1. science
2. social science
3. history
4. medieval history

Why do we still dig Iron Age ramparts?
John COLLIS
Viewed from the outside, the obsession with the
excavation of ramparts by Iron Age archaeologists in
central and western Europe may seem bizarre, but it
is an obsession which has now lasted a century and
a half, and which shows no sign of abating despite
shifts in paradigm. In the 1860s France led the way
with the first identifications of the murus gallicus
which fitted in with the French state’s interest in its
Gallic past. In a series of campaigns of fieldwork
and excavation the sites mentioned by Julius
Caesar and other ancient authors were identified,
especially those associated with the conquest of
Gaul by Caesar notably the murus gallicus with its
distinctive iron nails and the stone revetment walls
pierced front and back by horizontal wooden
baulks which he encountered during the siege of
Avaricum.The first discovery of a nail was byVicomte
d’Aboville at Mont Beuvray in 1866, followed by
Bulliot’s excavation in 1867 on Champlain, and
in 1868 between the Porte du Rebout and Come
Chaudron (Bulliot 1899 ; Aylwin Cotton 1957, p. 190195). In 1868 Castagné discovered the rampart at
Murcens which fitted Caesar’s description of the
murus gallicus (Castagné 1868 ; Aylwin Cotton 1957,
p. 183-186).This resolved a number of controversies
about the identification of sites, demonstrating, for
instance, that Bibracte was at Mont Beuvray, not at
Autun, and especially Stoffel’s work provided the
physical evidence for the topographical framework
for Napoléon III’s Histoire de Jules César (1866), and
of the subsequent publications across Europe such
as Rice Holme’s Caesar’s Conquest of Gaul (1911)
at a period when an education in the Classics was
an essential element in schools and universities,
especially in the imperialist states of Britain, France
and Germany.
This historical approach, or paradigm, is not
one which has died with the rise of alternative
approaches. Thus, it is a model which Otto Urban
has recently evoked in his discussion of the Late
La Tène defences on the Middle Danube (Urban
1999), or for Závist and Hrazany whose violent ends
are witnessed by the burnt gateways and have been
linked with historical events such as the conquest of
Bohemia by the Germanic Marcomanni under their
leader Maroboduus (Drda, Rybová 1997). If in Gaul
no spate of rampart construction can be assigned
to the conflicts surrounding the conquest in the 50s
BC,one or two dates provided by dendrochronology
do lead to considerations of historically recorded
events. The dates from Metz include one which can
be linked with the wandering of the Cimbri and
Teutones, as well as one dating to the conquest of
Gaul (Faye et al. 1990).The increase of construction
in central and northern Gaul in the years following
the Roman conquest of Narbonese Gaul in 125123 BC and the defeat of the Arverni may have
caused a power vacuum which led to greater interstate conflict and the foundation of the oppida.
Despite the obvious dangers of using a partial
and fragmented historical record, this framework
still provides a popular way for archaeologists to
present their discoveries to a wider public.
By the 1920s and 1930s French archaeology
had fallen into the doldrums, and developments in
Iron Age archaeology were dominated by German
and British scholars, using a new paradigm, often
labelled as ‘Culture-Historical’, which sought to
identify ‘cultures’ or ‘culture groups’ characterised
by distinctive artefact types, settlement forms or
burial rites. These were then correlated with ethnic,
FICHTL (St.) dir. — Murus celticus. Architecture et fonctions des remparts de l‘âge du Fer. Actes du colloque organisé par l’UMR 7044 de Strasbourg,
l’UMR 6173-CITERES de Tours et Bibracte, à Glux-en-Glenne les 11 et 12 octobre 2006. Glux-en-Glenne : Bibracte, 2010, p. 27-35 (Bibracte ; 19).
John COLLIS
or to use the 1930s mode of thought,‘racial’ groups
such as Celts and Germans, and used to document
their origins and expansion. This paradigm was
especially important under the Third Reich in
trying to justify the conquests of countries such as
Czechoslovakia for which some sort of Germanic
past could be claimed. Rampart constructions and
gateway designs were used as another set of cultural
traits which could be described and mapped.
