rather than
the roles they performed. I will then consider
the case for treating these sites as urban,
looking in particular at the issues of functional
224
specialisation at both intra-site and inter-site
levels. Finally, I will suggest a new synthesis
that focuses on the non-urban character of late
La T h e settlement and discusses the implica-
tions of the absence of urbanism in late Iron
Age Europe.
WHAT IS AN OPPIDUM?
The definition of the term ‘oppidum’ is
recognised to be problematic. But two features
are common to most definitions, fortification
and urban functions. Oppida are thus differen-
tiated, on the one hand, from hillforts without
urban functions and, on the other, from open
settlements and farms. In practice, two other
criteria are applied, chronology and size.
Oppida are held to begin in the middle La
T h e , from La T h e C in central Europe (e.g.
Bavaria, Bohemia, Moravia), from La T h e D
in western Europe (e.g. Switzerland, France)
and from the late pre-Roman Iron Age in
southern Britain. In effect, this restricts the
phenomenon to the last two centuries BC. A
minimum size of 20-25 ha is often asserted,
but in practice this criterion is often relaxed,
especially in the west of Europe. Usage varies
fairly widely, the term sometimes being taken
to refer to any La T h e hillfort, and it is often
admitted that some of the features taken as
signs of ‘urban’ nature are also found on some
open sites. The ideal type of an oppidum seems
often to correspond to sites like Mont Beuvray
in eastern France, Manching in southern
Germany or Zavist in Bohemia, characterised
by tens or hundreds of hectares enclosed by
complex ramparts, often timber-laced as in the
murus gallicus, sites which when excavated
produce evidence of wooden buildings, iron-
working, a wide range of ceramics and perhaps
some foreign imports. It was these sites that
Reinecke, Dechelette and Dehn were thinking
of when they first gave the term ‘oppidum’ an
archaeological usage, and they remain the
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quintessential oppida for rnost Iron Age
archaeologists.
But in practice these defining criteria tend
to be used polythetically: a m u m gallicus or
industrial activity or a large enclosed area or
foreign imports is often enough to suggest the
term. If two criteria are satisfied, then the site
tends to be assimilated to the category. The
exception is fortification: there is some reluc-
tance to assimilate open settlements to the
oppida, even when the similarities are recog-
nised, and for some writers the origin of the
oppida seems to mean the origins of fortifica-
tion, even when it is recognised that the
fortification traditions in questjon have a much
longer history in temperate Europe than any
of the ‘urban’ features of the late La Tkne sites
(Collis and Ralston 1975).
As a result of this definitional confusion, it
is far from clear how many oppida there are
in Europe. Collis (1984, lo), in the best and
fullest survey of the phenomenon, maps 59
examples of ‘Late La Tkne oppida, defended
sites of over 30 ha’, but considers 279 sites
in an appendix. Wells (1984, 158-161) notes
38 sites of 30 ha or more in non-Mediterranean
France alone. Since many fortified sites as
small as 2 ha are often considered as oppida,
the potential total is very large indeed.
Several factors may be used to demonstrate
the variability of oppida. The clearest are the
scale and morphology of fortifications. The
fortifications of the biggest oppida define areas
of some hundreds of hectares. Two Bavarian
sites, Kelheim and Manching, had rampart
systems that enclosed 650 and 350 ha respec-
tively. At Kelheim, at least, occupation did not
extend across the entire enclosed area, and the
use of river gorges as natural barriers to some
extent explains the huge scale. Nevertheless,
the enormous fortifications of sites, like Mont
Beuvray in Burgundyor Stanwick in Yorkshire,
were on a scale unprecedented in prehistoric
Europe. Perhaps 20 sites exceeded 90 hectares
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(Audouze and Buchsenschutz 1991,235), but
the vast majority were much smaller. Of the
13 sites identified in the Limousin, 10 were
smaller than 10 ha in area and only one,
Villejoubert with an exceptional enclosed area
of 360 ha, surpassed 25 ha. Similarly, 1 1 of
the 13 sites known in the Berry and five of the
eight located in the Aisne, were 20 ha or less
(Ralston 1988, 792).
