Farms, Villages & Cities: Commerce & Urban Origins in Late Prehistoric Europe

by Peter S. Wells

8vo. Original pictorial card covers (softback) (VG). Pp. 270, illus with b&w maps, drawings and b&w photos in text (previous owner's neat inscription on half title).

270 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

Reviews

[Hugolane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Over a two decades ago, I read Wells's The Barbarians Speak and found it immensely insightful, so much so that it was one of the books I was telling people to read to help process 9/11 alongside J.M. Coetze's Waiting for the Barbarians. I've been returning to the early history of Europe recently, and this book came up in a search. Recognizing Wells's name I immediately ordered it. In comparison with The Barbarians Speak, this seems written for a more scholarly audience, in so much as its core concern is about how urbanization north of the alps happened, and what were its drivers. Wells's key argument that north of the alps urban centers began to take shape as centers of trade and production before contact with Mediterranean civilizations. This was already occurring in the Bronze age. That said, these urban centers did not form the basis for civilization as generally understood, because the economy was insufficient to support them, and this actually continued throughout the Roman era and after. It was not until the high middle ages that Northern Europe truly begins to support civilization as we think of it. It is intriguing to think of early medieval Europe as a continuity of the pre-Roman situation, but if you are trying to make sense of things like the different ethnic groups, like the Celts or the appearance of the Germanic peoples this book is not for you, as Wells, following standard archeological practice, prefers to identify cultures based on artifacts rather linking them to linguistic groups that are familiar to us, thus the argument is framed in terms of different material cultures, like the Hallstatt culture that became prominent north of the alps in the first millenium BCE.

[Peter Goggins · Rating 3 out of 5]

As the title suggests, the author explores the economies of bronze, iron, and Roman age Northern Europe, largely through the prism of grave excavations. This is a good reference guide to the types of objects that were manufactured at the time, where and how they were traded, and what their relative value was.

For most of the book, I felt as though the author was dancing around a central thesis, as would be expected, without actually delivering one. I struggled to fit the information delivered into my worldview of social development. At the very end two appeared - the first was that trade with the more advanced Mediterranean societies for luxury goods stimulated the formation of trading centers - essentially, that Europe was the hinterland of the Mediterranean world.

The second, and far more intriguing hypothesis, concerned the process by which “enterprising individuals” could appropriate agricultural surplus, stimulate metal production, and trade it for goods, with the agricultural surplus and metal serving as a proto-capital mechanism.