Dr. Manuel Fernández-Götz, Chancellor’s Fellow in Archaeology, Edinburgh University
“The Heuneburg Agglomeration and the Earliest Urbanization North of the Alps (600-400 BC)”

Abstract: Dr. Manuel Fernández-Götz, Chancellor’s Fellow in Archaeology, Edinburgh University, completed his binational PhD in pre- and protohistoric archaeology at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel (Germany) and the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain) in 2011. His research focuses on the evolution of Iron Age communities in western Europe, especially questions of social identity. He has participated in numerous field projects in Germany, France, Spain and Portugal and was coordinator of the Heuneburg project at the State Office for Cultural Heritage Baden-Württemberg in Germany. He has authored more than 80 publications on Iron Age Europe and theoretical approaches to archaeological identity.

Traditionally, Late Iron Age oppida have been considered the ‘first cities north of the Alps’. Recent large-scale research projects carried out in Germany and France have challenged this view. In the light of new data, the first urban and proto-urban centres of temperate Europe developed between the end of the 7th and the 5th centuries BC in an area stretching from Bohemia to central France.

The best known and most intensively investigated of these early Iron Age sites is the Heuneburg in southern Germany. The results of recent excavations indicate that this was one of the most important early Iron Age settlements, a substantial, politically and economically flourishing centre with extensive connections to areas as distant as Etruria and Greece.

Co-sponsored by the UWM Department of Anthropology, FLL/Classics, and UWM College of Letters & Science.