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uate mythic notions of ethnic identity that some-

times ﬁnd their realization in modern European na-

tionalities. Despite early medieval references to

cultural groupings, such as Burgundians, Goths,

and Saxons, no evidence exists that these peoples

shared a common biological descent. Indeed, eth-

nicity appears to have been a situational construct

that was important within relationships of power

and politics. The elite and their interests were most

likely to have been the subjects, benefactors, and

consumers of the written works in which ethnic la-

bels were recorded.

Because of the centrality of the documentary

records in the ongoing activities of church and state,

it is impossible to consider any aspect of the early

medieval period without acknowledging the power

of the written word in our current appreciation of

these institutions. Without such awareness, the so-

cial, economic, and political organization of the past

becomes evidence of evolutionary developments ex-

tending from the early medieval period to the mod-

ern day. This deterministic presentation of “prog-

ress” legitimizes the authority of those powers

whose past is recorded and affords modern interests

an opportunity to incorporate the legitimacy of a

mythic past in the pursuit of their own objectives.

The historiography of the early medieval period

cannot be separated from Europe’s own self-

conception, as current political concerns have un-

consciously guided interpretations of the past. For

example, beginning in the nineteenth century, ar-

chaeology presented Europe as the cultural product

of conquest and colonization, mirroring the Euro-

pean imperialist experience in Africa, Asia, and the

Americas. By the 1960s, this association with milita-

ristic expansionism was superseded by complex

processual models. Today, in an environment of in-

dividualism and nation building, interpretations

emphasizing human agency and cultural identity are

evoked.

THE NATURE OF HISTORICAL AND

ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE

In comparison with texts of later historical periods,

those dating to early medieval times (c.

A.D. 400–

1000) are neither as common nor as speciﬁc and

typically lack any substantive presentations of indi-

viduals. Textual sources during this period include

heroic literature, annals, histories and chronicles,

saint’s lives, charters, wills, pedigrees and genealo-

gies, and laws. Discontinuous in their creation and

episodic in their narrative of time and space, docu-

ments traditionally have been considered perma-

nent records intended for present and future audi-

ences. In contrast, archaeological information,

characterized as cumulative and continuously creat-

ed, informs on relations and situations in the past.

Categories of archaeological data include the exca-

vated remains of settlements, burials, and earth-

works, ﬁeld surveys, and supporting data from spe-

cialist analyses (e.g., metallurgical, petrographic,

chronometric, and zooarchaeological studies).

Underscoring the importance of the written

link between the documentary and archaeological

records are inscribed objects. These textual artifacts,

such as coins carrying the name and place of the au-

thority under whom they were minted and personal

items inscribed with the name of the individual who

made, commissioned, or owned the object, occa-

sionally are encountered in contexts associated with

nonliterate peoples. It cannot be assumed that the

content of the inscription necessarily was under-

stood by those using these objects. The symbolic

authority of the written word, however, must have

been generally appreciated, as meaningless charac-

ters sometimes appear on objects, such as precious

metal bracteates, fabricated by nonliterate people.

Moreover, the prestige vested in the written word

is emphasized by the fact that the members of the

elite would have been most likely to have had the

resources and relationships necessary to acquire and

distribute these valuable goods.

Critical theory has led scholars to understand

that the past is a cultural construction and that his-

torians and archaeologists, as well as their source

materials, are constrained by biases. The historical

records were not created to address the questions

that modern scholars pose. Intentional and unin-

tentional biases arise between the situations in

which documents were originally created and have

been subsequently interpreted. At a fundamental

level are errors of translation, as the lack of equiva-

lency in one language can lead to misrepresentation

in another. Moreover, the written records often

were drafted many years after the events that they

describe or, in the case of oral traditions, after the

original work was composed. As a consequence,

these written works may reﬂect the political geogra-

HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY

ANCIENT EUROPE

341

phy and relationships of the time of transcription

rather than the period of creation. Not all records

from a particular time and place have been pre-

served, so the picture presented from a reading of

the available documents can never be considered

complete or even representative. Indeed, early me-

dieval authors were selective in their choice of sub-

jects, often omitting entire categories of people,

such as the young, the impoverished, or the dis-

abled, from meaningful mention. The resulting his-

torical narrative often lacks any structure beyond

that of chronology, as the events described occur at

irregular intervals and are of unknown relative sig-

niﬁcance.

