Syllabus
1) Introduction - Mediterranean and central Europe; archaeology of intercultural contacts 2) The Aegean Bronze age and Central Europe 3) The Urnfield culture and the beginnings of the Iron Age 4) Early Iron Age: Etruria, Este, Golasecca - Hallstatt and the Eastern Alps, the Situla Art 5-6) Late Hallstatt period - Etruscans in the Po valley and Greeks in Massilia, princely graves and princely residences: Hochdorf, Heuneburg, Vix… 7) Early La Tène Period: new art, new society; the Celts 8) Early to Middle La Tène period - Celtic art, Celtic expansions, the Celts in Italy 9) Celts in the Balkans, in Greece, and Anatolia; Celts in Greek and Roman art; Celtic mercenaries 10) Third to second century BC: transformation of Celtic society - coins, glass and agglomerations 11) late La Tène Period: oppida, amphorae and late La Tène art 12) end of the Celtic world - Caesar, Burebista, and Romanisation 13) Germans and Romans - the first centuries AD in central Europe.
Annotation
The course presents a historically (and mostly) archaeologically based general overview of our knowledge on
Transalpine Europe in the first millennium BC with principal focus on the instances of interaction between Central
Europe and Mediterranean occurring throughout the studied period. We will analyse the available (Greco-Roman) written sources on the Transalpine world, present the principal categories of imported objects, study the situations of mutual interaction and influence between the two cultural areas and analyse the broad phenomena of cultural transformation in which the contact of the two worlds (is supposed to have) had its share (e.g the Hallstatt culture princely graves, Celtic art, Late La Tène oppida).