Perversely,in the case of the Germanic expansion,
the evidence used from defended sites was largely
negative as it was assumed that early Germanic
society was based around small open villages, and it
was not until the early medieval period that defensive
structures became important with the establishment
of feudal castles and of defences around newly
established trading settlements such as Haithabu.
Hill-forts were characteristic either of the pre-Roman
Celtic peoples who were replaced by Germans in
central and southern Germany and Czechoslovakia,
or for the early medieval expansion of Slavic
speaking peoples in eastern Germany, Poland and
Czechoslovakia, and so played an important role
in the story of the Germanic peoples. German Iron
Age archaeologists in the universities such as Gero
von Merhart, Gerhard Bersu or Ernst Wahle may have
resisted some of the extreme political interpretations,
but even for the nationalists the Celts were an
essential part of German history, and protohistoric
‘Celtic’ archaeology saw important advances in the
identification and classification of ramparts such as
the definition of the Altkönig-Preist construction, or
the discovery of the murus gallicus at Manching.
This Culture Historical paradigm reached its
most developed form in Britain, though fortunately
lacking the political dimension found on the
continent. The framework of thought in Iron Age
studies interpreted the period in terms of a series
of invasions or migrations from the continent, an
approach which started in the late 19th century
with Sir John Evans’ attempt to identify the Belgic
settlement mentioned by Caesar using coinage
(1885), and Sir Arthur Evans interpretation of the
cremation burial rite at Aylesford (1890). This was
furthered in the 1920s firstly by Reginald Smith at
the British Museum using other cultural traits (1925),
but it is especially with his assistant Christopher
Hawkes that the idea developed in an article
on hill-forts in 1931 in which he postulated three
invasions, Hallstatt, Marnian and Belgic, labelled A,
B and C. It was an approach which was to dominate
28
into the 1960s and was to provide the raison d’être
for the excavation of many hill-fort ramparts and
gateways, and research campaigns such as Hawkes’
series of excavations on Hampshire hill-forts in the
1930s starting with St. Catharine’s Hill, and including
Quarley Hill, Bury Hill and Buckland Rings
(Hawkes et al. 1930 ; Hawkes 1935 ; 1939 ; 1940).
By the late 1950s the three original invasions had
been supplemented by a whole series of smaller
events both chronologically and geographically
(Hawkes 1959, 1960). Thus the Marnian invasion
which characterised Hawkes’ ‘Iron Age B’ has
often been defined by the occurrence of chariot
burials on the chalk Wolds of Yorkshire, but for the
Severn valley a separate invasion from somewhere
along the Atlantic coast was suggested to explain
the distribution of ‘duck-stamped’ pottery and the
‘guard chambers’ in hill-fort entrances.
The climax to this approach saw the campaign
of fieldwork and excavation in northern France
initiated by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, whose impact and
importance is well documented by the number of
times it is referenced in this volume.The publication
was supplemented by an extensive survey of the
literature on the murus gallicus by Molly Aylwin
Cotton. The primary aim of the project was to
discover the supposed continental origin of cultural
traits (and so of immigrants) found in southern
Britain, and specifically in Dorset where Wheeler
had excavated the site of Maiden Castle in the 1930s.
Though in part pottery attributes were used such as
the internal grooving of rims and of the provision
of countersunk handles (Wheeler, Richardson 1957,
Fig 12), or the cordoned bowls found at Le Petit
Celland but also known at Hengistbury Head whose
appearance in Britain Wheeler and Richardson
(p. 47) identified as ‘foreign’ in a British context,
and so as imports (‘the relics of a few ship-loads of
refugees at the time of the Caesarian conquest’ or
which possibly could ‘be commercial products of
a somewhat earlier period’), it was the evidence of
shared characteristics of the defences of hill-forts on
either side of the Channel which were of primary
interest.