Without mediation between these two sources

of information, our understanding of the archaeo-

logical or textual evidence is constrained. For exam-

ple, the Beowulf poem, written down in the eighth

century or later, has been used by archaeologists to

identify and interpret objects, such as the helmet

and standard found in the elite seventh-century ship

burial at Sutton Hoo (Suffolk, England). Although

the poem and the burial generally are thought to be

separated chronologically by at least one century,

scholars often treat them as contemporaneous.

Moreover, similarities between the literary and ar-

chaeological material have been employed to derive

the date of the heroic Beowulf poem and to guide

its translation toward language and concepts framed

by the ﬁnds at Sutton Hoo. By viewing the Anglo-

Saxon epic Beowulf and the Sutton Hoo burial as

mirrors of each other, we limit our understanding

of each in its own right.

RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN HISTORY

AND ARCHAEOLOGY

Archaeology has been famously belittled as the

“handmaiden to history” and “an expensive way of

telling us what we already know.” Indeed, some ar-

chaeologists have viewed archaeology during his-

toric periods as most useful as a laboratory in which

theories, particularly those developed by prehistori-

ans, can be tested. At the same time, early medieval

archaeologists ignore the epistemological implica-

tion of this cultural connection across centuries: Is

it appropriate—and, if so, under what conditions—

to assume a cultural connection from historically

documented times into the prehistoric past? Often,

little rigor is exercised in assessing the appropriate-

ness of the analogy drawn. This procedure, called by

North American archaeologists the “direct histori-

cal approach,” effectively decontextualizes the past,

thereby subjecting it to anachronistic interpretation

and obscuring its speciﬁc social meaning.

The discipline of history or archaeology is seen

by some practitioners in the other ﬁeld as a fertile

source of comparative material to illustrate or inter-

pret research concerns within their own discipline.

In the most intellectually arid conception of the re-

lationship between written and artifactual evidence,

historians simply have grafted archaeological facts

onto a historical framework, and archaeologists

have substantiated their ﬁndings by drawing facts

from the documentary record. Throughout study of

the early medieval period, archaeology has been

used to illuminate areas of research largely ignored

by the written texts, such as technology and econ-

omy.

The intellectual conversation between the two

disciplines has been characterized as a monologue,

as some historians consider archaeology to be irrele-

vant or overly theoretical. Scholars in both ﬁelds

complain that in making use of the historian’s

toolkit, archaeologists demonstrate a limited under-

standing of the nature of historical inquiry and are

unable to keep pace with philosophical and theoret-

ical changes in the historical discipline. An-

thropologically related historical approaches that

mirror work done by post-processual archaeologists

in other parts of the world, such as historical analy-

ses that focus on the cultural construction of lan-

guage and on the ways in which culture creates, fos-

ters, and challenges inequalities, are largely ignored

by those working in the early medieval period.

Using history to frame archaeological questions

risks the production of tautologies, or circular argu-

ments. For example, burials found in an area and at

a time known from documents to have been inhab-

ited by a certain tribal group generally are deemed

to represent the population group. In early medi-

eval England, this unreﬂective ethnic ascription of

cemeteries as Anglo-Saxon has raised critical ques-

tions about how Celtic and Germanic ethnic identi-

ty was conceived, if at all, by those living in the

fourth to seventh centuries and what the cemetery

evidence indicates about the fate of the indigenous

British population during this time.

7: EARLY MIDDLE AGES/MIGRATION PERIOD

342

ANCIENT EUROPE

PAST APPROACHES, FUTURE

DIRECTIONS

During the twentieth century the relationship be-

tween archaeology and history reﬂected wider de-

velopments in each ﬁeld. During the ﬁrst half of the

twentieth century, Anglo-Saxon archaeologists,

such as J. N. L. Myres and E. T. Leeds, fashioned

an early medieval archaeology that privileged the

historical record. Archaeological ﬁnds were orga-

nized within chronological and typological schema,

which were related, in turn, to events, such as bat-

tles, and accounts of great men detailed in historical

documents.

Into the 1970s and 1980s, archaeological data

were viewed as more objective and reliable than his-

torical sources, because it was argued that archaeol-

ogy produced deposits that were unconsciously cre-

ated and lacked intentionally communicated

messages. Artifacts were seen as the tools by which

humans maintain stability within the natural and so-

cial environment. Following the positivistic philoso-

phy prevailing in the “New Archaeology” move-

ment at that time, archaeology was positioned as a

natural science against which subjective historical

facts could be tested.