The size of oppida varies both between and
within regions. The oppida of Bohemia and
southern Bavaria tend on the whole to be much
larger than those of northern and western
France, which rarely exceed 20 ha and are
often much smaller. Another group of very
large oppida are found in southern Britain,
even though, on the whole, British oppida are
fairly small. But within each region there is
considerable diversity. Stanwick in Yorkshire
covers some 350 ha in an area where massive
oppida are otherwise unknown, Mont Beuvray,
with an area of 135 ha, is equally unusual as
far west as Burgundy, while considerable
differences exist between different regions of
central France (Ralston 1988).
Regional differences are also very apparent
if oppida are classified morphologically.
The eastward limit is defined by Collis on the
edge of the Hungarian plain, where large
enclosed sites with timber-laced ramparts, and
with defensive features characteristic of the
Bavarian and Bohemian sites llke the Zangentor
entrances, are replaced by large sites consisting
of a hilltop fortress surrounded by extramural
settlements. However, these ‘Zemplin’ type
settlements do share some of the features of
contemporary settlements further west, such
as scale, the presence of artisanal activity and
the production and use of very similar ceramics
(Collis 1972; 1984, 12-13). At the western-
most extreme, the southern British ‘oppida’
are equally unusual. The dyke systems at
Chichester, Colchester and St Albans are
discontinuous and very complex, enclosing
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 RETHINKING THE OPPIDA
very large areas, but not only was the entire
enclosed area not settled but settlement actually
seems to have been dispersed, or focused
on a number of discrete nuclei within the
complexes.
Between these two extremes, the oppida of
France, Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia
are on the whole much more uniform morpho-
logically, but may be differentiated by varia-
tions in rampart construction. Earth ramparts
had been built in parts of temperate Europe
ever since sedentary settlement began in the
Neolithic. But although many late Iron Age
fortifications, in particular a number in eastern
France and north-west Germany, reused and
extended previous structures, the late La Tkne
fortifications may be distinguished both by
their unprecedented size and by new techniques
of rampart construction. Chief among the latter
was the use of timber-lacing in ramparts
throughout temperate Europe. Variants of this
technique are known well to the north and east
of the region usually considered to have been
the heartland of the oppida, in Scotland, Poland
and Romania (Ralston 1981, 84), and a com-
plex typology has been developed. Each type
shows a marked regional distribution. For
example, muri gullici, in which a timber frame
was held together with massive iron nails were
most common in the west: Kelheim ramparts,
in which the stone wall was supported by
sloping banks, are more common in the centre:
and the Preist type, using an un-nailed latices
of timbers, was more common further east.
Dump ramparts, with no timber lacing, were
common in Britain and came to replace muri
gullici in some parts of northern France at the
very end of the period.
This brief survey of the scale and morphol-
ogy of late La T h e defended sites raise sub-
stantial problems for the category ‘oppidum’.
What justification is there for excluding the
Zemplin type sites, for example, when the
ditch complexes of Colchester are included?
226
When both dump ramparts and timber laced
ramparts are common on non-oppida all over
temperate Europe, is there any point distin-
guishing oppida from late Iron Age hillforts?
Is a settlement category useful that assimilates
sites of one or two hectares in area to com-
plexes enclosing some 1500 ha or 2000 ha, but
distinguishesthem from sites of the same scale
which do not happen to be fortified? Our
current research paradigm effectively defines
an oppidum as any site broadly similar to Mont
Beuvray , Manching and Stradonice. The
further away from the area defined by those
three sites, the less the oppida conform to the
model. Unless a definition of oppidum can be
created based on functional rather than formal
criteria, it may be time to reject that paradigm
in favour of one better suited to expressing the
unity and diversity of late La T h e settlement.
WERE THE OPPIDA URBAN?
Much has been written on the extent to
which the oppida may be considered urban
(e.g. Alexander 1972; Nash 1976; Collis 1976;
Kruta 1980; Bintliff 1984, 195-200). The
issue is bedevilled by both empirical and
definitional uncertainties. Oppida are in their
nature difficult to excavate in toto, even where
they are not overlain, as many of the western
sites are, by Roman and later structures which
make timber buildings difficult to recognise.
Urbanism, on the other hand, is extremely
difficult to define, especially in the absence
of firm evidence for the size and occupations
of the populations that inhabited the oppida.