Wheeler and Richardson (1957, p. 1) identified
three types of site, characterised by different types
of rampart :
1. ‘Major tribal oppida of the Le Petit Celland series’,
characterised by the murus gallicus ;
2. ‘Cliff-castles of the Castel Coz series’ with one,
two or three lines of ramparts and so including
Why do we still dig Iron Age ramparts ?
‘multivallation’;
3. ‘Belgic earthworks of the Fécamp series’, with
massive dump ramparts and wide shallow
ditches (discussed in this volume by Stephan
Fichtl).
In a British context it was the multivallation and
the dump ramparts which caused most interest as
both are found in southern Britain, while the murus
gallicus is not.
If the migrationist/invasionist interpretations
have nowadays been largely abandoned, a cultural
approach to rampart and gateway constructions has
continued,mainly in the form of detailed descriptions
of ramparts such as the murus gallicus and specific
forms of gateway like the Zangentor by scholars
such as Wolfgang Dehn (1960 ; 1961), giving us both
a chronological framework as well as geographical
distributions. This is the tacit presumption behind
this present collection of papers, but with no clear
statement of the aims of this work other than the
obvious one of providing criteria for the dating of
rampart types,which in some cases can be extended
to the dating of unexcavated sites simply based on
surface criteria (e.g. the Fécamp construction). At
one level we can see the diffusion of shared ideas
on how to construct a murus gallicus which can
transcend physical constraints such as the nature of
the bedrock. But how was this achieved ? The shift
from murus gallicus to Fécamp construction may
be a technological reaction to Roman methods
of siege warfare ; in other cases there seems to be
no functional reason. In the Welsh Marches the
construction of semi-­circular guardhouses (as
against rectangular ones) seems cultural and has
been explained in terms of specialist ‘architects’
who might be called in by a community to offer
advice about how to construct a hill-fort. In other
cases it may merely be emulation by someone who
had visited another site and taken the ideas back
to their home community. In both cases it raises
questions about the relationship of a group to their
neighbours, but also of transmission of ideas over
time. Though we can to a certain extent identify
an evolution of methods of construction, this is
often punctuated by periods of a century or two
when certain communities were not constructing
new defended sites, but later seem capable of
constructing a complex rampart when necessity
demanded.
The title of this volume and its contents even
imply a certain survival of the ethnic interpretation,
widening out the scope from the more narrow
meaning of the word gallicus to the Celts to include
areas such as Celtiberia, and parts of Hungary
where the Eravisci centred on modern Budapest
were specifically described as Keltoi. On the other
hand the use of the term Celticus is not linguistic as
the British Isles are excluded (as is Ireland, though
it does not seem to have had hill-forts during the
period under consideration – most are Late Bronze
Age : Raftery 1994). The same is presumably true of
the Germanic speaking areas of northern Europe.
Celtiberian sites share more in common with their
non-Indo-European neighbours the Iberians who
are likewise excluded.
On fig. 1, I show a map of the areas where
the ancient written sources talk of the presence
of people whom the Greeks and the Romans
considered to be Keltoi or Celtae, a name which
Caesar claimed was also used by the people
them­selves, and it is also used by authors such as
Trogus Pompeius who was probably himself Celtic
(Collis 2003). This map is radically different from
the ones traditionally used to show the origin and
expansion of the Celts in all directions. It rejects
the correlation between language and ethnicity,
and also between language and ethnicity with a
‘La Tène Culture’ (for instance, the Celtic speaking
Treveri considered themselves to be Germani
according to Tacitus). I reject the concept of a La
Tène Culture Group, and envisage instead many
small societies interacting with one another and
exchanging ideas, what Renfrew and Cherry (1988)
referred to as ‘peer polity interaction’. The impli­
cation of this alternative model for rampart studies
is that innovations can appear among any of the
societies involved rather than emanating from one
area (e.g. southern Germany). To take a specific
example, Wheeler and Richardson assumed the
precedence on the continent for the development
of multivallation and dump ramparts of Fécamp
type, but as I argued many years ago, given the
continuity of hill-fort construction in parts of Britain
throughout the Iron Age and the development there
of complex entrance structures, the ideas are more
likely to emanate from Britain and spread there
to northern France, a process repeated 2000 years
later by Wheeler and Richardson themselves !