In the 1980s, however, archaeologists began to

complain that historical interests framed the agen-

da, modes of analysis, and language of archaeologi-

cal inquiry. As a consequence, it was argued, archae-

ological research should be guided by its own

theoretical premises and executed independently of

the historical sources. Rather than chronicling past

events of traditional narrative history, with its focus

on the elite, the “new medieval archaeology”

sought to explicate the social processes affecting the

daily lives of the wider population.

The “new medieval archaeology” was itself crit-

icized, however, for conceptualizing change as an

adaptive response to external systemic stimuli,

thereby denying individual agency and ignoring the

discursive relationship between human actions and

the structures that they produce. Instead, it was ar-

gued that artifacts must be assessed in context, both

as the products of actions and as the active agents

by which social relations are identiﬁed, subverted,

and transformed. Particularly in the United King-

dom and Scandinavia, this reassessment of the rela-

tionship between history and archaeology revital-

ized medieval studies. Inspired by anthropologically

oriented historians, such as those engaged in the

French Annales school, which examined the long-

term structures of social and economic history, and

by the theoretical agendas of anthropologically

trained North American archaeologists, new re-

search cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries

and sources to investigate thematic concerns, such

as gender, power relations, and cultural identity.

The work of historical archaeologists in the

United States was invoked further to demonstrate

that the distinction between artifacts and texts is

cultural rather than natural. Some archaeologists

emphasized that in the same way that historians ap-

proach documents, artifacts can be “read,” because

both sources are components of material culture

formed by the imposition of human action on na-

ture. This position considers texts and artifacts

equally as the products of thoughtful human action

that contain social meaning and are the means by

which social relations are articulated and negotiat-

ed. Rather than playing a passive role, as labels or

markers, artifacts and documents were utilized in

the past as expressive media. Written texts, there-

fore, are fundamentally artifacts and, as such, are

not privileged over other forms of material culture

in the interpretation of the past. As a consequence,

only through examining the speciﬁc social contexts

of artifacts and documents can we understand their

social meaning.

The analytical framework must be derived from

a social theory independent of historical or archaeo-

logical methodologies. It has been suggested that

social reproduction—the renewal and transforma-

tion of the social system and its cognitive struc-

ture—or the structuring dynamic of power provide

organizing principles by which texts and artifacts

can be methodologically joined. For example,

through reading the changing proportions of differ-

ent Pictish symbols carved on monumental stones

between the sixth and tenth centuries, it is possible

to identify a discourse of power. According to this

interpretation, changes in the ideological content of

these symbols articulate the expansion of dynastic

elites in early medieval Scotland and the religious

authorities put to their service.

This approach holds more broadly that the pro-

cesses that produce the archaeological and historical

records are often the same, even if their creators or

circumstances of origin differ. Thus, the ideological

HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY

ANCIENT EUROPE

343

anxieties articulated by the paganism of the seventh-

century Sutton Hoo burials also are expressed, at a

later time and in a different medium, by the political

tension pervading the Beowulf poem, thereby unit-

ing these works through a common metaphor or

mindset. Indeed, following the writings of post-

modern philosophers, the fact that a document

shapes reality, thereby transforming it into a monu-

ment, is echoed by archaeologists who consider

monuments, such as burial mounds, to be docu-

ments not only in a metaphorical sense but also as

statements of ancestral authority and land tenure.

Rather than ignoring the documentary record

or considering it to be all of a piece with the archae-

ological record, other archaeologists have argued

that archaeology and history provide different sets

of data that can be related dialectically to expose

contradictions. This view holds that because differ-

ent processes produce them, written and material

pieces of evidence are fundamentally independent.

In this approach, the interests of the dominant

groups, as portrayed in the texts, can be used to in-

vestigate the ideological promotion of power and

control and the resistance, through the distribution

of material culture, among the textually disenfran-

chised. For example, this type of analysis exposes the

contradictions between contrasting religious, politi-

cal, and social interests vying for supremacy during

the sixth and seventh centuries in the emerging East

Anglian kingdom. Along with the documented at-

tempts by Frankish and Italian churchmen to bring

Christianity to England came a political and ideo-

logical alignment with these Continental kingdoms.

