¡Descarga Unit 1. Celts and Romans y más Apuntes en PDF de Idioma Inglés solo en Docsity!
UNIT 1 CELTS AND ROMANS
1. PALEOLITHIC
1.1 UNDERCOVERING PREHISTORIC MAN
In 1856 some quarry workers found a skull and some bones in Neander Valley, Germany. These bones were examined because they didn’t know if they were animal or human. Two prominent English scientists crossed over to Germany in order to investigate the origin of the remains. They decided that they were human. The discovery took place when Darwin published his book: The Origin of Species. As a consequence of this, people began to talk about if these strange bones (ridge, no forehead, chunky…) were related to humans.
1.2 THE STONE AGE
We talk about Stone Age because people used stones in a surprising number of ways. They made sharp tools with stone and flint. a) NEANDERTHALS They were big and chunky; they had an enormous brain (section) so they were not stupid, they were not similar to apes, as people thought and seemed to have a sense of spirituality too according to the way they buried the dead bodies. Their big bone structure was not very useful when, after the Ice Age, the ice melted and they had to run after the animals for hunting. We don’t know what happened to Neanderthals, we only know that they lived with humans during a short period of time and then, they died out. b) CRO MAGNON The Cro Magnon are the early humans, early Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Their paintings were founded in France, in Cromagnon that is why they are called that way. The fact that they could paint is very important, it involves having skill and imagination. These men had culture, they made clothes, and they could go fishing and hunting. They were nomadic people.
2. NEOLITHIC
The Neolithic Era took place in 4000 - 2000 B.C.
People started to do different things:
- Sow seeds
- Harvesting
- Storing harvest
- Making tools to make these works easier
- Domesticate animals
- Trade
- Began to worship
- Build megalithic monuments (long barrows, henges, passage graves...)
The Neolithic or New Stone Age can be defined as the time when people took up agriculture as a way of life, and stopped being nomadic hunter-gatherers. Sometime around 4000 BC the ideas and technology of farming, and perhaps some of the first livestock ganado, crossed the Channel and arrived in England. Farming quickly spread all across the British Isles. Neolithic farmers settled in stable communities, cleared land, planted wheat trigo and barley cebada, and raised herds of domesticated sheep, cattle, and pigs. What hunting they did as a supplement to their agriculture may have been done with the assistance of small dogs. They settled on the easily drained soils of the upland hills and on the coastal plains, avoiding the thickly densamente wooded valley bottoms. Huts These Neolithic settlers originally lived in rectangular log tronco cabins, similar in style to those of the early American West. Communities were small, but they were communities, so people could and did indulge in large projects requiring group participation, such as the building of communal graves (long barrows), causewayed camps, and henges. Semi nomadic people. Although these people were farmers, they hadn't yet ironed out all the fine details of crop management, so every 10-20 years the land would reach the point where it could no longer support crops and the group would have to move on. In a few generations they could have returned to the original settlement after the land had lain fallow long enough to regenerate. Clothing seems to have been simple hide piel garments prendas. Ornamentation was extremely simple; animal teeth and bone necklaces. They hadn’t weaves tela. Life span was short, about 35 years for men and 30 for women. Arthritis was rampant, as was malnutrition. This was not a Golden Age of Yore; it was a difficult time to scratch a living from the earth.
Stone Henge
The Neolithic people started to build Stone Henge and it is supposed that the beaker people helped them to build it. Its origin is unknown; it is believed that it was build according to spiritual reasons. It is a massive circle of upright stones supporting lintels with another horse-shoe shape set of stones inside it, and an altar of stone inside that. The circle is aligned with the sunrise at the summer solstice and the sunset at winter solstice what means that it could have a spiritual origin. The stones were transported so far away by boat, so it is unbelievable that people could do that in such era. st
once farms, houses, and their field systems. It seems likely that warfare and banditry erupted as the starving survivors fought over land that could no longer support them.
Religion
People had started to have religion in Neolithic times as the monuments that they built show and as does their graves. The Baker Folk bury the corpses in round barrows. They were often clustered in groups which suggest family cemeteries. The barrow graves were generally filled with grave goods bienes, indicating the importance of the dead person and a belief in some kind of afterlife. Some of the goods included in barrows were: pottery jars, golden buckles, bronze daggers, cups, necklaces, and sceptres in various stones and precious materials. Both men and women were accorded barrow burials. A curious fact was noted in studying these Bronze Age burials; in many cases the corpses were carefully laid with the head to the south, men facing east, women facing west. We can only guess that this was to allow the corpse to see the sun at a particular time of day. Many of the best barrow burials found today are the Iron Age or even Saxon/Norse type barrows rather than Bronze Age. The other main area of Bronze Age focus was stone circles. Although circles may have been erected before, the major circle building era was during the Bronze Age. This suggests that The Beaker Folk and their descendants took over or adopted many of the beliefs and customs of the earlier Neolithic inhabitants. Certainly they had a go at improving the most famous of all stone circles, Stonehenge.