In Germany the inter-war period saw the large
scale excavation of sites such as the Neolithic
settlement of Köln-Lindenthal, and this had been
mirrored in hill-fort studies by projects such as
Bersu’s excavations on the Goldberg and the
29
John COLLIS
1. The distribution of people referred to as Celtae, Celtiberi, Celtici or Galatae in the ancient sources,
compared with the distribution of ancient Celtic place names.
Wittnauer Horn, a tradition he brought to Britain
with the excavation of Little Woodbury. During the
war Hans-Jürgen Hundt stripped the interior of the
Aleburg at Befort in Luxembourg, while in Poland
the most famous large-scale excavation of all was
that of Biskupin. It was a tradition which continued
after the war, firstly in a rescue context with Werner
Krämer’s large-scale excavations at Manching, and
in research contexts Egon Gersbach’s excavations
on the Heuneburg, and Reinhardt Schindler’s at
Bundenbach. In southern France some sites such
as Entremont and Ensèrune were being excavated,
but more in a context of understanding the classical
impact rather than the native societies themselves.
The general paradigm behind these excavations
was still largely cultural, using settlement forms as a
means of defining cultural groups and influences.
While the questions posed by these traditional
paradigms have continued and the associated
excavation methodologies, there has been a gradual
shift from narrow historical and cultural questions
to ones which are best described as economic or
socio-economic, asking what the function of hill30
forts and oppida may have been. In Britain in the
1930s it was assumed that Iron Age hill-forts were
the equivalent of Roman camps or Norman castles,
centres of defence built by an immigrant elite against
the indigenous peoples. Thus in the 1960s Hogg
could suggest that coastal promontory sites might be
‘bridgeheads’ built by the invaders (Hogg 1972), and
this was the specific interpretation used by Wheeler
(1953) for the site of Bindon Hill in Dorset. Though
he had excavated a certain amount of the interior
of Maiden Castle, this had mainly been to clarify the
nature and date of the Late Roman activity on the site,
and the Roman temple (Wheeler 1943). In the 1960s
new interpretations started appearing. In the context
of the Heuneburg, Wolfgang Kimmig saw such Late
Hallstatt sites as centres of power and wealth, both
on the evidence of the rich burials clustered around
them and of contacts with the Mediterranean world,
and coined the term Fürstensitz, using, perhaps
inappropriately, medieval feudal nomenclature,
but raising the question of their function within
their region. For the oppida, the concept that these
were ‘urban’ centres started being discussed, and
the major excavations of the 1960s were mainly in
Why do we still dig Iron Age ramparts ?
Czechoslovakia, initiated by Jan Filip, and interpreted
within a Marxist economic view of the past.
In Britain the change of emphasis in the 1960s
was specifically associated with a theoretical shift,
with the rise of a new paradigm, the so-called ‘New’
or ‘Processual Archaeology’ characterised in hill-fort
studies by Barry Cunliffe’s excavations at Danebury.
Here, though there were the traditional trenches
through the ramparts and clearing of the gateway
to obtain an evolutionary sequence, the main thrust
was to obtain data about the economic role of the
site (industrial production, agriculture and grain
storage) and the social status if its inhabitants. A
new terminology appeared (central places, site
hierarchies,ports of trade,pre-industrial cities) taken
over from Geography and Economic Anthropology,
with the construction of models of trade and
exchange systems, land use and seasonal activities
(Cunliffe 2005). New field techniques appeared like
large-scale area excavation,systematic field walking,
and greater use was made of the aerial photographic
evidence which had been accumulating since the
1920s. By the 1980s and 1990s attitudes especially in
Britain were changing yet again with a plethora of
new approaches loosely labelled as ‘Post Processual’
with a greater emphasis on the symbolic and
ideological aspects of hill-forts, characterised by a
series of articles especially in the short-lived journal
Scottish Archaeological Review (volumes 1-10, 19821995), and studies such as J.D. Hill’s analysis of
depositional patterns at Danebury (1995).