Despite Continental Christianizing efforts, howev-

er, the burials at the East Anglian cemetery at Sut-

ton Hoo exhibit a deﬁant paganism in their prefer-

ence for cremation, grave furnishings, and ship

burial. The dialectic between the missionary activi-

ties of the Christian church, as described in Bede’s

Ecclesiastical History of the English People, and the

pagan burial practices has been interpreted as the

East Anglian kingdom’s resistance to an ideological

conquest by Continental powers.

In conclusion, there is no agreement as to

whether archaeological and historical inquiries have

different source materials, methodologies, or goals.

While some archaeologists have sought to validate

and integrate the interests of the ﬁelds of history

and archaeology by identifying commonalties, oth-

ers consider the disciplines to be complementary,

and still others argue that archaeology must be re-

leased from its historical shackles. Rather than evi-

dence of an inadequate theoretical and epistemo-

logical foundation, the lack of a universalizing

system within which history and archaeology can be

uniﬁed has been considered essential for the devel-

opment of a contextual and pluralistic approach to

the early medieval past.

See also The Nature of Archaeological Data (vol. 1, part

3); Sutton Hoo (vol. 2, part 7).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andersson, Hans, Peter Carelli, and Lars Ersga˚rd, eds. Vi-

sions of the Past: Trends and Traditions in Swedish Medi-

eval Archaeology. Stockholm, Sweden: Central Board of

National Antiquities, 1997.

Andrén, Anders. Between Artifacts and Texts: Historical Ar-

chaeology in Global Perspective. Translated by Alan Cro-

zier. New York: Plenum Press, 1998.

Austin, David, and Leslie Alcock, eds. From the Baltic to the

Black Sea: Studies in Medieval Archaeology. London:

Unwin Hyman, 1990.

Braudel, Fernand. On History. Translated by Sarah Mat-

thews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Carver, Martin. “Marriages of True Minds: Archaeology

with Texts.” In Archaeology: The Widening Debate. Ed-

ited by Barry Cunliffe, Wendy Davies, and Colin Ren-

frew, pp. 465–496. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2002.

Driscoll, Stephen T. “Discourse on the Frontiers of History:

Material Culture and Social Reproduction in Early

Scotland.” Historical Archaeology 26, no. 3 (1992): 12–

25.

———. “The Relationship between History and Archaeolo-

gy: Artefacts, Documents and Power.” In Power and

Politics in Early Medieval Britain and Ireland. Edited

by Stephen T. Driscoll and Margaret R. Nieke, pp. 162–

187. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988.

Funari, Pedro Paulo A., Martin Hall, and Siân Jones, eds.

Historical Archaeology: Back from the Edge. London:

Routledge, 1999.

Hodges, R. “New Approaches to Medieval Archaeology,

Part 2.” In Twenty-Five Years of Medieval Archaeology.

Edited by David Hinton, pp. 24–32. Shefﬁeld, U.K.:

University of Shefﬁeld, 1983.

Knapp, A. Bernard, ed. Archaeology, Annales, and Ethnohis-

tory. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press,

1992.

Moreland, John F. Archaeology and Text. London: Duck-

worth, 2001.

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———. “Method and Theory in Medieval Archaeology in

the 1990’s.” Archeologia Medievale 18 (1991): 7–42.

Rahtz, Phillip. “New Approaches to Medieval Archaeology,

Part 1.” In Twenty-Five Years of Medieval Archaeology.

Edited by David Hinton, pp. 12–23. Shefﬁeld, U.K.:

University of Shefﬁeld, 1983.

Ravn, Mads, and Rupert Britton, eds. “History and Archae-

ology.” Special Issue of Archaeological Review from

Cambridge 14, no. 1 (1997): 129–135.

Sawyer, Peter. “English Archaeology before the Conquest:

A Historian’s View.” In Twenty-Five Years of Medieval

Archaeology. Edited by David Hinton, pp. 44–47. Shef-

ﬁeld, U.K.: University of Shefﬁeld, 1983.

Tabaczynski, Stanislaw. “The Relationship between History

and Archaeology: Elements of the Present Debate.”

Medieval Archaeology 37 (1993): 1–14.

