Introduction

This book is not about the Roman period in Germany, at least not Germany within its present political boundaries, and it therefore does not have the title ‘Roman Germany - It might seem surprising to find sites in the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Switzerland as well as Germany discussed here, but that is because parts of these modern countries once lay within the Roman political boundaries of Germania Inferior and Germania Superior. These two provinces are the focus of this study (1).

Within the German provinces were many disparate landscapes and a wide variety of population groups - Celts (the Greek name) or Gauls (the Latin name), Germans, peoples of mixed Celtic and Germanic origin, and Romans from across the Empire - all joined by Roman external agency into a heterogeneous whole. This book tries to deal with all of them, although admittedly the Romans, who were a significant presence in the region, get the most attention due to the nature of the evidence. What is the levidence? The archaeological material - excavated sites and all manner of artefacts is abundant. However archaeologists have often focused more strongly on what is recognisable as ‘Roman’, for example stone-built architecture and certain types of easily recognisable pottery such as terra sigillata, rather than on less tangible timber structures or handmade local pottery which even in the twentieth century was sometimes thought to be preRoman. The excavated remains allow us, if properly studied, to assess the complex impact of Rome on various regions and the varying degrees to which the indigenous populations accepted, adapted or rejected Roman culture. Written sources such as Latin historical and geographical treatises have an inherent Roman bias, and their reliability as accounts of the cultural and ethnic diversity of the conquered areas is limited. Nevertheless, they have a great value as contemporary documents from a Roman perspective and can be compared and contrasted with the excavated evidence. Other written sources such as inscriptions, particularly those on funerary monuments, reveal population influx and movement, social structures and identities.

In the multi-ethnic environment of the German provinces, perceived and expressed identities are an important issue. Did the Celts call themselves Celts, did the Germanic peoples identify themselves as Germans, and is it justified to use these terms in this book? The archaeological and historical evidence suggests that these two large groups did not regard themselves as nations, but rather it was the Roman ethnographic tradition derived from earlier Greek accounts that politically and ideologically constructed the larger ethnic communities known as Celts/Gauls and Germans. Diodorus Siculus and Caesar writing in the first century BC acknowledged the diversity of peoples in Gaul, but confirmed that they were all joined together under one name by the Romans as the Gauls. Wliat is now the equivalent of France, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands and

1 Provinces of the western Empire with main administrative centres

Germany west of the Rhine was known as Gaul (Gcdtia), despite the fact that Germanic and mixed Celtic and Germanic peoples lived there. Carved out of the eastern fringes of Gaul were the German provinces where Celtic and Germanic groups also lived side by side. The indigenous peoples under consideration, however, categorised their ethnic ascription on a specific tribal level, identifying themselves as belonging to a particular group and not using a collective name. In using, mainly for the sake of simplicity, the names ‘Celt’ or ‘Gaul’ (which I do interchangeably) and ‘German’ I am using the standard terminology of antiquity which also has an established tradition in modern archaeological and historical research. That there is great diversity in this generalised unity is absolutely clear, and this is taken into account in many ways in the individual chapters of the book.

Archaeological research on the Roman period in the modem states comprising the former German provinces is as diverse as the ancient peoples in them, and attitudes towards the pre-Roman and Roman past vary greatly. Peoples and events have often been selectively chosen to bolster more recent political and ideological structures. The most extreme case of this was exhibited in National Socialist Germany when the Roman past was rejected as foreign and oppressive and the indigenous Germanic peoples were idealised as freedom fighters of racial purity and superiority. Since the Second World War, archaeology in Germany has taken a turn in reaction to this. The Romans are of great interest again, perhaps because issues of race and ethnicity can be more easily avoided, although I find the apparent reluctance in German archaeology to eiqjlore ethnic and other identities unfortunate. The Romans are obviously regarded as ‘safer’, and a study of them need not reopen a Pandora’s box of race-historical issues once so negatively exploited and better forgotten. Excavating at sites in Germany in the 19fJ0s and 1990s, which were clearly not of the Roman period or outside the frontiers of the Empire, our excavation teams were inevitably asked by interested members of the public on site whether we had yet found something Roman. The disappointment at being told that this was not the case was tangible. The Romans can also be rather useful politically and ideologically, as in 1992 in Cologne when there was a concerted effort on the part of the city administration to distance itself from any racial prejudice and aversion to foreigners expressed by right-wing groups. One of the mottos of the time was ‘Die ersten KSlncr waren AudSnder’ (‘the first inhabitants of Cologne were foreigners’). In other words, the Romans who founded Cologne were a mixed group from around the then-known world, and this multicultural society was represented as a role model of harmony.