So what role do we envisage for rampart
studies in the new climate of thought ? Though in
recent years we have begun to recognise public
or communal buildings such as sanctuaries on
defended sites, and other public works such as
roads and water tanks (Mont Beuvray, The Breiddin,
Vladař),the ramparts still represent the major visible
investment by the community. But on whose behalf ?
Cunliffe has argued in the case of Danebury that,
like a medieval castle, it is some sort of lord or chief,
but he has produced no evidence for this, though
it might fit our interpretation of the Heuneburg.
Could it indicate the status of the inhabitants like
the burgers of a medieval town, or, like a capital city,
be an emblem of the society as a whole, as Sharples
(1991a ; 1991b) has argued in the case of Maiden
Castle ? In some cases visible status may be more
important than the function of defence as I once
argued for the hill-forts of Hampshire where big
hill-forts have big ramparts, and little hill-forts little
defences, which is not what one would expect if
defence was the main function (Collis 1977). Some
sites in Devon have a massive rampart as viewed by
someone approaching the entrance,but only a token
bank and ditch elsewhere. The oppidum of Ulaca
near Ávila in central Spain has substantial ramparts
facing the valley, but they are only two courses high
facing the mountains. It is not unfinished due to the
arrival of the Romans, as the official interpretation
states, as the inhabitants had time to construct a
second rampart raising the enclosed area from 60
to 80 hectares (Collis 2008). The same symbolic
interpretation has been argued for the Porte du
Rebout at Mont Beuvray – wider than necessary for
simply restricting access, and lacking the expected
timber gateway despite the longevity of use and
frequent remodelling of the ramparts.
The construction of ramparts involved not only
huge quantities of wood and the cutting down of
hectares of woodland, the use of stone, sometimes
imported from several kilometres away, and, in the
case of the murus gallicus, the perhaps unnecessary
consumption of considerable quantities of iron for
the nails or spikes, but also many days and weeks of
labour.The construction of the rampart was a major
communal effort and may have also been a major
force for social solidarity which could have been
regularly reinforced if the ditch was to be regularly
cleared out and the rampart repaired.
Evidence of repair, or lack of it, is clearly
important for our understanding of ramparts, to
demonstrate if the construction was simply a oneoff single event, or involved a continuous process
of maintenance either to maintain the defensive
qualities or for social or legal reasons (c.f. the legal
status of people living in the confines of a town
in medieval times). The data to document such
repairs, as has been noted on the rampart of the
Münsterhügel at Basel, cannot be obtained from a
single narrow trench or even a series of trenches
(Furger-Gunti 1980). The rampart of the Heuneburg
was frequently rebuilt, with post-holes front and
back, but the new post-holes could completely
destroy those of an earlier phase, making it difficult
if not impossible to correlate the post-holes from
one trench to another, and so interpret the phasing,
and establish how many times the rampart had
been rebuilt, especially as this could involve the
total removal of the bank. The traditional trench
as employed by Wheeler and by Hawkes, and by
others more recently, thus has severe limitations
in what it tells us, as Thomas Pertlwieser and Iris
31
John COLLIS
Ott’s re-excavation and extension of Hawkes’ 1930s
trench on Gergovie clearly demonstrates.