ENEVIEVE FISHER

HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY

ANCIENT EUROPE

345

EARLY MIDDLE AGES/MIGRATION PERIOD

STATE FORMATION

■

To understand the classic archaeological problem of

state formation as it was played out in Europe, it is

necessary to place it within its wider context. While

the terms “state” and “state formation” are still in

use, archaeologists today are more likely to discuss

states and their immediate predecessors in terms of

increasing political complexity, since the line be-

tween a so-called chiefdom and a state can become

blurred by the context of their development, and it

is not always useful to try to pigeonhole such varied

political forms.

WHAT IS A STATE?

It turns out to be quite difﬁcult to deﬁne a state. In

the mid-twentieth century, V. Gordon Childe com-

posed his classic list of state “attributes,” which in-

clude cities, specialized labor, writing, monuments,

and other “markers”; these have proved to be highly

problematic, however, since some entities that are

clearly states had no writing or cities, while Stone

Age farmers built monuments of tremendous size;

similarly, many nonstate societies have specialists in

various tasks and crafts. However, despite the prob-

lems of Childe’s original list, it should be noted that

many of the characteristics he identiﬁed are still rec-

ognized as important variables in the study of states.

It is probably safe to say that states are complex po-

litical structures in which several administrative or

bureaucratic layers are necessary for effective rule,

and that they encompass numerous internal groups

and stratiﬁed social classes over which leaders exer-

cise integrative power in combination with institu-

tionalized coercion.

In addition, while kinship between rulers and

other elites is important in many states, the rulers of

states rely for the most part on political ties with fol-

lowers to hold the state together and to perpetuate

their power, rather than relying mainly on the sup-

port of their own large kin-groups. States are also

usually more or less integrated—that is, their

“parts” work together relatively smoothly and are

more or less controlled by whomever rules. These

parts would include, among many other things, the

political structure (the chain of command leading

from ruler to various bureaucratic specialists), the

political economy (taxes, tribute), jurisprudence

(lawmaking and lawgiving), communications

(roads, bridges, messengers), warfare (command-

ers, troops, supply lines), and the social and reli-

gious institutions partly or completely controlled by

the state. When operations are not running smooth-

ly, archaeologists can gain useful clues into the pro-

cess of state formation and development itself, just

as a modern economist might interpret a budget

deﬁcit as an indication of ﬁscal problems within a

nation. Thus, archaeologists can trace the emer-

gence of a state by monitoring the initial appearance

of these institutions and by watching carefully to see

who controls them—regional elites or a centralized

ﬁgure. Often, there are periods during state forma-

tion when control of institutions by central authori-

ties is incomplete. This phase may be followed by a

consolidation of power or by the collapse of the

state.

While today’s world is dominated by state polit-

ical structures, they are in fact a very recent “inven-

346

ANCIENT EUROPE

tion,” having emerged from pre-state complex so-

cieties in the Near East no earlier than 3600

B.C.

They are also a rare occurrence: the archaeological

social sequences that have not resulted in states far

outnumber those that have. Many people believe

that state societies are “stable”; in fact, they are one

of the least stable forms of government and are

highly susceptible to upheaval and collapse. There

have been many theories on state formation, and

many of the earlier concepts have been character-

ized as “prime mover” theories because they postu-

late a single trigger for the rise of all states, such as

water control, warfare, trade, the need for record

keeping, or demographic pressure. While such the-

ories were popular for a time due to their plausibility

and simplicity, archaeological ﬁeld investigations

have shown that one state rarely develops for the

same reason as another; even within a single political

entity, the causes of state development are complex

and multivariate. Today, most archaeologists note

the highly contingent nature of states, stressing

local conditions and speciﬁc “historical” trajectories

(even when the states are prehistoric), while at the

same time using some generalizations and compari-

sons across cultures to evaluate how certain factors

may inﬂuence developing political complexity in

similar ways.

HOW ARCHAEOLOGISTS STUDY

THE STATE

At the most general level, states can be categorized

as either primary or secondary. The ﬁrst developed

where no state had previously existed, as an innova-

tion in sociopolitical evolution; the second, through

interaction and association with already-extant

states. Those of Europe are secondary states. Why

do extant states trigger new state development at

their peripheries? One theory is that the presence of

a powerful and organized neighbor creates a need

in a less complex region to produce “equal” leaders

and institutions to cope with and take advantage of

nearby states. Another view is that local emerging

elites, who already have power in their own socie-

ties, achieve greater control by limiting all access to

the coveted goods and new ideologies brought by

the neighboring state. In addition, if the nearby

state presents a threat, leaders grow more efﬁcient

and organized to meet the danger. Yet another idea

is that a system develops in which the original state

stimulates development at its periphery to exploit its

raw materials and resources, yet at the same time

tries to limit that development to take advantage of

its superior position. Once the process begins, how-

ever, it often moves outside the control of the ﬁrst

polity.

