Rural Settlement: Relating Buildings, Landscape, and People in the European Iron Age

The majority of humanity have lived out their lives in a ‘rural’ context, and even in our increasingly urbanised world almost half of the global population still live in rural areas. In the European Iron Age, the vast mass of the population clearly lived in small hamlets and farmsteads, and this overarching ‘rurality’ is important for understanding these societies. While there has been a pronounced focus in recent archaeological research on patterns of centralisation and urbanisation, there is a need to reincorporate ‘rural life’ or rurality into these discussions of how people lived.

This book is a contribution to the study of rural life in Iron Age Europe, collating case studies extending from southern Spain to northern Scotland and from Denmark to the Balkans. Papers are grouped thematically to open up cross-regional comparisons, ranging across studies of buildings, farms – the basic unit of Iron Age life consisting of its inhabitants, its livestock and associated agricultural lands – to wider settlement patterns and land use strategies. The 29 papers in this volume discuss the disposition, form and organisation of rural settlements, as well as underlying social and economic networks, illustrating both the variability between regions, and also common themes in cultural, economic and social interactions.

This volume provides an up-to-date overview of current research, presenting new results for the Iron Age specialist as well as a wider audience interested in the rich tapestry of rural settlement in Europe.

Table of Contents

Exploring rural settlement in Iron Age Europe – An introduction
Dave Cowley, Manuel Fernández-Götz, Tanja Romankiewicz & Holger Wendling

Beyond the site: settlement systems and territories

Regional settlement entities or terroirs in Late Iron Age northern France
Alexandra Cony

Regional aspects of landscape exploitation and settlement structure in Denmark in the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age
Mads Runge

Iron Age settlement in mid-west Ireland
Katharina Becker

Recent research on the Arras Culture in its landscape setting
Peter Halkon

Settlement and landscape in the Iron Age of eastern Iberia
Ignasi Grau Mira

Approaching Late Iron Age rural landscapes: New ways of looking at the archaeological record in the southeast Iberian Peninsula
Leticia López-Mondéjar

From hut to factory: models of rural occupation in the Lower Guadalquivir valley during the 1st millennium BC
Eduardo Ferrer-Albelda, Francisco José García-Fernández & José Luis Ramos-Soldado

Space and place in the Early Iron Age in eastern Burgundy
Régis Labeaune

Settlement units and buildings

The chronology of wetland settlement and its impact on Iron Age settlement dynamics in southwest Scotland
Graeme Cavers & Anne Crone

Settlement nucleation and farmstead stabilisation in the Netherlands
Karen M. de Vries

Turf worlds: Towards understanding an understudied building material in rural Iron Age architecture – some thoughts in a Scottish context
Tanja Romankiewicz

The concept of ‘house’ and ‘settlement’ in the Iron Age of the middle Tisza region
Péter F. Kovács

House or workshop? A case study of two pit-houses at the Iron Age settlement site of Michałowice, Kazimierza Wielka county (Poland)
Jan Bulas, Michał Kasiński & Gabriela Juźwińska

Late Iron Age settlement in Hungary
Károly Tankó & Lőrinc Timár

At the fringes of the La Tène world – The Late Iron Age rural occupation of the Banat region, Romania
Andrei Georgescu

Late Iron Age rural settlements in southern Pannonia
Ivan Drnić

Meillionydd: a Late Bronze and Iron Age double ringwork enclosure in northwest Wales
Katharina Möller & Raimund Karl

The changing patterns of La Tène Farmsteads in Central and Western continental Europe
Angelika Mecking

Rural settlement patterns in urbanised Areas: The oppidum of Manching
Thimo J. Brestel

Status and settlement hierarchy

Rural residential places? Rethinking the Fürstensitze-elites correlation
Manuel Fernández-Götz & Ian Ralston

Middle and Late La Tène rural aristocratic establishments in Gaul: plans and organisation
Stephan Fichtl

Scordiscan stronghold: A Late Iron Age multiple fortification at Bačka Palanka in northern Serbia
Holger Wendling

The emergence of oppida in Celtiberia: The case study of Los Rodiles (Guadalajara, Spain)
Marta Chordá, Álvaro Sánchez-Climent, Emilio Gamo & María Luisa Cerdeño

New tools and perspectives

Microtopographies of Dacian upland settlement strategies and community aggregation trends in the Orăştie Mountains, Romania
Ioana A. Oltean & João Fonte

A structured Iron Age landscape in the hinterland of Knežak, Slovenia
Boštjan Laharnar, Edisa Lozić & Benjamin Štular

Around the Münsterberg: How online tools help us to rethink our data
Loup Bernard

Archaeology, landscapes, and heritage in the southeast Iberian Peninsula: The ALHIS project
Leticia López-Mondéjar

Rural domestic patterns in northwest Iberia: An ethnoarchaeological approach to Iron Age household layout
Lucía Ruano & Luis Berrocal-Rangel

Manuel Fernández-Götz is Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, Executive Board Member of the European Association of Archaeologists, and winner of the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Archaeology 2016. His research focuses on Iron Age societies in Central and Western Europe, the archaeology of identities, and the archaeology of the Roman conquest.

Tanja Romankiewicz is a Research Fellow at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. Developing from her PhD on the complex roundhouses of the Scottish Iron Age, supervised by Ian Ralston, she currently investigates prehistoric and Roman architectures more widely across northwest Europe, funded by the Leverhulme Trust.