Urbanisation dynamics in Celtic Europe: from sites to networks
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2015-10-15

Clara Filet
PARIS 1 - PANTHÉON-SORBONNE
Over a relatively short period between the 3rd and the 1st century BC, an unprecedented phenomenon of complexification of modality of habitation developed in non-Mediterranean Europe. This was the emergence of large agglomerations which had urban characteristics. This important landmark of the end of the Celtic period on the continent is here considered in the light of a new element: organisation of the sites networks. We no longer consider the town as a simple dot in a map, but as the articulation between different networks (contacts and interactions) of settlements, from the local to inter-cultural scale.

The presented project works to precise the organisation of connections between settlements inside a given territory. To reconstruct past connections, the distribution of exogenous products or material and the structure of the settlement hierarchy are examined and confronted to spatial interactions models, in particular retailer models (ex. Bevan and Wilson 2012). First conceivedby physicists and urban geographers, those applications allow us to identify the relative (economic, political, in size…) importance of each node depending on its position in the network. Their more recent use for archaeological dataset offers promising prospects in the study of complex processes with connected actors.

Studying this system, its implementation and its evolution will help us to better highlight how the first towns’ networks established themselves in relation to each other, and to perceive how far these new agglomerations had a role to play in the territory structuration and the emergence of the first archaic states north of the Alps.