Rethinking the Iron Age

Abstract

This paper argues there is an urgent need to critically evaluate the basic assumptions used by Iron Age archaeologists across Europe. It suggests that the existing frameworks of explanation and interpretation are at best inadequate to understand the actual archaeological evidence for the period. At worst they are still unconsciously reproducing nineteenth century nationalist and racist ideologies (e. g. the preoccupations with the «Celts≫ or «Iberians≫, etc.). Drawing on examples from Britain, and the Czech and Slovak republics. We will argue that archaeological evidence Iron the Iron Age does not neatly fit our modernist and Eurocentric assumptions about what the period ought to have been like. It suggests Iron Age archaeology must recognise the difference of the past, that prehistoric societies in Europe may have had very different forms of social organisations, world views and economies than those in later European history. This means critically questioning archaeological evidence and being open to the possibility that existing interpretations are wrong (e. g. stressing the impact of the Mediterranean World Economy, that Oppidas were urban centres, or that settlement and subsistence data can be adequately understood in modern capitalist/functionalist terms, etc.). As such Iron Age studies can on/y be a «Contextual Archaeology≫.