Understandably, many analysts have relied
heavily on Caesar’s description of some Iron
Age sites as urbes (Lat. ‘towns’), or else on
posited relationships between urbanisation and
the development of political structures, of
artisanal or industrial activityand of commerce.
Those arguments are, however, very fragile.
Caesar’s terminology was imprecise, inconsis-
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tent and politically motivated (Buchsenschutz
and Ralston 1986), while the arguments from
political structure, manufacture and commerce
not only depend on generalised models of
urban origins that may not be appropriate in
the context of temperate Europe, but also draw
on some questionable interpretations of the
archaeology of those phenomena. Rather than
build stronger houses of cards using these
methods, it seems safer to argue from the
archaeology upwards.
I propose two simple critexia of urbanism
susceptible to archaeological investigation.
First, as urbanism is not a property of indivi-
dual sites but rather of settlement systems, the
settlement systems in question must exhibit
some degree of functional differentiation and
specialisation between sites in order to be
deemed urban. Towns, in other words, imply
the countryside. This specialisation must
involve a degree of ranking which expresses
power differentials within society connected
with the production and consuinption of goods.
Ranking distinguishes hierarchical urban settle-
ment systems from heterarchical systems
within which settlements are differentiated but
not ranked (Crumley 1987, 418). Examples
of the latter type of system might be the Iron
Age settlement system recognised in the Upper
Thames valley that comprised both summer
and winter occupation sites (Lambrick and
Robertson 1979), and perhaps middle Iron Age
Wessex, if we accept the suggestion that the
hillforts complemented, rather than dominated,
the lowland sites (Haselgrove 1986; Stopford
1987).
My second criterion is that urban sites ought
to exhibit significantly different internal (intra-
site) differentiation than do other sites in
the settlement pattern. Central place theory
requires that sites be ranked according to the
number of higher-order functions they per-
form. Some major zoning of activities also
seems common to most sites recognised as
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urban in other periods and places (Sjoberg
1960). But care must be taken with this
criterion. All sites display some zoning of
activities. This is true even of neolithic long
houses and, at a larger scale, of Bronze Age
settlements like Biskupin in Poland. Equally,
central-place functions are not the only possible
explanation for complex internal organisation
on sites: some artisanal activities, such as
mining, may require or at least generate a high
level of spatial differentiation. Nevertheless,
the search for internal organisation has long
been regarded as an important indicator of
urban status for the oppida (e.g. Collis 1984,
105-136; Audouze and Buchsenschutz 1991,
233). Partly this reflects a search for the
familiar features of classical cities and medi-
aeval towns - monumental zones, elite resi-
dences, artisanal quarters - and as such is
ethnocentric. Nevertheless, the internal struc-
ture of these sites is without doubt informative
about their nature and function. But rather than
search for a ‘recognisably urban’ layout, it
seems better simply to require that intra-site
organisation be different from that of other
sites, and that any differences reflect a hier-
archical distribution of functions within the
settlement system, rather than a heterarchical
one.
First, then, can we identify differentiated
settlement systems in the late La T h e , other
than those which are clearly heterarchical?
Two approaches are possible. One alternative
is to use various forms of archaeological
survey to identify settlement patterns contem-
porary with the oppida. The other is to compare
the activities attested on open settlements with
those attested on oppida in the hope of identi-
fying central place functions restricted to the
oppida. Relatively few late La Tene landscapes
have been reconstructed by systematic survey.
