These words are taken from Julius Caesar’s account of his war of conquest against the Celtic peoples of Western Europe in the first century BC. He attributed them to his enemy Vercingetorix, leader of the last great defence of Gaul against the Roman legions. More important in the context of the present discussion, they are inscribed at the base of a monumental bronze statue of Vercingetorix that surmounts the hilltop fortress of Alésia in Burgundy, the site of the final stand against the Romans. The French emperor Napoleon III commissioned the statue in 1865, and he also lavishly financed archaeological excavations at the site. Over a century later, in 1985, standing in the middle of the nearby ancient hilltop fortress of Bibracte (Mont Beuvray), where Vercingetorix had attempted to rally a united opposition against the Romans, French president François Mitterrand launched an appeal for national unity. Stating that Bibracte was the place where the ‘first act of our history took place’ (Mitterrand 1985: 54), he officially declared it a ‘national site’. A monument was also erected to commemorate his visit, and archaeological excavations were begun with financing on an unprecedented scale. It is my contention that such appeals to an ancient Celtic past have played, and continue to play, a number of important and often paradoxical roles in the ideological naturalization of modern political communities at several contradictory levels, including: (1) pan-European unity in the context of the evolving European Community, (2) nationalism within member states of that community, and (3) regional resistance to nationalist hegemony. An understanding of this complex process requires exploration of the ways in which language, objects, places, and persons have been differentially emphasized to evoke antiquity and authenticity at each of these levels in the process of constructing and manipulating emotionally and symbolically charged traditions of Celtic identity. As an archaeologist specializing in the study of those societies of ancient Iron Age Europe that serve as a touchstone of authenticity in the invocation of Celtic identity, I have an interest in examining the ways that archaeology has been appropriated, or has collaborated, in these ‘invented traditions’ (Hobsbawm 1983), and its potential role in sorting out the competing claims of what Benedict Anderson (1983) has called ‘imagined communities’.
Astronomy, culture and landscape in the Early Iron Age in the Ebro Basin
