Collective Action in Iron Age Europe: Public Assemblies as Arenas for Participatory Government

Summary

Public assemblies were a common phenomenon in Iron Age and Early Medieval Europe. In these large collective meetings, important decisions concerning war, peace, the choice of military leaders, legislation and the administration of justice were taken. Together with their political role, they also fulfilled other simultaneous functions, including religious festivals and the holding of fairs. Once believed to be archaeologically invisible, recent research has identified the remains of a large number of public assembly places within Late Iron Age fortifications. This paper will summarize the archaeological and literary evidence for Iron Age public assemblies, setting them into the wider comparative framework of collective action theory.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Power from Below: Collectivity and Heterarchy in Global Perspective

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14528