This book provides a broad overview of the current research questions facing archaeologists working in Europe. The book uses a case-study method in which a number of archaeologists discuss their work and reflect on their goals and approaches. The emphasis is on the intellectual process of archaeology, not just the techniques and results. Chronological coverage is provided from the Mesolithic to the Iron Age and over much of the European continent.

In AD 9, a Roman traitor led an army of barbarians who trapped and then slaughtered three entire Roman legions: 20,000 men, half the Roman army in Europe. If not for this battle, the Roman Empire would surely have expanded to the Elbe River, and probably eastward into present-day Russia. But after this defeat, the shocked Romans ended all efforts to expand beyond the Rhine, which became the fixed border between Rome and Germania for the next 400 years, and which remains the cultural border between Latin western Europe and Germanic central and eastern Europe today. This fascinating narrative introduces us to the key protagonists: the emperor Augustus, the most powerful of the Caesars; his general Varus, who was the wrong man in the wrong place; and the barbarian leader Arminius, later celebrated as the first German hero. In graphic detail, based on recent archaeological finds, the author leads the reader through the mud, blood, and decimation that was the Battle of Teutoburg Forest.

This volume presents preliminary results of three seasons of excavation at the Late Iron Age oppidum settlement of Kelheim, including analytical studies of materials recovered and interpretation of the significance of the findings. Research on the materials presented here is ongoing, and more detailed reports will follow at a later date. The volume is divided into four main sections. The first explains the reasons for investigations at Kelheim, the questions addressed, the character of the landscape, and the history of archaeological research there. The second describes the techniques of excavation used and the progress over the three field seasons, and presents the results of the excavations, regarding both settlement features and artifact distribution, as well as an overview of the character of the material recovered. Many illustrations are included here in order to show the range of pottery, metal, and other objects from the site. The third section includes special studies of several categories of materials, as well as discussion of the chronology of the occupation and presentation of the results of the landscape survey around the Late Iron Age settlement. The final section attempts to address some major questions about late prehistoric Europe from the perspective of these excavations and analytical results at Kelheim. A final section presents investigations into ritual behavior in the Kelheim region and uses this theme to argue for strong continuity of tradition from prehistoric times into the Middle Ages.

This volume presents preliminary results of three seasons of excavation at the Late Iron Age oppidum settlement of Kelheim, including analytical studies of materials recovered and interpretation of the significance of the findings. Research on the materials presented here is ongoing, and more detailed reports will follow at a later date. The volume is divided into four main sections. The first explains the reasons for investigations at Kelheim, the questions addressed, the character of the landscape, and the history of archaeological research there. The second describes the techniques of excavation used and the progress over the three field seasons, and presents the results of the excavations, regarding both settlement features and artifact distribution, as well as an overview of the character of the material recovered. Many illustrations are included here in order to show the range of pottery, metal, and other objects from the site. The third section includes special studies of several categories of materials, as well as discussion of the chronology of the occupation and presentation of the results of the landscape survey around the Late Iron Age settlement. The final section attempts to address some major questions about late prehistoric Europe from the perspective of these excavations and analytical results at Kelheim. A final section presents investigations into ritual behavior in the Kelheim region and uses this theme to argue for strong continuity of tradition from prehistoric times into the Middle Ages.

The peoples who inhabited Europe during the two millennia before the Roman conquests had established urban centers, large-scale production of goods such as pottery and iron tools, a money economy, and elaborate rituals and ceremonies. Yet as Peter Wells argues here, the visual world of these late prehistoric communities was profoundly different from those of ancient Rome's literate civilization and today's industrialized societies. Drawing on startling new research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology, Wells reconstructs how the peoples of pre-Roman Europe saw the world and their place in it. He sheds new light on how they communicated their thoughts, feelings, and visual perceptions through the everyday tools they shaped, the pottery and metal ornaments they decorated, and the arrangements of objects they made in their ritual places--and how these forms and patterns in turn shaped their experience.

"How Ancient Europeans Saw the World" offers a completely new approach to the study of Bronze Age and Iron Age Europe, and represents a major challenge to existing views about prehistoric cultures. The book demonstrates why we cannot interpret the structures that Europe's pre-Roman inhabitants built in the landscape, the ways they arranged their settlements and burial sites, or the complex patterning of their art on the basis of what these things look like to us. Rather, we must view these objects and visual patterns as they were meant to be seen by the ancient peoples who fashioned them.

"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.