Up to the 1960s the traditional methods of
investigation of hill-fort defences followed the
same pattern, even on major excavations, with
narrow trenches through the ramparts and the
clearance of the gateway which could show the
basic sequence and perhaps the relationship of
the different phases with the internal occupation
as at Danebury. However a revolution came with
the rescue excavation of two hill-forts in Wales, The
Breiddin which was excavated by Chris Musson
between 1969 and 1976 (Musson 1991), and Moely-Gaer (Rhosesmor) directed by Graeme Guilbert
in 1972-3 (Guilbert 1975 ; 1976) ), inspired by Leslie
Alcock’s excavations at South Cadbury (Barrett
et al. 2000). In both cases extensive lengths of the
ramparts of 30m and more were excavated revealing
complexities which single trenches would be
incapable of showing. In the case of The Breiddin, it
was one of the first to produce Bronze Age dates, as
well as Late Roman structures, demonstrating that
the hill-fort was not a phenomenon confined to the
Iron Age as assumed under the Culture-Historical
model. Guilbert’s photograph (fig. 2) of the phase
2 defences at Moel-y-Gaer shows an AltkönigPreist construction with each section filled in in a
completely different way, presumably by separate
teams of workers, and even two or three trenches
through the rampart would have each given very
different results impossible to understand. The
examples of large scale rampart excavation in
this volume, at Gergovie, Mont Vully and Puech du
Mus, underline the need for extensive clearance of
ramparts, as Fichtl states in his conclusion.
Besides the cultural restraints on techniques
of rampart construction, the other major factor is
environmental, especially the availability of suitable
tim­bers for the elaborate timber lacing which is a
feature of many of the rampart types discussed in this
volu­me. They also require the availability of soil and
rocks, materials which are not necessarily available
everywhere. In northern and western Scotland where
stocks of suitable timber were at a premium if not
non-existent, for instance on Orkney, but where high
quality building stone was relatively easily quarried,
purely stone structures like the brochs and duns pre­
do­minate. Similar stone traditions are found in the
Mediterranean countries such as Spain and southern
France, but there were alternative materials available
such as turf or sun-dried bricks, or later mortared
walls and fired brick and tile. But clearly environ­
mental determinism to explain the distribution of
ram­part types is too simplistic, as we find different
building traditions overlap geographically, or one
technique replaces another.
2. The Phase 2 rampart of Preist-Altkönig construction at Moel y Gaer (Rhosesmor) showing the different
nature of the infill in the different sections between the horizontal timbers. Copyright, Graeme Guilbert.
32
Why do we still dig Iron Age ramparts ?
Examples of ‘foreign’ construction techniques
appearing in a region where another dominated can
give us ideas about the transfer of cultural traits. The
most famous Iron Age example is the dried brick
construction (and the bastions) at the Heuneburg,
but, though, contrary to what is often stated, it suited
the climate very well, it was not repeated or used
elsewhere to our knowledge in temperate Europe,
and as the excavators argued at the time, it was a
Mediterranean influence introduced by someone
familiar with building techniques in the developing
classical world. Another example is the stone wall at
Gergovie in the Auvergne, an outlier to the southern
French distribution of such ramparts. But in the
Auvergne and neighbouring areas Fécamp dump
ramparts are known, as at Gondole, and it is likely that
the rampart here overlies an earlier murus gallicus as
is the case on several sites in the neighbouring areas
of the Forez, Berry and Burgundy. The murus gallicus
at Manching is likely to be another example. In parts
of Wales and Scotland the earth, stone and timber
rampart constructions may alternate chronologically
with pure stone constructions.
central England against Danish invaders in the 9th
and 10th centuries AD. Many were new foundations
which might or might not later develop into urban
centres. Some of the ramparts, such as Wareham
(RCHME 1959) were originally built of earth, but in
other cases earlier Roman walls were refurbished
using stone and mortar as at Winchester, and
some new foundations like Oldaport in Devon
(Rainbird 1998 ; Rainbird, Druce 2004) were given
mortared stone walls from the start. In the case
of Winchester, the Roman walls gave a certain
historical status to the capital of the expanding
kingdom of Wessex, what was to become England.
The same is true for its successor, London, but in
this case the reconstruction of the Roman walls led
to a movement of much of the population from the
trading site of Lundenwic to the west of the Roman
town into the area defended by the walls, bringing
with it a special status to ‘The City’ which survives
to the modern day, though nowadays the status is
defined more by the financial institutions rather
than its medieval legal status. The same seems to
have happened in York.
But we must also beware of false connections.