Since it is not always easy to identify the process

of state formation, or even the existence of a state,

on the basis of activities at a single site, the archaeo-

logical study of states often takes a regional ap-

proach. The reason is clear if one considers the

questions important for studying state formation.

For example, who controls the economy in a soci-

ety? Is it individuals, a kin-group, or the political ap-

paratus of a state? To ﬁnd an answer, one must look

at many sites with economic activity and determine

whether they are under centralized or individual

control. Similar patterns are to be sought for politi-

cal activity, religious organization, and other insti-

tutions likely to be controlled by a ruler or ruling

class. In addition, geographers have demonstrated

that a bureaucratic hierarchy is often reﬂected in

“size classes” of sites—large centers, small centers,

large villages, small villages—even though the ofﬁ-

cials themselves may not live in these communities,

since in some societies elites value spatial separation

from commoners as well as economic and political

separation. In historically observed chieﬂy societies,

there are centers and satellites, but usually only

three classes of sites: primary centers, smaller cen-

ters, and small villages or scattered farms. States,

however, display at least four types of communities.

Thus, if archaeologists observe a change in the orga-

nization of settlements over a landscape: for exam-

ple from many villages, all roughly the same size, to

a pattern with various size centers and outlying sites,

and this is concomitant with apparent increases in

stratiﬁcation, centrally coordinated defense or eco-

nomic activities, this is often inferred as marking a

transition in political organization.

EUROPE’S EARLIEST STATELIKE

SOCIETIES

Although Italy and Greece are part of the European

sphere today, in ancient times they belonged to a

world system centered around Turkey, the Levant,

and Asia; hence their earliest phases do not relate

strongly to the archaeologic record of the western,

northern, and central European world-system. Nev-

ertheless, the earliest state formation sequences in

STATE FORMATION

ANCIENT EUROPE

347

Europe can be said to be linked to Italy and Greece.

The development of Rome itself was secondary in

nature, in response to interaction with the Greek

and eastern Mediterranean worlds. Rome then de-

veloped into an empire—a state that subsumes

other civilizations and cultures—and from that po-

sition triggered state formation in many other parts

of Europe.

Important developments for early European

states can be found in the Celtic Iron Age, which

began in about 800

B.C. and constituted an ethnol-

inguistic-political complex encompassing parts of

France, Switzerland, southern Germany, the Czech

Republic, and other regions. Already, in the Hall-

statt period (800–480

B.C.), complex pre-state so-

cieties were coalescing as a result of the internal de-

velopment of a Celtic political elite and interactions

with Greek traders in the western Mediterranean

who established Massalia (Marseille) at the mouth

of the Rhône. During the La Tène period (500–50

B.C.), in the second century B.C., Rome began to ex-

pand beyond the Italian peninsula, and, in response,

sites called oppida emerged north of the Alps

throughout much of western and central Europe,

spreading to eastern Hungary, Slovakia, Germany,

Belgium, and southwestern France. These were for-

tiﬁed central places with nucleated proto-urban

populations, often housing a number of industries

and the residences of rulers. Clues to their develop-

ment lie in their defensive locations and walls, their

close proximity to mineral-rich areas and good agri-

cultural soils, and their position on trade routes.

The nature of these settlements has been debat-

ed: were they city-states, like the small polities of

classic period Greece, or were they chieﬂy societies?

Oppida such as the well-investigated Kelheim site,

with walls that required more than a million person-

hours to construct, had populations in the thou-

sands, representing several social classes engaged in

many specialized industries, and they appear to have

been economic and administrative centers. Evi-

dence at smaller sites indicates that elites may have

lived outside the oppida as well as in them. This is

not at all unusual: in fact, in some states, few elites

live in towns. Many archaeologists now classify the

oppida as archaic or emergent states that were devel-

oping independently before Rome’s intervention.

Their full ﬂowering was cut off in the mid-ﬁrst cen-

tury

B.C. by the expansion of the Romans through

conquest, and the eventual removal of local rulers

and their replacement with Roman ofﬁcials. Until

the collapse of Rome’s empire, these regions were

provinces within a larger state entity.

