Enclosing Space, Opening New Ground

Enclosures are among the most widely distributed features of the European Iron Age. From fortifications to field systems, they demarcate territories and settlements, sanctuaries and central places, burials and ancestral grounds. This dividing of the physical and the mental landscape between an `inside' and an `outside' is investigated anew in a series of essays by some of the leading scholars on the topic. The contributions cover new ground, from Scotland to Spain, between France and the Eurasian steppe, on how concepts and communities were created as well as exploring specific aspects and broader notions of how humans marked, bounded and guarded landscapes in order to connect across space and time. A recurring theme considers how Iron Age enclosures created, curated, formed or deconstructed memory and identity, and how by enclosing space, these communities opened links to an earlier past in order to understand or express their Iron Age presence. In this way, the contributions examine perspectives that are of wider relevance for related themes in different periods.

Tanja Romankiewicz is a Research Fellow at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. Developing from her PhD on the complex roundhouses of the Scottish Iron Age, supervised by Ian Ralston, she currently investigates prehistoric and Roman architectures more widely across northwest Europe, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Manuel Fernandez-Goetz is Chancellor's Fellow in Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. His main research intterests are Iron Age societies in central and western Europe and the archaeology of identities from a theoretical perspective. This research has resulted in numerous publications relating to the Iron Age of the Iberian Peninsula, northeast Gaul and southern Germany, including Identity and Power: The transformation of Iron Age societies in northeast Gaul (2014). Gary Lock is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at the University of Oxford. His research interests include computer applications and quantitative methods in archaeology especially Geographical Information Systems, their application and theoretical aspects (current interests are modelling visibility and movement). Olivier Buchsenschutz is one of France's pre-eminent scholars on the Iron Age and has been Director of Research at CNRS, the French national centre of scientific research. He has worked on some of the most famous Iron Age enclosed sites in France, in particular the oppida sites at Bibracte and Bourges.