Unlike the archaeology of the Roman period in Britain which is known rather enigmatically and inconsistently as ‘Romano-British’, that of the same period in Germany is known simply as ‘Roman’. The same is true in the Netherlands and in Switzerland. There are no overtones of a particular people or nation at the heart of the period, although interestingly Dutch scholars more frequently than others explore social, cultural and ethnic structures of the pre-Roman and Roman periods, but without nationalistic sentiments. In contrast. Roman-period archaeology in Belgium is alternatively called Betgo-Romain' or ‘Galh-Ronutitt', both terms alluding to the indigenous population of the Roman period and both implying some kind of national particularism. 'GaUo-Romain' is also widely used in France, again indicating that the Gauls as indigenous peoples and perceived ancestors of modern France are central to an understanding of the period. The phrase ‘nos antitres, les Gaulois' (‘our ancestors, the Gauls’) was first coined in the sixteenth century, and this sentiment is still expressed today.

In the nineteenth century both France and Germany were guilty of manipulating history for political and nationalistic purposes. Both countries bypassed their common Frankish past to hail either an early Gaulish or Germanic leader as a national hero. In France, Vercingetorix, the Gaulish chieftain of the Arvemi who united other tribes in fierce resistance to Caesar in 52 BC, became the manifestation of Gaulish resistance to foreign domination, an issue particularly relevant in the wake of German aggression against France in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870/71. In Germany, Arminius (or Hermann), the Cheruscan chieftain who defeated Varus and his three Roman legions in

AD 9, became a symbol of the German love of freedom and of national unification. The latter attitude was largely prompted by the treatment of Germany by Napoleon, the Roman conquest somehow being equated with foreign domination by France. The Germans, of course, could and did point out to the French that Vercingetorb; was actually defeated, whereas Arminius was not. Statues were erected to both of them, Verdngetorix at Alesia in 1865 and Arminius near Detmold in 1875. At the same time, the Belgians proclaimed the Gaulish leader Ambiorix of the Eburones, who died fighting Caesar, a national hero, erecting a sutue of him in the town centre of Tongeren. These figures were put forward as visible symbols of national unity and a glorification of perceived ancestors, ignoring the disunity and fictitious nationhood of both the Gauls and the Germans in the Iron Age and in the Roman period.

There is no argument that Vercingetorix was a Gaul and Arminius a German, but problems of interpreting identity arise in France and Germany with the late Roman and early Medieval Franks. A catalogue accompanying an exhibition shown in Mannheim in 1996 and Berlin in 1997 entitled Die Franken - Wegbereiter Europas or Let Francs - Frkurseurs de {'Europe tackles, among other things, the identity of the Franks, attempting to place them in a larger context as the creators of a shared European experience from the fifth to eighth centuries. One of the chapters of the catalogue has the apt heading ‘Eine Geschichle - Zwei Geschichten’ (‘one history - two stories’). To the French, the Merovingian Franks represent Germanic invaders who brought about the destruction of Roman Gaul; to the Germans they represent the triumph of a confederation of Germanic peoples who freed Germany from Roman domination and ruled over Gaul. Since the nation of France rose out of the Germanic kingdom of the Franks this poses a real conflict for the French. The conflict is partly reconciled by an historical event: the conversion of Clovis (French) or Chlodwig (German) to Christianity in 496. With the baptism of Clovis and his army, the barbarian German is perceived to have acknowledged the faith and culture of late Roman Christian Gaul (although not all Gallo-Romans were Christians), thereby unifying the Gallo-Romans and the Franks and becoming the first king of France. In the year of the 1500th anniversary of his conversion, a special church celebration was held by the Pope in Reims where Clovis was baptised, and special issues of history books such as Clwis. La rmissance de la France or Clovis ou! es origines de la France were published in 1995 and 1996. The question whether the Franks were French or German, however, does not take into account that their genesis as a people and their establishment as a kingdom is intimately related to the role the Franks played within the context of late Roman history.