Similar developments occurred in Britain, as il-

lustrated by Maiden Castle, a fortiﬁed hilltop that

was home to as many as four thousand people. The

Romans defeated its occupants and their leaders in

A.D. 43, an event to which the huge stockpile of

weapons found inside and the Roman projectiles

found outside bear archaeological witness.

The Celtic culture was not the only one in Eu-

rope to have witnessed state formation in the Iron

Age. Northern Europe, inhabited primarily by Ger-

manic groups, was never conquered by Rome; and

yet, beginning in the ﬁrst century

A.D., interaction

with Roman traders and ambassadors seeking

wealth and political advantage brought political

change to what the Romans called Free Germania,

which included much of present-day Germany, all

of Denmark, and other Nordic regions. Although

the empire planned to conquer this area, it was un-

able to do so. Thus, unlike the Celtic groups closer

to Rome, the peoples of this region retained their

independence and built a more politically complex

society during the last centuries of the Roman

Empire.

POST-ROMAN STATES IN EUROPE

The fall of Rome, like the collapse of any large, inte-

grative political system, had a huge impact not only

within its own borders but outside them as well.

The post-Roman world consisted of former imperial

areas and areas that had never been conquered, and

the course of subsequent state formation was differ-

ent in the two zones because of the preexisting con-

ditions speciﬁc to each one. In northern Europe,

post-Roman Scandinavians were left in disarray after

the imperial collapse, but responded by forming

their own, more centralized structures to provide

the power and prestige that local leaders had previ-

ously acquired from their Roman connections. In

the period from

A.D. 500 to 1000, they slowly ac-

quired increasingly statelike qualities. Between the

eighth and tenth centuries, a settlement system,

which included cities, towns, villages, and hamlets,

emerged; in addition, a “state” style of runic monu-

ments spread from the epicenter of the state to new

regions under its control, and rulers began to mint

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ANCIENT EUROPE

coins, collect taxes, and mobilize large labor forces

for public works projects. Although large labor-

intensive projects are possible in many types of so-

cieties, the building of the Danevirke, an earthwork

many kilometers in length, by the Danes beginning

A.D. 737, and the founding of several market-

places and towns that show signs of large defensive

works, attest to the emergence of a stronger central

authority.

Nearby Slavic peoples, such as the Wends living

in the Baltic plain, also began to display more politi-

cal complexity; administrative centers, markets, and

other integrative features arose, often in connection

with the coercive power of local rulers, who were

linked by marriage to the earliest Danish and Swed-

ish royal lines.

A different series of conditions was found in the

Romanized regions after the fall of the empire.

Many Germanic and some Slavic peoples ﬂowed

onto the Romano-Celtic continent at this time,

and, from these old and new societies, new states

emerged, often called the “successor states,” since

they succeeded, or at least followed, the imperial ap-

paratus. The “starting points” of these new polities

varied a great deal: in some areas, barbarian Visi-

goths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Langobards, Bur-

gunds, and others took up residence and rulership

in what is now France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and

other nations. Elsewhere, collapsed provinces re-

emerged as states. For example, the Merovingian

and then Carolingian dynasties of the Franks,

though Germanic in origin, came from the Roman-

ized side of the Rhine, while the Visigoth kingdom

was created when the Roman government ceded

taxes and administration in one area to a Germanic

warlord in

A.D. 413. As imperial institutions fell

apart, a system developed that fused Germanic,

Slavic, Romano-Celtic, and Roman elements.

England, a category in itself, was both a former

Roman province and a somewhat “de-Romanized”

area, since it had been subject to many destabilizing

Saxon attacks in the fourth century. It had also lost

its Roman connection early. Constantine III, a

Roman soldier who became the ruler of the British

province, began a campaign in 407 to seize the im-

perial throne. To back his bid for imperial power, he

took the last remaining Romano-British troops with

him as he crossed the Channel in his march toward

Rome. As a result, the hapless Britons were sudden-

ly forced to organize their own government and

military. Archaeological evidence from the terminal

Roman sequence shows that the urban centers de-

clined and the many rural villas faded away. Roman

artifacts and coins are largely absent from strata

more recent than about

A.D. 400. By the time the

rest of the empire began to collapse in the 450s,

Britain had far fewer remnants of Roman structures,

such as the imperial church organization, lan-

downership systems, and legal practices. Thus,

when their new states emerged during the post-

Roman period, they had a unique ﬂavor.

