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Central Gaul at the Roman Conquest: conceptions and misconceptions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Ian Ralston
Ian Ralston*
Affiliation:
Department of Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, 16–20 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9JZ & CNRS UPR AO 178, Laboratoire d'Archéologie, École Normale Supérieure, 45 rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France
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Extract

Several recent reconstructions of the social and economic development of non-Mediterranean Gaul after c. 200 BC have argued for the development of complex societies, characterized by the appearance of centralized political entities with urban – or at least urbanizing – communities. The emergence of such ‘Archaic States’ is often considered as having been restricted to a broad zone running eastward from the Atlantic façade through the northern Massif Central to the Swiss plateau. Five certain such states are usually claimed: Bituriges cubi, Aedui, Arverni, Sequani, Helvetii; and three probable: Pictones, Lemovices and Lingones. The constitutents of this zone were originally recognized by Dr Daphne Nash (1976; 1978a; 1978b; 1981), and her view has since been adopted in Britain by Champion and his collaborators (1984), Bintliff (1984) and, most recently, Cunliffe (1988: figure 38). Essential to the formulation of this hypothesis was a wide-ranging consideration of three domains of protohistoric evidence on Gaul: literary, most conspicuously Julius Caesar’s de Bello Gallico; numismatics; and the settlement record of the late La Tène and its more shadowy antecedents. Among more recent commentators, a primary interest in the ‘core–periphery’ relationship (Cunliffe 1988; Rowlands et al. 1987) which existed between the Mediterranean world and Central Gaul is manifest. In a minimal view, this interaction may be envisaged in terms of the consequences of long-distance trade and subsequent military conquest spurring socio-political change. The unspoken by-product of this perspective is that differential development within non-Mediterranean Gaul is simplistically presented in terms of distance-decay from the Mediterranean littoral, with little attention being paid to the effects of physiographic diversity across this landmass.

Type
Special section: Classical matters
Information
Antiquity , Volume 62 , Issue 237 , December 1988 , pp. 786 - 794
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1988

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