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Sto caricando le informazioni... La parola ai barbari: come i popoli conquistati hanno disegnato l'Europa romanadi Peter S. Wells
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Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. The only thing that's really wrong with this book is the misleading title and back cover blurb. Supposedly it "re-creates the story of Europe's indigenous people" in Roman times and tells us "how the conquered peoples shaped Roman Europe". These are wild exaggerations. This book is archaeological and the conclusions it reaches are therefore much more modest than those advertisements would lead you to assume. The argumentation goes like this: these objects were found here, other objects were found there, this might mean that the indigenous people interacted so-and-so with the Romans. In between there are some general thoughts on cultural interaction across frontiers and about biased historical accounts (ancient and modern), but I thought most of these observations were quite obvious. The author does nicely question the value of ancient Roman terminology, "Celts", "Gauls" etc., and contrasts it to the objectivity and certainty of archaeology. Of course he's right as far as objectivity is concerned, but the flipside of the coin is the limited nature of archaeological evidence and argumentation. In short, read this book if you have a serious interest in Rome and in archaeology. If you prefer history to archaeology, then the barbarians won't really speak to you in this book any more than they do in other books. nessuna recensione | aggiungi una recensione
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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. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)936History and Geography Ancient World Europe north and west of Italian Peninsula to ca. 499Classificazione LCVotoMedia:
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