This paper considers the short-lived emergence of complex societies in the mid-first millennium BC in western temperate Europe, effectively preceding by some four centuries the major phase of the establishment of secondary states in the decades prior to their conquest by the late Roman Republic. The evidence for the initial phase is essentially archaeological; it consists in the main of small-scale heavily-enclosed sites surrounded by wealthy barrow burials, both types including high-status imports from the Mediterranean world.
Bourges, located further west than most sites with these characteristics, represents a variation on the normal spatial arrangements of such sites and, being more extensive perhaps c.
Associations between high-quality imports and craft sectors around Bourges intimate a less top-down organization than apparent elsewhere. Likely modeled on north Italian exemplars, the expansion and floruit of Bourges c.
During the Iron Age of western temperate Europe, accumulating archaeological evidence has long indicated two distinct periods at which societies with many of the characteristics of state-level societies emerged.
The second of these in chronological terms is characteristic of the decades before the Roman conquest of Gaul in the middle of the last century BC e. At this period a series of Celtic societies, some run by traditional aristocracies or even by kings, and others by elected magistracies although drawn from the same hereditary elite groups , were in due course overcome within less than a decade by the late Republican armies of Julius Caesar.