These conflicts between Gaulish/Celtic peoples and Germanic peoples, between the French and the Germans, are relevant to a study of the German provinces. The theme of opposition between Gauls and Germans is one occurring already in antiquity, and it goes back to the late second and first centuries BC when the northern Germanic Cimbri and Teutones and later the Suebi from the Elbe region plundered Gaulish territory west of the Rhine. In 58 BC the Gaulish Acdui are said to have feared that ‘in a few years all the natives will have been driven forth from the borders of Gaul, and all the Germans will have crossed the Rhine’ (Caesar, De Bello Galileo 1.31). Caesar made ample use for tactical and ideological reasons of cavalry units recruited from east-bank Germanic tribes, the old enemies of the Gauls, in his campaigns in Gaul (De BeIJo Galileo 7.13, 65, 70), and the

Roman general Cerialis, addressing the Lingones and Treveri in AD 69, fuelled old animosities by reminding them of the lust, avarice and aggressiveness of past Germanic neighbours (Tacitus, Hisioriae 4,73).

Exchange and contact between Gauls and Germans was not simply a pre-Roman phenomenon, but relations between Gauls and Germans, both conflicting and friendly, and between both groups and the Romans continued throughout the first few centuries AD. After the Roman conquest of Gaul and the Rhineland, peoples who were ethnically and culturally Gaulish/Celtic on the middle and upper Rhine were politically organised by the Romans into the district of Germania Superior, the name of the province thus not accurately reflecting the character of the population, but perhaps revealing something about the Roman perception of it. Germania Inferior, particularly the north, and the annexed area between the Rhine and the iimes, encompassed regions in which both ethnic Germans and people of mixed Germanic and Celtic origin lived. In addition to this, a greater degree of physical and social mobility in Roman provincial society enabled many to travel and participate in economic life in areas outside their immediate communities. The opportunities offered by the newly established towns on the Rhine frontier, often heavily populated by the Roman military and its dependants, for example, attracted many Gaulish businessmen and merchants to a predominantly Germanic region. Moreover, the post-Caesarian restructuring of tribes and subtribes west of the Rhine, often involving the resettling of Germanic groups from the east bank of the river to the west bank, meant that during the early Empire the population of the provinces found itself in a state of flux. It was the Romans who united the Gallic and Germanic polities into larger units referred to as Caili or Germani. Nevertheless, a Gallic or Germanic nation identifying itself with a collective name did not exist, and modern attempts to negate the disunity and disparity of the many groups in Gaul and Germany are nationalistic constructs.

The other essential component in this Gallic-Germanic world were the Romans, themselves a disparate bunch from many localities in the Empire. In what way, for example, was an auxiliary soldier born and raised in the Danube region who retired with Roman citizenship and settled in one of the German provinces a ‘Roman’? Why would a ‘Roman’ soldier of distant, possibly north Italian, origin stationed on the German frontier become a devotee of gods rooted in local, pre-Roman cults of the lower Rhine? And why would some Gaulish peoples invent an origin myth which linked them to Rome through common descent? Tb varying degrees the Gaulish and Germanic peoples took an active part in internalising Roman culture as it was presented to them and, by the same token, in contributing to a western Roman culture that is very different from that in other parts of the Empire. This is reflected in many ways that are explored in the following chapters.