Those surveys which have told us the most
about the Iron Age in Britain have been carried
out in regions usually considered outside the
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 RETHINKING THE OPPIDA
distribution of oppida (e.g. Hingley and Miles
1984; Sharples and Ambers 1991). But those
surveys which have been carried out on the
continent have not yet produced convincing
evidence of the settlement hierarchies of which
oppida are often thought to be tip of the
iceberg. Mills’ work in the Auvergne did not
uncover a network of small sites that could be
co-ordinated with the oppidum of Gergovie,
and some sites - including the excavated open
settlement of Aulnat-Gandaillat - seem to
have been abandoned before or at the moment
when the oppidum was created. Nor were
dependant settlements located in a much
smaller survey also carried out by Mills in the
Berry, near the oppidum of Levroux, which
also replaced a nearby open settlement (Mills
1985). The phenomenon of the abandonment
of an open settlement and its replacement by
a fortified site is a common one in late La Tkne
Europe (Collis 1984, 77-85; Audouze and
Buchsenschutz 1991, 233-8; Buchsenschutz
and Colin 1990). Less well known is the
impact on settlement generally of the sudden
appearance of the oppida. Only in the Aisne
valley has systematic survey, combined with
the rescue excavation of a variety of sites,
produced a more nuanced picture, in which
the settlement pattern is dislocated at the time
of the formation of the oppida but either
then, or possibly after an interval, is reorgan-
ised around larger farms than previously
(Haselgrove 1990). It should be emphasised
that the chronological precision necessary to
trace these processes in detail is very hard to
achieve.
The Auvergne, the Berry and the Aisne
valley are among the best understood land-
scapes in France, yet in none of them have
hierarchical settlement systems been demon-
strated contemporary to the oppida. The
appearance of oppida does not seem to origi-
nate through gradual diversification within an
existing settlement system so much as through
228
rapid growth, which results in the abandon-
ment of at least some other settlements (Collis
1982; Haselgrove 1990, 255-8). A very
similar picture has been presented for the
growth of Maiden Castle, at the expense of
neighbouring settlements, in the middle to late
Iron Age (Sharples 1991,260). It may be that
periods of sudden settlement concentration
were not uncommon in late prehistoric Europe.
But the picture seems rather different in
Bohemia where oppida appeared earlier and
co-existed within smaller settlements. To some
extent, the contrast between settlement forms
seems to mirror the geography and it is unclear
how far the smaller settlements can be regarded
as subordinated to the larger ones. But the
difference from the situation in central France
is a useful reminder of just how difficult it is
to generalise about the late La Tkne, and in
fact settlement patterns seem to have varied
to some extent throughout Europe (Collis
1984, 167-84; Audouze and Buchsenschutz
1991,238 -40). That diversity would be even
more evident if regions like Britain and Poland
were included. In the face of this degree of
variation and in the current state of our know-
ledge of most areas, it might seem rash to
categorically deny the existence anywhere of
settlement hierarchies headed by oppida.
Nevertheless, Iron Age urbanism has been a
major focus of research for some decades now,
and it is no longer true to say that open settle-
ments and the landscapes around the oppida
have not been investigated.
If hierarchies between contemporary settle-
ments are difficult to demonstrate, can oppida
be distinguished from open settlements on
functional grounds? In practice, few criteria
are available. Not only do open settlements like
Aulnat regularly produce evidence for iron and
glass working, but even coins were produced
and used there (Tournaire et al. 1982; Gruel
and Brunaux 1987). Oppida do not seem to
have played a specialised role, then, within late
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La T h e society either as centres of production
or consumption. Once again, the picture needs
to be nuanced to take into account differences
between regions. Slip decorated pottery in
Bohemia was more or less restricted to the
oppida, but the complex relationships indicated
by the circulation of these finewares are
difficult to resolve to any simple model of large
sites dominating smaller ones (Cumberpatch
1991). Indigenous production of glass began
at a number of sites in Bohemia, but in La Tkne
C2-D an increase in the quantity and variety
of the glass produced seems to centre on the
oppida, but little of it was distributed to smaller
sites in the region (Venclova 1990, 142-56).
It is possible that some hier,archy should be
envisaged in this region, but the demonstration
of different patterns of production and con-
sumption is not enough to show that these sites
performed central place functions. At all
events, the situation is very different in central
and southern France, where: imported fine-
wares and amphorae appear on most categories
of site. Even the wood and earth architecture
of buildings in these oppidii is part of the
same tradition as that of the structures known
from the open settlements (Audouze and
Buchsenschutz 1988).
The large fortified sites of the late La Tbne
seem to differ from contemporary and earlier
open sites mostly in being large and fortified.
Those differences are important, and I shall
return to them. But there is lide archaeological
evidence for any central place functions,
whether administrative, commercial, industrial
or religious. As far as we can tell, the oppida
had no temples, no monumental architecture,
no public spaces and, as far as we can tell,
much the same sorts of things went on there
as had done in the open settlements that
preceded them.
