THE BARBARIANS SPEAK

The Barbarians Speak re-creates the story of Europe's indigenous people who were nearly stricken from historical memory even as they adopted and transformed aspects of Roman culture. The Celts and Germans inhabiting temperate Europe before the arrival of the Romans left no written record of their lives and were often dismissed as "barbarians" by the Romans who conquered them. Accounts by Julius Caesar and a handful of other Roman and Greek writers would lead us to think that prior to contact with the Romans, European natives had much simpler political systems, smaller settlements, no evolving social identities, and that they practiced human sacrifice. A more accurate, sophisticated picture of the indigenous people emerges, however, from the archaeological remains of the Iron Age. Here Peter Wells brings together information that has belonged to the realm of specialists and enables the general reader to share in the excitement of rediscovering a "lost people." In so doing, he is the first to marshal material evidence in a broad-scale examination of the response by the Celts and Germans to the Roman presence in their lands.

Peter S. Wells, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, has conducted archaeological fieldwork continuously in southern Germany for nearly three decades. Among his recent works are Settlement, Economy, and Cultural Change at the End of the European Iron Age: Excavations at Kelheim in Bavaria, 1987-1991 and Farms, Villages, and Cities: Commerce and Urban Origins in Late Prehistoric Europe.

DIE BARBAREN SPRECHEN: Kelten, Germanen und das roemische Europa
Deutsch von Susanne Fischer
[HC: Theiss/WBG, 08/2007]