BOHEMIA AND MORAVIA

In 1984 I drew a contrast between the small defended sites of Slovakia with their surrounding open settlements, and the nucleated oppida of Bohemia and Moravia in which the whole of the defended area was occupied. An overlap area existed around Bratislava. This contrast still exists, but the boundary is less marked. The oppida in Bohemia are generally large, up to 180 ha or more at Zavist, whereas the largest oppidum in Moravia, Stare Hradisko, is only 30 ha, still larger than the Slovakian sites, but like them it has extensive occupation outside its defences (Cizmaf 1989).

The Czech sites are still generally the earliest oppida in temperate Europe, belonging to the early second century BC - Zavist, Stradonice, Hrazany, Stare Hradisko. Despite the apparently rational distribution along trade routes, the appearance of the oppida was not a unitary phenomenon. Tn'sov has long been accepted as a later addition to the system some time in the first century BC (La Tene D1-2), and Drda (pers. comm.), considering the evidence for reconstruction of sites and the subtle changes in construction techniques for the defences, believes that a sequence can be detected, with Zavist as the oldest. Their end is, however, synchronous, some time in La Tene Di, late in the first century BC, with violent destructions at Zavist and Hrazany, whereas certainly in Slovakia, and perhaps in Moravia, the sites continued later, in places into the first century AD. Despite one or two suggestions, no oppida have been definitely identified in northern Bohemia, though major open settlements such as Lovosice (Salac 1990), and many small farming settlements on the loess, are now beginning to be identified. The concept of the oppida being established to stem hostile Germanic invasion from the north can no longer be sustained by the archaeology.

In both size and the complexity and elaborate sequence of its defences, Zavist is obviously a key site, controlling, like Prague, the geographical centre of Bohemia (Motykova et al. 1990). Despite the evidence of a massive late bronze age settlement, and the Hallstatt - La Tene A settlement with its religious centre on the ‘Akropolis’ (Motykova et al. 1986), the La Tene C2 oppidum is a new foundation after a couple of centuries of abandonment. But the wealth of finds, especially coins, is still less impressive than those plundered in the nineteenth century from its smaller neighbour Stradonice (Rybova and Drda 1989), and the relative status of the two sites in the economic and political hierarchy is unclear. But concentrations of iron working, coin production, bronze-working and other industrial activity is a feature of all the oppida which have been extensively explored.