Discussion of monumentality leads naturally
to the second criterion of urbanism, intra-site
differentiation or the zoning of activities within
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oppida. Classical cities and mediaeval towns
exhibited zoning in different ways. The
physical layout of a town is in some sense a
cultural map indicating the relative importance
of public and private (and the way they are
conceptualised in society), the extent to which
rich and poor lived in separate worlds, the
relative importance of cult, political participa-
tion and commerce in structuring urban society
and, most importantly, where power resided.
The physical organisation of oppida might
in principle tell us a good deal more about
late La Tbne society than whether or not it
was urbanised. As ever, practical problems
intervene.
A convenient starting point is provided by
the oppidum of Mont Beuvray in Burgundy.
Extensively excavated at the turn of the last
century, and now the subject of major new
excavations, Mont Beuvray has some claims
to being the best understood late La T h e site
in France and it remains for many archae-
ologists the archetypal oppidum. The site is
a volcanic mountain, three peaks of which
were enclosed in the Iron Age by a rampart,
five kilometres in circumference, with elabor-
ately fortified entrances. It is worth noting that
in size, complexity of defences and perhaps
chronology, the site is unusual so far west, and
recalls the oppida of Bohemia or Bavaria,
except for the murus gallicus type of rampart.
But unlike them, Mont Beuvray remained in
occupation for the first seventy years or so of
Roman rule and developed into a Gallo-Roman
prCcoce city. At the time when most of it was
abandoned in favour of the new Augustan
foundation of Autun, there was a monumental
forum on the highest of its summits, with
temples and probably other public buildings,
while on the lower hilltops were large, Roman-
style houses with stone walls, tiled roofs
and courtyards that evoke the peristyles of
Mediterranean town houses. As in Rome, the
less flamboyant residence buildings were
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 RETHINKING THE OPPIDA
located in the valleys and, by the Augustan
period, the city was clearly thriving and houses
had overspilled the line of the ramparts and
were constructed on the filled-in ditches.
If it were possible to demonstrate this sort
of structure for the late Iron Age, there would
be no doubt that the oppida were towns. But
at Mont Beuvray, the Roman city has effec-
tively erased whatever lay beneath and even
the painstaking modern excavations have failed
to locate similar zoning in the late La T h e .
The story might be repeated, on a smaller
scale, for dozens of sites in France where
oppida were replaced by Roman cities. There
are exceptions. Villeneuve Ste Germain in the
Aisne valley is a defended valley bottom site
that either replaced or coexisted with hilltop
oppida like Pommiers (Fleury 1986). Here
there does seem to be a division between a zone
inhabited by people and animals and another
zone devoted to craft production. Faunal
remains are distributed unevenly across the site
and the excavated area is divided up by com-
plex ditch and post structures. But the division
is only a matter of a few hundred metres and
spatial separation between, for example,
butchering and living areas is hardly restricted
to urban settlements.
More can be learnt from sites outside the
area eventually controlled by Rome, where the
oppida were abandoned rather than built over.
Most important is Manching in Bavaria, the
subject of an extended campaign, where large
open area excavations have revealed post-built
structures organised around and within pali-
saded enclosures arranged along streets. The
less structured plan compared to Villeneuve
is probably attributable to the long develop-
ment of Manching from a mid-La T h e open
settlement to a late La Tbne oppidum as
opposed to Villeneuve’s very brief and perhaps
sudden establishment. Otherwise, a complex
of ‘compounds’ organised along roads seems
to characterise both sites and maybe smaller
230
sites like the open settlement at Levroux as
well. Similar compounds are known at Hrazany
in Bohemia and most importantly at the
Moravian site of Star6 Hradisko, where the
excavator argued that internal organisation of
the oppidum was restricted to the organisation
of these autonomous enclosures (Meduna
1970). The late pre-Roman Iron Age occupa-
tion of Silchester may also conform to this
pattern (Fulford 1985, 43-4). The question
of zoning can also be approached through
artefact distributions. At Manching it has been
argued that within a 250 metre long transect
there are uneven distributions of iron slag, and
the residue from bronze working, coin produc-
tion and textile working (Jacobi 1974,262-8).
