Hillforts of the Eastern Hallstatt Circle. Central places, fortified areas or something else?

Summary

One of the most prominent landscape features of the Hallstatt Culture that more or less stands for the Early Iron Age of the Central Europe are hillforts. They are usually located on prominent spots in landscape and surrounded with some kind of fortification. This paper will try to combine geographic and social contextual analysis of these enclosures and create complex model of their meaning within cultural and physical landscape of the Iron Age communities. Usually they are interpreted as central settlements of local communities built in their core and ramparts and ditches were seen in purely defensive role. The very idea of central place seems to be very coherent in terms of content as well as function within the social structure of local community. It is possible that enclosure (rampart or a ditch) does not only function as fortification but also as a definition of special space. It is probably true that these places were central places of the Iron Age communities. However, it is much more difficult to answer were they created in the core of the communal activity or they became central places because of focusing of such activity around them?

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Biographies of Enclosure in Global Context

Keywords

Spatial Coverage