Les oppida, une parenthèse dans l’histoire de l’Europe tempérée ?

Abstract

By asserting that “the Gaulish fortresses were not mere places of refuge […] but real cities occupied by a fixed population […] The oppidum was also the emporium, the market of the city […]”, Joseph Déchelette has durably conceptualized the notion of oppidum. A century later, this definition is, more or less, the one that has the favour of the whole community of Iron Age archaeologists. However, the exponential increase of data, concerning the oppida or more generally the entirety of the archaeological documentation relative to the period of the 2nd and 1st century BC, invites to an in-depth reconsideration of the analysis of Déchelette. That is what we evoked in our this paper, relying in particular on the work of Vladimir Salač, who in a series of recent papers considers that the archaeological data make possible to propose an interpretation of the advent of oppida opposed to Déchelette’s, namely, as the symptom of a “desurbanization”.

Keywords

• oppida
• Celtic world
• chronology
• urbanization
• Déchelette (Joseph)
• Salač (Vladimír)