The peoples who inhabited Europe during the two millennia before the Roman conquests had established urban centers, large-scale production of goods such as pottery and iron tools, a money economy, and elaborate rituals and ceremonies. Yet as Peter Wells argues here, the visual world of these late prehistoric communities was profoundly different from those of ancient Rome's literate civilization and today's industrialized societies. Drawing on startling new research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology, Wells reconstructs how the peoples of pre-Roman Europe saw the world and their place in it. He sheds new light on how they communicated their thoughts, feelings, and visual perceptions through the everyday tools they shaped, the pottery and metal ornaments they decorated, and the arrangements of objects they made in their ritual places--and how these forms and patterns in turn shaped their experience. How Ancient Europeans Saw the World offers a completely new approach to the study of Bronze Age and Iron Age Europe, and represents a major challenge to existing views about prehistoric cultures. The book demonstrates why we cannot interpret the structures that Europe's pre-Roman inhabitants built in the landscape, the ways they arranged their settlements and burial sites, or the complex patterning of their art on the basis of what these things look like to us. Rather, we must view these objects and visual patterns as they were meant to be seen by the ancient peoples who fashioned them.

These three volumes deal with the Iron Age grave materials from Magdalenska gora, excavated by the Duchess Paul Friedrich von Mecklenburg-Schwerin. The Duchess of Mecklenburg, a member of an Austrian royal family with estates in Slovenia, conducted her excavations in the early years of the twentieth century. The materials from Magdalenska gora were purchased by the Peabody Museum in the 1930s.

This volume presents data and analysis on settlement structure, subsistence patterns, manufacturing, and trade from the Peabody Museum's four seasons of excavation at Hascerkeller, Bavaria, a typical Central European agricultural community at the start of the final millennium B.C.

These three volumes deal with the Iron Age grave materials from Magdalenska gora, excavated by the Duchess Paul Friedrich von Mecklenburg-Schwerin. The Duchess of Mecklenburg, a member of an Austrian royal family with estates in Slovenia, conducted her excavations in the early years of the twentieth century. The materials from Magdalenska gora were punchased by the Peabodt Museum in the 1930s. "Volume III" presents data and analysis of the horse remains and human skeletal materials.

The barbarians who destroyed the glory that was Rome demolished civilization along with it, and for the next four centuries the peasants and artisans of Europe barely held on. Random violence, mass migration, disease, and starvation were the only ways of life. This is the picture of the Dark Ages that most historians promote. But archaeology tells a different story. Peter Wells, one of the world s leading archaeologists, surveys the archaeological record to demonstrate that the Dark Ages were not dark at all. The kingdoms of Christendom that emerged starting in the ninth century sprang from a robust, previously little-known European culture, albeit one that left behind few written texts."

Did people in the Iron Age see their bronze figurines and sculpted stones differently from the way we see them today? How can we approach the problem of determining how they saw things? How different was their experience viewing these objects in the course of their use, from ours as we look at them in museum cases or through photographs in books?Recent research in cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology forms the theoretical basis for a new approach to understanding the visual basis of communication in early Europe. The focus is on societies from the Early Iron Age to the early medieval period in temperate Europe, at the time that traditions of writing were gradually being adopted in this part of the world. Following review of the most relevant results of new experiments and observations in those sciences, Peter S. Wells examines the visual aspects of the archaeological evidence to investigate the role that visuality - the visual quality of things - played in the expression of the self, in interaction between members of social groups, in ritual activity, and in the creation and experience of cultural landscapes.

Who were the Iron Age peoples of Europe? Celts, Germans, Scythians and others are among the names that come to mind. But such names, and the characteristics associated with them, come to us from outside observers - Greek and Roman writers - not from the native peoples themselves. To understand how late prehistoric groups constructed and expressed their identities, we need to examine the rich archaeological evidence left by Iron Age Europeans themselves. Recent theoretical and methodological advances in anthropology, archaeology and history, together with results of archaeological research all over Europe, provide the basis for a new approach to the problem of the identities of Iron Age peoples. Peter Wells uses patterns of identity revealed in the archaeology to interpret the commentaries of Greek and Roman authors who conveyed their own perceptions of these non-literate groups. Finally, he examines ways in which Iron Age Europeans responded to the Greek and Roman representations of them. The result was an ever-changing mosaic of complex and dynamic identities among the diverse peoples of Late Iron Age Europe.

The barbarians who destroyed the glory that was Rome demolished civilization along with it, and for the next four centuries the peasants and artisans of Europe barely held on. Random violence, mass migration, disease, and starvation were the only way of life. This is the picture of the Dark Ages that most historians promote. But archaeology tells a different story. Peter S. Wells, one of the world's leading archaeologists, surveys the archaeological record to demonstrate that the Dark Ages were not dark at all. The kingdoms of Christendom that emerged starting in the ninth century sprang from a robust, previously little-known, European culture, albeit one that left behind few written texts. This recently recognized culture achieved heights in artistry, technology, craft production, commerce, and learning. Future assessments of the period between Rome and Charlemagne will need to incorporate this fresh new picture.