4. THE IRON AGE The iron came into Britain through contacts with continental Europe. We have different written accounts of this period: a)GREEKS Albion and Ierne is the way that Strabo called Britain and Ireland. Greeks wrote about British tin. They also realized that they were islands. b )THE ROMANS The Romans wrote about people who lived in the British Isles, but these accounts are suspect. But the best evidence about life in the Iron Age comes through the remains of some bodies founded buried in bogs. Those people were extremely well preserved; they were whole human beings, with faces and clothes. Archaeologists work out, after examining them even their stomachs, that they were human sacrifices.
But… WHO WERE THESE PEOPLE?
One thing we can be pretty sure of is that no wave of Iron Age invaders occurred. It is not sure that people in Britain could not melt iron. The decoration of the iron stuffs can give archaeologists clues of who were these people. Studying the shields and brooches and so on, two styles can be differentiated:
- La Tene (Switzerland) People of La Tene were Celts; so if these people brought iron to Britain, they made it a Celtic land.
CELTS
The Celts first appeared in Europe in about 500 BC. We don’t know where they came from; it is thought that they might be from Russia. For a start, the concept of a "Celtic" people is a modern and somewhat romantic reinterpretation of history. The “Celts” were warring guerreras tribes who certainly wouldn’t have seen themselves as one people at the time. There are two different hypotheses about the Celts in Britain:
- The Invasion Hypothesis. According to this theory two waves of Celts arrived in Britain: one, called Gaels , headed for Ireland and Scotland. The others, who settled in England, Wales and part of Scotland, were known as Britons. All these people had red hair and long moustaches and spent all the time fighting each other.
- Other historians claim that pretending the Britons were Celts is silly. They could have had contacts with Celts of the continent what explains that Britons had things of Celtic origin. Moreover, the Romans called them Britons, not Celts. We “prefer” to follow the first hypothesis so the Britons were CELTS. The Iron Age is the age of the "Celt" in Britain. Over the 500 or so years leading up to the first Roman invasion a Celtic culture established itself throughout the British Isles. Who were these Celts? The Celts were a group of people loosely tied by similar language, religion, and cultural expression. They were not centrally governed, and quite as happy to fight each other as any non-Celt. They were warriors, living for the glories of battle. The "Celts" as we traditionally regard them exist largely in the magnificence of their art and the words of the Romans who fought them. The trouble with the reports of the Romans is that they were a mix of reportage and political propaganda. It was politically expedient for the Celtic peoples to be coloured as barbarians and the Romans as a great civilizing force.
The advent of iron
The Celts, as I have said before, were the people who brought iron working to the British Isles. The use of iron had amazing repercussions. First, it changed trade and fostered local independence. Trade was essential during the Bronze Age, for not every area was naturally endowed with the necessary ores to make bronze. Iron, on the other hand, was relatively cheap and available almost everywhere.
Hill forts castros
The time of the "Celtic conversion" of Britain saw a huge growth in the number of hill forts throughout the region. These were often small ditches and bank combinations
Trading places
These people traded with the Gauls, Romans, Greeks and Phoenicians. They made it directly and through others. This can be claimed because a lot of coins have been found, and of course things like jars dating before the Roman Conquest, jewellery from all over the world…
Language
There was a written Celtic language, but it developed well into Christian times, so for much of Celtic history they relied on oral transmission of culture, primarily through the efforts of bards bardos and poets. These arts were tremendously important to the Celts, and much of what we know of their traditions comes to us today through the old tales and poems that were handed down for generations before eventually being written down. Two different branches of Celtic language: a) Goidelic or Q-Celtic (origin of Celtic languages). b) Brythonic or P-Celtic (origin of Welsh, Cornish and Breton in France)
Religion
They believed in gods and spirits. The druids were a sort of priests, bards, poets, astrologies...; they could also read the future in the flight of birds, sacred mistletoe…. From what we know of the Celts from Roman commentators, who are, remember, witnesses, Celts held many of their religious ceremonies in woodland groves and near sacred water, such as wells and springs. The druids were the priests who did the religious ceremonies. The druids believed in an afterlife, when a person die, the soul goes from one world to another. They also believed that if you captured someone’s soul, that it is in the head, you have really powerful magic: so they collected heads. The Celtic warriors would cut off the heads of their enemies in battle and display them as trophies. They mounted heads in doorposts and hung them from their belts. By taking the head of a vanquished foe enemigo derrotado they were appropriating that power for themselves. It was a kind of bloody religious observance. The Iron Age is when we first find cemeteries of ordinary people’s burials (in hole-in- the-ground graves) as opposed to the elaborate barrows of the elite few that provide our main records of burials in earlier periods.
