Crossing the Alps: Early Urbanism Between Northern Italy and Central Europe (900–400 BC). Edited by Lorenzo Zamboni, Manuel Fernández-Götz, and Carola Metzner-Nebelsick. Leiden: Sidestone Press 2020. Pp. 434. £166.50. ISBN 978-90-8890-961-0 (paper).

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewCrossing the Alps: Early Urbanism Between Northern Italy and Central Europe (900–400 BC). Edited by Lorenzo Zamboni, Manuel Fernández-Götz, and Carola Metzner-Nebelsick. Leiden: Sidestone Press 2020. Pp. 434. £166.50. ISBN 978-90-8890-961-0 (paper).John CollisJohn CollisDepartment of Archaeology The University of Sheffield Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreCrossing the Alps contains 26 contributions presenting evidence from recent fieldwork as well as older excavations and showing similarities in urban forms in Slovenia, Italy, France, and Germany. Though there were major agglomerations in the Neolithic (e.g., Tripolye/Trypillia in Ukraine) and Bronze Age (e.g., Minoan and Mycenaean) settlements, the period when we can really talk of widespread urbanization in the Mediterranean and temperate Europe starts in the first millennium BCE, with the classical civilizations of Greece and Italy, but also less well documented sites from Iberia to southern Germany, all linked to the development of the great trading systems of the Phoenicians and Greeks around the Mediterranean and also extending inland toward temperate and northern Europe. One of the features of this was the establishment of colonies, not only to control harbors and river routes and supply raw materials for the empires of the Near East but also simply to grab land for the citizens who formed surplus populations in the developing city states of the Levant, Greece, and central Italy. This had one important consequence: the colonizers established defended sites that became towns, and they brought with them a preconceived idea of what a town should look like, with defensive walls, a marketplace, temples, domestic houses (often initially egalitarian), a planned layout of streets, and amenities that might include a theater and baths, cemetery areas outside the walls, and investment in prestige adornments of sculpture and inscriptions. For the Greeks especially, the city was the epitome of their idea of civilization. A similar idealized view of what a city was like may also have inspired the foundation in the second to first centuries BCE of large oppida in temperate Europe, where we see clear similarities in the ways ramparts and gates were constructed and in site location. But these were the exceptions, and even for them we can perhaps overemphasize their homogeneity. For the places in between, both chronologically and geographically, no such idealized picture may have existed, and this volume deals with places that developed with a variety of arrangements.A second problem has been the development of the necessary research tools. With their drystone and masonry walls, the solid buildings of the classical world seemed relatively easy to research, whereas the sites where timber structures were prevalent needed skilled stratigraphic excavation and geophysical techniques, practices that largely only appeared in the late 20th century, mainly originating on medieval sites in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and gradually adopted elsewhere: in Germany in the 1970s (stratigraphic excavation adopted at the Heuneburg in the 1960s was an exception), in France in the 1980s, and perhaps even later in other areas such as Italy. Many of the sites covered in this volume were primarily known from their cemeteries, excavated mostly in the 19th century, when the theoretical orientation was mainly toward the mere collecting of antiquities, the study of art history (influences of, e.g., classical art, local Situla Art), or chronological questions and the defining of “archaeological cultures.” So sites such as Bologna, Este, Spina, Hallstatt, the Heuneburg, the Dürrnberg, and Vix were mainly characterized by their rich burial records, and little was known of the settlements where the people lived. Several chapters of Crossing the Alps describe the preliminary results that are coming from these settlement sites as new excavation methods start yielding results, methods carried out by academically trained professional archaeologists who do their own digging, rather than by the untrained laborers employed in older excavation methods. Another factor is the increasing importance of urban rescue excavation, especially relevant in the case of Bologna where there are surprising results, such as the huge barn-like structures of still unknown function (warehouses?). Several of the chapters, however, deal with analyzing the chance finds made over the last century and a half and placing them into more synthetic topographical surveys.In his summing up of the volume, Simon Stoddart notes the great variability of the theoretical approaches in the 26 articles. Their bibliographies together cite only five authors twice or more, indicating the very varied academic backgrounds of the contributors, which must be considered a strength in the sharing of ideas. This reviewer is unusual