Building Community: The Heuneburg Hillfort as Monument and Metaphor

Summary

Walls are assumed to serve as systems of containment and protection in response to social divisiveness but they may also serve to reduce or mask conflict within a society. Their physical form may be entirely expedient, largely symbolic, or some combination of the two. Early Iron Age settlements in west-central Europe were often situated on promontories with wall and ditch systems encircling portions of the occupied terrain but because of the daunting task of excavating such hillfort sites, which can have deposits of many meters, relatively few sites have been extensively documented and our picture of the significance, both functional and symbolic, of these sites remains incomplete. The Heuneburg hillfort on the upper Danube River in southwest Germany is one of the few such sites to have yielded decades of data and the most recent excavations there, together with the application of new technologies, including LIDAR and various forms of remote sensing, have produced intriguing new evidence for the complexity of the hillfort phenomenon in this region.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• The social lives of forts: Reconsidering the social construction of ancient fortified settlements and their diverse roles in political organization

Keywords

Spatial Coverage