But, as at Villeneuve, the demonstration that
not every activity took place at every point is
unsurprising and some such local zoning might
be expected on almost any site. A difference
of a hundred metres or so between residences
and the sites of craft activities scarcely implies
the existence of distinct town quarters. It might
even be argued that the occurrence of traces
of all these activities within the same discrete
area at Manching suggests very little zoning,
while the patterning illustrated is to some
extent generated by the road that bisects the
transect. Wells’ attempts to assess the degree
of zoning of activities at Kelheim by comparing
the artefacts recovered from different parts of
the site seem so far to support the notion of
a relatively low level of intra-site differentia-
tion there (Wells 1987). Perhaps the best
example of one zone playing a specialised role
within an oppidum is the area occupied by
Italian traders on the MagdaIensbergin Austria,
but this entrepot is hardly representative of the
organisation of most oppida.
Not all sites are alike in terms of the kind
of internal patterning they exhibit. Ironically,
the clearest evidence for large scale zoning
comes from oppida at the very limits of the
distribution (and definition) like Colchester,
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with a series of foci within the ditch systems,
or Zemplin with its citadel i2nd ‘Unterburg’.
But the two categories are very different: the
south British sites look very unlike urban
complexes, perhaps more like estate bound-
aries in some cases (Bradley 1984, 150-2).
The east European examples look much more
like classical, particularly Greek, cities. But
within the occupied areas of most sites, it is
very difficult indeed to demonstrate any signi-
ficant zoning by class (elite and non-elite
residences) or activity (residential, commercial,
industrial quarters) and there is no certain
example of religious or public monuments or
spaces in the Iron Age oppida. Rather, the few
well-excavated examples that we have suggest
both large and small fortified villages, or
perhaps better, clusters of compounds within
each of which people lived, penned animals
and made clothes, and zoned their activities
in much the same way as they had done in
smaller settlements.
Were the oppida urban? The diversity among
the sites considered as oppida makes generali-
sation, particularly between regions, difficult.
But in terms of the criteria examined, inter-site
and intra-site differentiation and specialisation,
either they were not towns or they represent
a local variation on urbanism peculiar to Iron
Age Europe.
LATE LA TENE SETTILEMENT:
AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW
Perhaps both the categories used and the
questions posed are wrong. The term oppidum
embraces a wide variety of sites, too wide to
allow easy generalisation and yet arbitrarily
exclusive, setting up false geographical bound-
aries and dividing open sites from enclosed
ones. Best perhaps to abandon the false impli-
cation that the oppida have any analytical unity.
Certainly urbanism seems the wrong way to
approach the issue. However we interpret the
OXFORD JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY
Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1993
largest sites of late Iron Age Europe, they
remain very different from most cities. By
focusing too much on supposed similarities to
Roman cities or mediaeval towns (and, as I
have argued, the similarities are very slight),
we run the risk of ‘familiarising the Iron Age’,
missing what is unique and different about the
late La Tbne in our search for analogies (Hill
1989). Various solutions present themselves.
One would be to search for a wider range
of urbanisms to which these settlements might
be compared. Cunliffe (1985) has suggested
that some Chinese cities might provide anal-
ogies for ‘dispersed urbanism’, perhaps settle-
ments like Colchester or Sarmizagethusa in
Roumania. The ‘cities’ of the Yoruba of pre-
colonial Nigeria consisted of vast complexes
of compounds in which physical proximity
reflected to some extent proximity within the
kinship system. The sudden nucleation of open
settlements in some parts of Europe into forti-
fied villages of agriculturalists recalls the
Italian incastallamento of the early Middle
Ages, or the development of inland fortified
villages on the islands of the mediaeval
Aegean. Both phenomena coincided, as it
happens, with the decline of open, urbanised
settlement systems. But if the similarities in
some cases may be marked, so too are the
contrasts, and it is difficult to go beyond the
comparison without creating an abstraction that
again takes us away from the specificity of the
European Iron Age. Even if we could create
some broad new category of urbanism, it
would not help us to understand the changing
settlement archaeology of the late La T h e and
its distinctiveness.
