When Spanish archaeologists went to check out a ruin in Galicia they thought dated to the pre-Roman Iron Age, they were surprised to discover Latin inscriptions. Taking a closer look at the walls, they realized that the stonework was more Roman than Celt-Iberian. It didn't take much more work to identify the site, which they dubbed Castro Valente, as a fortress constructed in the mid 400s AD after Iberia had been conquered by Germanic invaders.
Lidar (top) showed the dimensions of the fortress, which covers 10 hectares (25 acres). The walls are about 1200m long (3900 feet), studded with 30 towers.
You see this all over western Europe: people who in Roman times had been living in convenient, unwalled cities on nice, level ground, or next to helpful rivers, suddenly decided that they needed to live in hilltop fortresses. Hilltop fortresses are extremely innconvenient places to live. Every trip to the fields involves hiking up and down the hill, plus there's the problem of water. Building walls on top of hills is also quite difficult and time consuming. People didn't do that unless they had to. And they had to, in the 400s AD, because the collapse of the empire in Western Europe made the world a much more violent and dangerous place.
Interesting, and very exciting that they can still discover hitherto unknown castros.
ReplyDeleteAs elsewhere, there is, of course, plenty of debate about castros and Romanization: how Romanized the area from Galicia to Vizcaya ever was (the positions ranging from "never at all" to "completely"); whether, if Romanized, the castros were abandoned in Roman times or integrated into the network of civitates; whether castros before or after Rome should be taken to represent collectively-organized refuges or aristo strongholds (my impression is this is a perennial debate all over Europe), etc.
Parts of coastal Spain were obviously very Romanized, but I recently came across this striking passage in Wickham's Framing the Early Middle Ages: "the Spanish interior may have been the most isolated, detached part of the whole Roman world-system in 400 or so." In this sense, one has to credit the Visigoths with managing to turn that barren center into a focus of power (Toledo, long remembered with a kind of liturgical romanticism by Spanish clergy). Of course, the house of cards fell apart rapidly after 711.
(Personally, I always preferred your image of people retreating to their ancient pre-Roman fortifications after the empire's shield was gone. But scholars will have their little arguments.)
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