in having been cited in five chapters, mainly an article where I contrasted the nature of urbanization between the Mediterranean and the temperate parts of Europe. In the former, there was considerable continuity of sites from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age, not only into the period of the Roman empire but even to the modern day, including obvious sites like Athens, Corinth, Rome, Marseilles, and Cadiz. In temperate Europe, however, only one of the sites from the sixth–fifth century BCE discussed in the volume is still a major site today: Bourges. Also, the nature of possible urban sites is very varied, both geographically and chronologically. There were periods, especially in the fourth century BCE, when urban-style sites disappeared, followed by a period of major open sites preceding the establishment of the defended oppida from the second–first centuries BCE, what Ian Ralston and others have referred to as “fragile” urbanism.This volume covers in part the area in northern Italy that lies between these two different traditions as well as the early stage of Iron Age urbanization north of the Alps in the sixth–fifth centuries BCE. The pattern that emerges for Italy is closer to that in central Europe in that many of the sites are short-lived, with exceptions such as Bologna. There is relatively little colonization from ­outside—Marzabotto on the southern fringe is an Etruscan colony, and Spina also seems to owe more to external colonizers than local indigenous origins. One cause of this variability is the vagaries of the Po River, which occasionally changed its course, and some sites are buried under the silt from the Po and its tributaries. There is also great variability in the location of sites; some in the plain, others on raised areas just above the river, but also sites in what are clearly defensive hilltop positions. In some cases, such as Spina, special measures had to be taken to make the site habitable by the construction of canals and drains, reminiscent of medieval Venice. But one factor is important for many of the sites discussed, their location on trading routes: along rivers, especially the Po and its affluents such as the Adige and the Ticino, or controlling locations leading to routes over the Alps such as at Bergamo or Como. Less information is available within the Alps, though sites such as Parre and Most na Soči (Sveta Lucija) are discussed.Moving north over the Alps, the great variability of the sites becomes more apparent. Here the dominant model cited is that put forward by Wolfgang Kimmig in the 1960s, the Fürstensitz: ideally a small defended site with a cluster of rich tumulus burials around it, with evidence of rich imports from the Mediterranean world, often of an exceptional quality or size like the Vix crater (“Zum Problem späthallstättischer Adelsitze“, in K.-H. Otto and J. Herrmann, eds., Siedlung, Burg und Stadt: Studien zur ihren Anfängen. Festschrift Paul Grimm. Schriften der Sektion für Vor- und Frühgeschichte 25, Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften 1969, 95–113). Kimmig’s initial formulation listed virtually any defended site that produced Mediterranean imports. However, even the best-documented sites are very different from one another and from the idealized model that Kimmig constructed. The Heuneburg is only one element in a complex of closely interrelated sites, which now includes one relatively short-lived phase covering up to 100 ha with farm-like enclosures at the foot of the main defended site but also includes other hill forts with specialized functions within the complex, such as the ritual site of the Alte Burg. Vix has produced huge dikes linking the hilltop of Mont Lassois with the river Seine, plus evidence of varied types of houses, including unusual apsidal buildings. Bourges, in contrast, is a cluster of several areas of settlement with no evidence that exotic imports like Massaliote wine or Attic pottery were confined to any one of them. But others discussed include the salt-producing site of the Dürrnberg, and the massive defended hilltops of Závist and Vladař in Bohemia, which are very different again.In brief, this is an important and well-produced volume giving many new insights into an area that had been poorly documented but that is key to understanding the relationships between the classical world and central Europe. It has detailed information about a range of sites, with very useful summaries and wider overviews for the Anglophone reader. It makes clear that a simple diffusionist model of the sites north of the Alps imitating Mediterranean sites is wide of the mark. For some chapters, a firmer specialist hand would have helped with the English, but as a volume it breaks new ground.Notes[email protected] Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Archaeology Volume 126, Number 3July 2022 The journal of the Archaeological Institute of America Views: 306Total views on this site Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/720937 Views: 306Total views on this site HistoryPublished online June 07, 2022 Copyright © 2022 by the Archaeological Institute of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.