The Druids sacrificed humans if the wanted something from the gods. These were
people that weren’t actually worth having (to make do without). These people were generally thrown in bogs. The best evidence about life in the Iron Age comes through the remains of some bodies founded buried in bogs. Those people were extremely well preserved; they were whole human beings, with faces and clothes. Archaeologists work out, after examining them even their stomachs, that they were human sacrifices
The Celts at War
The Celts loved war. If one wasn't happening they'd be sure to start one. They arrayed themselves as fiercely as possible, sometimes charging into battle fully naked, dyed blue from head to toe, and screaming like banshees to terrify their enemies. They dyed
themselves with woad. This is a dyed made from the woad plant. The use of woad
hadn’t been only for ritual purposes; it was known to have the power of stopping the blood. They took tremendous pride in their appearance in battle, if we can judge by the elaborately embellished weapons and paraphernalia they used. Golden shields and breastplates corazas shared pride of place with ornamented helmets and trumpets. The Celts were great users of light chariots in warfare. From this chariot, drawn by two horses, they would throw spears at an enemy before dismounting to have a go with heavy slashing swords. They also had a habit of dragging families and baggage along to their battles, forming a great milling mass of encumbrances estorbos, which sometimes cost them a victory. As mentioned, they beheaded their opponents in battle and it was considered a sign of prowess valentía and social standing to have a goodly number of heads to display. The main problem with the Celts was that they couldn't stop fighting among themselves long enough to put up a unified front. Each tribe was out for itself, and in the long run this cost them control of Britain.
Druids (drus-wid; oak - to know or to see)
In simple terms the Druids were the priests of the Celtic tribes in Britain. The Druids were a sort of super-class of priests, political advisors asesores, teachers, healers curanderos, and arbitrators arbitros among entre the Celtic tribes. The druids knew how to read and write, about medicine, law and mathematics. They memorized this things. They had their own universities, where traditional knowledge was passed on by rote (i.e. memorized). Druids had the right to speak ahead of the king in council, and may in some situations have held more authority than the king. They acted as ambassadors in time of war, they composed verse verso and upheld ratificar the law. They were a sort of glue pegamento holding together Celtic culture. We know that the Druids used both animal and human sacrifice, and that many of their observances centred on oak, groves and water. The Isle of Anglesey, in present-day Wales, was a centre of Druidic practice. The Druids as we know them today exist largely in the words of the Romans. The trouble with the reports of the Romans is that they were a mix of reportage and political propaganda. It was politically expedient for the Celtic peoples to be coloured as barbarians and the Romans as a great civilizing force. Certainly the Romans seem to bee genuinely horrified by the instances of human sacrifice among the Druids. In 61 AD the Romans exterminated the Druids of Anglesey, effectively destroying Druidism as a religious force until a form of Druidism was revived in the 19th century.
Celtic festivals
a) Imbolc related with goddess Brigit (child birth). b) Beltane two fires in honour of Bel. Beltane = bright fire c) Lughnasadh God Lugh- harvest
The new capital (s)
The first Roman capital of the new province of Britannia was at Colchester. It didn't take the Romans long, however, to realize the strategic importance of the Thames river as a communication and transport highway. A small existing settlement was built up to become a trade and administrative centre. The Romans called it Londinium. We know it today as London. London became the hub at the centre of a major network of roads and the most important town, and eventually the capital, of the new province of Brittania. Client Kingdoms The Romans followed the formula in Britain that had been so successful elsewhere; rather than try to conquer with force, they established "client kingdoms" on the borders of territory they directly controlled. Basically this meant that certain Celtic tribes, in return for not being overrun, agreed to ally themselves to Rome. BOUDICA The Iceni king Prasutagus was what the Romans called a client-king. When he died, he left one half of his state to his wife Boudicca and other half to the Roman empire, but the Romans were not happy with a half so they went to Iceni territory to demand the rest. They flogged Boudicca and raped his two daughters. After the attack on Boudicca, the Iceni started attacking all Roman they could find. They went to Commulodunum, the great town the Romans had built, they burnt the temple of Claudius which was inside and they kill everyone they could find. Then, they headed for London and they burnt it to the ground. After the Iceni defeat, Boudicca poisoned herself and his daughters. According to the legend, Boudicca is buried underneath one of the platforms at King’s Cross Station.
Cnaeus Julius Agricola
(c. 39-93AD) Cnaeus Julius Agricola was a Roman general and governor of the province of Britannia from 78-84AD. He is credited with overseeing the final conquest of Britain.