A trench through the rampart of the Carlwark near
Sheffield shows it to be built of turf, revetted on
the front by a dry-stone wall. In her publication of
the site Peggy Piggott (Margaret Guido) noted the
only parallel known to her was a turf rampart in the
latest phase at Traprain Law which was considered
by the excavators to be post-Roman and this has led
to a long tradition that this is a Dark Age defence
(Piggott 1951; Avery 1993: p. 86). Neither is it likely
to be due to the introduction by the Roman army
of turf ramparts for military camps and even the
early phase of Hadrian’s Wall, as a Late Bronze Age
is just as possible as there are other examples of
the use of turf on Late Bronze Age and Early Iron
Age sites in Britain such as Rainsborough Camp
(Avery et al. 1967; Avery 1993: p. 276-290), though in
truth it is simply undated. It also reminds us of the
suggestion that the murus gallicus at the Camp du
Castellier at Saint-Désir (Calvados) may have had
turf revetment instead of the usual stone because
stone was not readily available in the area (Aylwin
Cotton 1957, p. 203-204). We thus have to reckon
with local innovations tried one or twice, but never
repeated.
This use of special construction techniques and
the re-use of previously important sites perhaps have
their Iron Age equivalents, again the Heuneburg
being an obvious example. When I first coined
the term ‘Ehrang’ to describe a murus gallicus type
of construction, but lacking the iron nails (Collis
197, p. 15), I had in mind not only a chronological
distinction, but also an industrial and political
development, with the appearance of societies
capable of organising labour and resources on a
large scale, and deliberately destroying material
(e.g. the iron nails) by using it in contexts where it
may not have been structurally necessary or visible.
This has its parallels on the Iron Age site of Segsbury
Camp where Gary Lock and Chris Gosden’s
excavation have produced ‘foreign chalk’ which was
brought from a considerable distance from the site,
but buried in the core of the bank where they were
not visible (Lock et al. 2005). Perhaps this conferred
status to sites where it was employed, not only as a
chef-lieu, a political centre of power, but also to the
individuals living inside, something which could
also be claimed by individual aristocrats as Olivier
Buchsenschutz has suggested for the small sites
enclosed by a murus gallicus found in the Berry.
Another interesting comparison is with the Late
Saxon burhs established by King Alfred and his
successors as centres of defence in southern and
The use of the title Murus Celticus for this
volume has led to a lively discussion between the
editor, the publishers and myself as the academic
33
John COLLIS
referee. We all agreed it was a good snappy title, but
one which could lead to major misunderstandings
and this introduction is an attempt to clarify the
problems of using terms such as ‘Celtic’. What we
are dealing with is a long tradition of rampart
construction whose distribution extends over large
areas of temperate Europe, a tradition which is in
part dictated by local environmental constraints
of the availability of the necessary materials, but
is also based on cultural factors, the transfer of
traditions between communities and generations.
The distribution of this tradition occurs mainly in
areas occupied by peoples variously called by the
Greeks and Romans and by the people themselves
as Keltoi, Galatae, Galli and Celtae, but it was not
confined to them, as it was used by people like the
Britanni who were never referred to as Celts (Collis
2003). There is also something of a correlation
with people who spoke what is now referred to
by linguists as Celtic languages, but again we have
Celtic speaking people like the Ligurians around
Marseille who at most were referred to as ‘Celto-
Ligurians’ but who never used this architecture. In
Spain we encounter peoples who spoke a Celtic
language, and some of whom were also referred to
as Celts,but whose architecture resembles more that
of their non-Indo-European Iberian neighbours. My
colleagues may not go as far as I do in rejecting the
idea of a La Tène Culture or Culture Group (though
I will accept there were ‘Hallstatt’ and ‘La Tène’ ways
of doing things which were technologically and
culturally determined). But we all agree that the
way in which we use terms like ‘Celtic’ has to be
done carefully or it can lead to outcomes which are
neither academically or politically acceptable.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Graeme Guilbert for putting me
right on aspects of the Carlwark, and his comments
about the influence of the South Cadbury
excavations on his work.
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