After all there are changes, and there is a
level at which late La T h e settlement has a
certain unity. If we take late Iron Age settle-
ment as a whole in temperate Europe, not
simply in the area usually characterised by the
civilisation of the oppida, but in the huge area
between the Atlantic and the Black Sea and the
23 1
 RETHINKING THE OPPIDA
Mediterranean littoral and the Baltic, it is
possible to detect unity in two areas, one
technological and cultural and the other social
and economic. The technological and cultural
unity consists of those traditions of fortification
and construction in wood and earth which had
characterised Woodland Europe for millennia
(Collis and Ralston 1976). To some extent
these traditions derive naturally from the
temperate European environment and are
geographically defined by its limits, but there
are cultural aspects too, best worked out in
regional preferences for particular variants in
fortification, or in religious traditions attached
to boundaries (Bowden and McOrmish 1987).
But the second aspect of this unity is new, the
increased social power which marshalled these
traditions and technologies in the last two
centuries BC and put them to new uses. The
increased social power of Iron Age groups may
be attested in other spheres, in agricultural
expansion, in migration and warfare, and in
the exploitation of iron resources and tools on
an unprecedented scale. This is not the place
to discuss its origins, which are in any case
obscure. But the links between the new power
of the late Iron Age populations and their
settlements is attested not only by the area
enclosed in the largest oppida but also by the
massive investment of timber and iron nails
in the muri gallici and other timber laced
ramparts.
The new combination of increased social
power and existing technologies and traditions
was manifested in different ways in different
areas. It is this unity of techniques, rather than
a unity of morphology or function, that brings
together not only the ‘territorial oppida’ of
southern Britain, the small fortified sites of
western France and the huge German and
Bohemian hillforts, but also the Zemplin type
settlements and structures like the north
Oxfordshire Grim’s Ditch which enclosed
some 6000 ha. The ability to create these
232
structures gave some groups the resources to
carry out the sudden nucleations that look in
many areas like a response to threat or crisis,
but we should not assume that all these struc-
tures were constructed in a hurry or on a single
occasion. Fortification was presumably only
one episode in the life history of some sites.
The variety of ways in which this new capa-
bility was used also reflects the fragmentation
of Iron Age Europe. Otherwise it is difficult
to account for the variations between adjacent
regions, north and south Bohemia for example,
or the Berry and Burgundy. Some populations
created one single huge fortified site, others
built a series of little ones, others built none.
Some fortifications may have been designed
to intimidate outsiders, others to discipline
insiders and it may be that in some cases it was
the action of fortifying, rather than the end
product, which was of greater social signifi-
cance. What was new about the late La Tbne
was the ability to mobilise the resources,
energy and skills to carry out these tasks.
We may conclude by aslung why, given this
increased social power, the people of late Iron
Age Europe did not create cities. One answer,
of course, is why should they have? Urbanism
cannot be assumed to be a necessary stage of
development and social evolution is properly
a trace left in history, not a force propelling
it. But urbanism is a widespread development
and one of which some Iron Age elites, at least,
were aware, through contact with the Mediter-
ranean world. Other technological innovations,
like the potter’s wheel, had been widely
adopted, while some, like coinage and wine
drinking were less widespread but stillcommon
in Europe on the eve of Roman conquest.
No definitive answer can be given, but it
may be relevant that temperate Europe has
never been a particularly urban friendly
environment. The chronological gap between
Neolithicisation and urbanism is much greater
in Europe than in most parts of the world.
OXFORDJOURNALOF ARCHAEOLOGY
0 Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1993
 GREG WOOLF
Roman towns in Europe were smaller and
further apart than towns lelsewhere in the
empire, and the functions they performed
differed very little from those performed by
vici. Roman urbanism in Europe was largely
a cultural and administrative phenomenon and
one that rapidly withered as soon as the
classical urban apogee passed (Jones 1987).
Equally, European urbanisation between 1500
and 1800 AD was marked b y a peculiarly low
degree of hierarchy by comparison with urban-
ism in China, Japan or Russia (de Vries 1984).
In part that was a product of political fragmen-
tation, but that too is characteristic of Europe
in the longue durCe (Weber 1979). One possi-
bility is that this resistance to the development
of urban hierarchies and site differentiation
derives from the physical constraints imposed
by the European landmass before canals and
railways. By contrast with the Mediterranean
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