I'm afraid the Barbarians aren't speaking, or at least not to me!
This falls into my rare bad book category, and I couldn't even
manage to read it all. I started by disagreeing with the main
premise, that we don't know much about the pre-Roman people of
Europe because they weren't literate, then I became annoyed by the
bitty narrative which jumps about all over the place and muddles
its discussion of Roman and non-Roman in a very confusing way, and
finally I tested a particular passage about which I knew something,
and found the discussion so facile and so limited I was amazed a
'professor' was responsible. Perhaps it is because his subject is
anthropology that he wastes an abundance of archaeological
evidence. There are numerous decent books about the pre-Roman and
non-Roman peoples of Europe; don't bother with this one. (Kirkus
UK)
"The Barbarians Speak" re-creates the story of Europe's
indigenous people who were nearly stricken from historical memory
even as they adopted and transformed aspects of Roman culture. The
Celts and Germans inhabiting temperate Europe before the arrival of
the Romans left no written record of their lives and were often
dismissed as "barbarians" by the Romans who conquered them.
Accounts by Julius Caesar and a handful of other Roman and Greek
writers would lead us to think that prior to contact with the
Romans, European natives had much simpler political systems,
smaller settlements, no evolving social identities, and that they
practiced human sacrifice. A more accurate, sophisticated picture
of the indigenous people emerges, however, from the archaeological
remains of the Iron Age. Here Peter Wells brings together
information that has belonged to the realm of specialists and
enables the general reader to share in the excitement of
rediscovering a "lost people." In so doing, he is the first to
marshal material evidence in a broad-scale examination of the
response by the Celts and Germans to the Roman presence in their
lands.
The recent discovery of large pre-Roman settlements throughout
central and western Europe has only begun to show just how complex
native European societies were before the conquest. Remnants of
walls, bone fragments, pottery, jewelry, and coins tell much about
such activities as farming, trade, and religious ritual in their
communities; objects found at gravesites shed light on the richly
varied lives of individuals. Wells explains that the presence--or
absence--of Roman influence among these artifacts reveals a range
of attitudes toward Rome at particular times, from enthusiastic
acceptance among urban elites to creative resistance among rural
inhabitants. In fascinating detail, Wells shows that these
societies did grow more cosmopolitan under Roman occupation, but
that the people were much more than passive beneficiaries; in many
cases they helped determine the outcomes of Roman military and
political initiatives. This book is at once a provocative,
alternative reading of Roman history and a catalyst for overturning
long-standing assumptions about nonliterate and indigenous
societies.
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