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.
The recent discovery of large pre-Roman settlements throughout central
and western Europe has only begun to show just how complex native
European societies were before the conquest. Remnants of walls, bone
fragments, pottery, jewelry, and coins tell much about such activities
as farming, trade, and religious ritual in their communities; objects
found at gravesites shed light on the richly varied lives of
individuals. Wells explains that the presence--or absence--of Roman
influence among these artifacts reveals a range of attitudes toward Rome
at particular times, from enthusiastic acceptance among urban elites to
creative resistance among rural inhabitants. In fascinating detail,
Wells shows that these societies did grow more cosmopolitan under Roman
occupation, but that the people were much more than passive
beneficiaries; in many cases they helped determine the outcomes of Roman
military and political initiatives. This book is at once a provocative,
alternative reading of Roman history and a catalyst for overturning
long-standing assumptions about nonliterate and indigenous societies.