The collapse of the Roman Empire in Europe

was felt long after the ﬁfth century, as various pow-

ers competed for supremacy or at least for a foot-

hold. To take just one example, at least two states,

Normandy and Flanders, formed within what

would become the kingdom of France in the ninth

and tenth centuries. This occurred well before the

king of France in the Paris Basin had his own state,

which eventually conquered the others. Additional

states were formed around very small territories,

counties, towns, or even the area immediately

around the seats of local nobles. Many archaeolo-

gists have found it difﬁcult to classify these areas as

they existed in post-Roman times, since they did

not display “typical” state features, such as urban-

ism, yet they were also not “chiefdoms” in the an-

thropological sense. During the mid- to late twenti-

eth century, archaeologists working with paradigms

according to which states were expected to conform

to a narrow set of characteristics sometimes called

them “post-state societies.” However, now that our

concept of what a state is and how diversely it can

form has been modiﬁed, such polities can often be

classiﬁed as “differently organized” states. For ex-

ample, structurally, Charlemagne’s eighth-century

Frankish kingdom was essentially nonurban, and

was similar to what is termed a “paramount chief-

dom,” with the king keeping the allegiance of his

vassals with opulent gifts and feasts, yet it was terri-

torially larger than most modern states and had a

number of the classic expression of variables usually

associated with states. As the Holy Roman Empire

expanded and gained new lands conﬁscated from

the conquered, kings began to give land to their vas-

sals instead. This increased the vassals’ power in re-

lation to the king’s, thus destabilizing the empire

and facilitating its further fragmentation.

STATE FORMATION

ANCIENT EUROPE

349

State formation in Europe may seem at ﬁrst to

be a tangled web of societies that rise, spread,

shrink, and fall in a nearly incomprehensible man-

ner. Most people, comparing it to their own experi-

ence as citizens of a modern state, would ﬁnd it

highly confusing. In fact, however, this is a short-

term perspective. Controlled chaos is the nature of

the state, and is more clearly visible to archaeolo-

gists, since they have a long-term perspective over

many thousands of years with which to make their

analysis. Many regions, when viewed from a long-

term perspective, have periods of fragmentation

into numerous, often warring groups, followed by

consolidation into larger entities under uniﬁed rule.

When Europe and its state formation sequences are

viewed in this light, it is clear that, out of many Celt-

ic proto-states, a period of uniﬁcation emerged,

during which they were provinces under Rome.

Upon its collapse, these provinces fell back into vari-

ous polities, which again underwent a fragmented

warring era, and then slowly merged back into larg-

er and larger aggregates under the Holy Roman

Empire, only to fall back into a series of small states.

In northern Europe, the chieﬂy societies of Scandi-

navia and northern Germany aggregated into Vi-

king Age states, then were joined together under

the Hansa and Kalmar unions, and later divided

again. This cycle is seen across the globe, and is just

as evident in the Valley of Mexico and the Andes as

it is in Europe. Thus, while Europe’s various regions

have their own unique historical trajectories, whose

differences and contingencies are studied by archae-

ologists, Europe’s states can also be compared

broadly not only to one another but to cultures as

distant as the Aztec and Inca.

See also Maiden Castle (vol. 1, part 1); Oppida (vol. 2,

part 6); Kelheim (vol. 2, part 6).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arnold, Bettina, and D. Blair Gibson, eds. Celtic Chiefdom,

Celtic State. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University

Press, 1995.

Ehrenreich, Robert M., Carole L. Crumley, and Janet E.

Levy, eds. Heterarchy and the Analysis of Complex Socie-

ties. Arlington, Va.: American Anthropological Associa-

tion, 1995.

Hedeager, Lotte. Iron-Age Societies: From Tribe to State in

Northern Europe 500

BC to AD 700. Oxford: Blackwell,

1992.

Hodges, Richard. Towns and Trade in the Age of Charle-

magne. London: Duckworth, 2000.

Randsborg, Klaus. The First Millennium A.D. in Europe and

the Mediterranean. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 1991.

Wells, Peter S. The Barbarians Speak: How the Conquered

Peoples Shaped Roman Europe. Princeton, N.J.: Prince-

ton University Press, 1999.

INA L. THURSTON

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