Agricola and Scotland
The emperor Agricola led two armies, one to the lowlands and another to the highlands. The tribes of the lowlands make peace quickly, but the Caledonians didn’t. The Romans defeat them but the Caledonians didn’t surrender and they escaped to the hills. When Agricola recalled to Rome, the Caledonians started attacking the forts the Romans had built in the highlands and with few men the Romans had to pull out of Scotland. Never in Ireland. It was found a fort there that seems to be a trading post.
Hadrian's Wall
Probably the most famous Roman remain in England is Hadrian's Wall. It is not by any stretch the most northerly point of the Roman advance; they reached as far north as modern Aberdeen. It isn't even the most northerly wall built by the Romans in Britain. That honour goes to the Antonine Wall. It is, however, an impressive engineering feat, and well worth visiting. Emperor Hadrian The Emperor Hadrian came to the imperial throne in 117 A.D. He decided that the Empire needed securing, not expanding, and in 122 he gave the order to build a wall
across the northern frontier. Build it they did; eighty miles worth, following the northern escarpment of the valleys of Tyne, Irthing, and Eden between Newcastle and Carlisle. Construction The original construction took six years to complete, during which time plans were altered several times. Forts along the Wall The wall itself was eight to ten feet wide and fifteen feet high, with a rampart walk and six foot high parapet. There are over eighty mile forts spaced, yes, every mile, with a kitchen and barracks for a small garrison. In between the mile forts two observation towers were built, resulting in lookouts every third of a mile for the entire length of the wall. In addition to the mile forts there were seventeen larger forts holding from 500 to 1000 troops, infantry or cavalry, or a mixture of both. These forts were built into the wall, with large gates on the north face flanked by stone towers. The Ditch To the south of the wall the Romans dug a wide ditch, or vallum. Why a ditch to the south when the threat was to the north? Most likely the Romans were afraid that the Brigantes tribe of northern England might join with the tribes of Lowland Scotland to make trouble. This way troops manning the wall could control, or at least observe, traffic going both directions. It is just as well, for the Brigantes remained rebellious long after Britain was nominally in Roman hands. Civilian settlements One other point of note about the wall concerns the growth of civilian settlements close to the major legionary forts, to the south of the ditch.
The Antonine Wall
In 138 AD Antonius Pius (86-161 AD) succeeded Hadrian as Emperor of Rome. To mark the northernmost extent of Roman territory in Britain - and to gain prestige - Antonius decided to build a wall to rival that of his predecessor. The Antonine Wall spans the narrowest portion of lowland Scotland, between the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde. The Antonine Wall was built of turf fronted by a ditch 12 feet deep. The wall was 10 feet high and 14 feet wide and dotted with 29 small military forts linked by a road. As a defensive barrier the Antonine Wall did not fulfilled its role for long. In 181 the northern tribes poured over the wall and pushed the Romans back to Hadrian's Wall. The Romans finally abandoned any hope of regaining the territory between the two walls in 196 AD. WHAT THE ROMANS GAVE TO BRITAIN Administration They set up administrative centres according to traditional tribal territories, and involved the tribal aristocracies in the decision making process. They made the conquered people responsible for their own administration within a Roman framework. It was part of their plan to bring the benefits of civilization, Roman style, to other people. It worked, for the way to prestige and social advancement was through the Roman bureaucracy. Towns
Industry in various forms was encouraged by the Romans. In their bid for the veneer of civilization the elite of Britain imported Roman wine, jewellery, and pottery. In return they exported cattle, grain, lead grafito, iron, tin, and, curiously enough, hunting dogs. The observant reader (this means you) will have noticed that most of the talk so far has been about how the upper classes lived. Certainly, most of the remains that have been excavated and analyzed pertain to them. How did the rest of the British Celts manage? Probably with a great shrug. Despite the growth of towns and bureaucracy and all the other essentials of civilization that came with the Roman conquest, the lot of the majority was unchanged. Britain was an agricultural province, dependent on small farms. The lives of the farmers changed very little. They still built round Celtic huts and worked the same fields in the same way. Their standard of living changed little, if at all. Despite the veneer of Roman civilization, Britain was still largely a Celtic, or even a Neolithic society.
WHAT ROMANS GIVE TO BRITAIN
- No aqueducts were found in Britain.
- Roads.
- Cities.
- Food: carrots, cabbages (repollos), honey, fruits, fish paste… agricultural techniques.
- Roman way of life.
- Christianity. The Britons started to worship as Christians, when the Romans started to do it.
TIME TO DECLINE, FALL AND GO
By the fourth century AD the R.E. was no longer the mighty edifice it had been in Caesar’s time: a) The Romans started fighting each other. b) People from the north of Hadrian’s Wall started incursions. c) German and Hungary tribes made incursions in the Roman Empire. d) The Saxons. e) ……. By AD 409 the Romans had gone.
