Whose Ancestors, les Gaulois?

Summary

Four decades ago this summer, newly arrived in a country where we barely spoke the language, our field crew began excavation of an Iron Age hill fort. First encounters quickly taught us that local identity was grounded in the tradition of the Iron Age Celts, not the later arriving Romans, Franks, or the region’s powerful medieval dukes. My intention was to see how indigenous peoples had fared before and after the Roman conquest; I planned a colonization framework. But the site was a surprise, yielding evidence for repetitive utilization over three millennia as a sacred precinct, a place of feasting and the exercise of power, and a fortification against marauders. No familiar narrative could cover the site’s complex history. We constructed a "meta-narrative" that could fit the site into a more encompassing framework. Landscape archaeology was in its infancy and did not yet include a regional perspective. Using a comprehensive understanding of archaeological "best practice," we assembled a new toolkit for interpretation. Our project was among the first to integrate ethnography, remote sensing, and regional- and continental-scale paleo-environmental and documentary evidence. Burgundy’s complex and well-preserved history of settlement and environmental change taught us historical ecology.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Sound of Theory

Keywords

Spatial Coverage