This book focuses on the temperate European Iron Age, which lasted for much of the first millennium BC; although essentially protohistoric in character, it is a frequently contested period in terms of its interpretation. The dominant schools of thought attempt, to variable extents, to reconcile archaeological, historical, and linguistic evidence, which is unevenly available across space and time. Rapidly accumulating bodies of new information primarily from field archaeology make plain the huge cultural variability present, both chorologically and chronologically. “Progress”—even when recognizable—is in Patrice Brun's graphic description, a record of recurrent ups and downs like the teeth of a saw (“L’évolution en dents de scie des formes d'expression du pouvoir durant l’âge du Fer en Europe tempérée,” in Les structures sociales protohistoriques en Gaule et Ibérie, 2015). Geographically, the core area for most wide-scale interpretations occupies an arc around the north of the Alps from the middle Danube to the Bay of Biscay, extending north into southern Britain. Although contested, much of this sector is associated with “peoples” such as the Celts, Gauls, and later the Germans.
The “alternative Iron Ages” considered here are not in the main an attempt to challenge and recast the evidence and prevailing models deployed for this zone but rather to provide studies from (in particular, western) Iberia, northern and southern Britain, northern Holland, east-central Europe, and Sardinia that advance hypotheses about the nature of Iron Age societies that may have been configured very differently in social and political terms. Yet, despite a rather strident introduction that intimates that many characteristics claimed by archaeologists—for example, hierarchies, aristocracies, and chiefdoms—are now “accepted only with reluctance” (p. 1), these concepts largely go unchallenged for European Iron Age sequences for which they were traditionally proffered.
In general, the editors and contributing authors investigate, with supporting case studies, social mechanisms or models that highlight inter alia egalitarianism, heterarchical perspectives, segmentary systems, anarchy, and the role of the peasantry in the development of different Iron Age societies. A preface by Timothy Earle, an introduction by the editors, and three chapters set the scene. One chapter traces the presence and recognition of egalitarian formations in the European Iron Age, and the other two are more avowedly anthropological: one, drawing evidence from northwestern North America, tackles the application of anarchic viewpoints to the European Iron Age, and the other, based on West African fieldwork and a reading of ethnohistory, examines egalitarianism as process and its spatial correlates.
The authors of the case studies in Part II deploy available archaeological evidence either to demonstrate the lack of recognizable indications of social or political hierarchies or to accept their presence but play down their significance. Inevitably, some fulfill this aim more convincingly than others, on occasion because of seeming shortcomings in the data or because the theoretical position taken seems to have few archaeological underpinnings. The upsetting of traditional societies by external drivers of change—most notably, the proximity of the Roman military or the development of external trade—is invoked too often for my taste. Two of the densest distributions of hillforts in temperate Europe—the castros of northwestern Spain (in the chapter by Brais Currás and Inés Sastre) and the enclosures of East Lothian, Scotland (in Ian Armit's chapter)—are interpreted differently but both in terms of nonhierarchical societies, which is noteworthy given that such monuments were once envisaged as the quintessential testimony of hierarchical sociopolitical structures. But novel hierarchical formulations are also represented (as in Niall Sharples's succinct rehearsal of Scottish brochs in terms of redefined “house societies”) and in a final “Mediterranean” group of case studies in Part III. If John Bintliff's view of Greek development does not diverge from class societies and city-states, it allows for differing regional trends over time, juxtaposing innovating and conserving societies. In contrast, two studies of the Celtiberian and Iberian worlds of the lower Ebro Valley and Levantine Spain by Francisco and Pilar Burillos and Ignasí Grau-Mira sketch different routes to Late Iron Age complexity, stressing the contributions of the peasantry and of corporate endeavors, respectively.
Overall, considerable diversity in the sociopolitical forms represented within the European Iron Age is certainly sustainable. A generation on from the previous book to address “different Iron Ages” (Different Iron Ages: Studies on the Iron Age in Temperate Europe, edited by Jeremy D. Hill and Christopher G. Cumberpatch, 1995), other paradigms, however, remain unchallenged in their heartlands, as alluded to earlier.
The book's apparatus is fit-for-purpose, although illustrations are sparing at times to the point where their absence is jarring (e.g., in some discussions of settlement plans). In considerable part laudably written in English by non-native speakers, the standard of the copyediting in an expensive book emanating from a major British academic publisher is lamentable. The impact of these challenging, sometimes polemical, sometimes more convincing series of varied perspectives on approaches to a millennium of sociopolitical changes in Iron Age Europe is thereby slightly diminished.
