In AD 9, a Roman traitor led an army of barbarians who trapped and then slaughtered three entire Roman legions: 20,000 men, half the Roman army in Europe. If not for this battle, the Roman Empire would surely have expanded to the Elbe River, and probably eastward into present-day Russia. But after this defeat, the shocked Romans ended all efforts to expand beyond the Rhine, which became the fixed border between Rome and Germania for the next 400 years, and which remains the cultural border between Latin western Europe and Germanic central and eastern Europe today.

This fascinating...

The Barbarians Speak re-creates the story of Europe's indigenous people who were nearly stricken from historical memory even as they adopted and transformed aspects of Roman culture. The Celts and Germans inhabiting temperate Europe before the arrival of the Romans left no written record of their lives and were often dismissed as "barbarians" by the Romans who conquered them. Accounts by Julius Caesar and a handful of other Roman and Greek writers would lead us to think that prior to contact with the Romans, European natives had much simpler political systems, smaller settlements,...

Who were the Iron Age peoples of Europe? Celts, Germans, Scythians: these are among the names that come to mind. But such names, and the characteristics associated with them, come to us from outside observers - Greek and Roman writers - rather than from their own words. To understand how late prehistoric groups constructed and expressed their identities, the author examines the rich archaeological evidence left by the Iron Age Europeans themselves. Recent theoretical and methodological advances in anthropology, archaeology and history, together with results of archaeological research all...

Did people in the Iron Age see their bronze figurines and sculpted stones differently from the way we see them today? How can we approach the problem of determining how they saw things? How different was their experience viewing these objects in the course of their use, from ours as we look at them in museum cases or through photographs in books? Recent research in cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology forms the theoretical basis for a new approach to understanding the visual basis of communication in early Europe. The focus is on societies from the Early Iron Age to the early...

The peoples who inhabited Europe during the two millennia before the Roman conquests had established urban centers, large-scale production of goods such as pottery and iron tools, a money economy, and elaborate rituals and ceremonies. Yet as Peter Wells argues here, the visual world of these late prehistoric communities was profoundly different from those of ancient Rome's literate civilization and today's industrialized societies. Drawing on startling new research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology, Wells reconstructs how the peoples of pre-Roman Europe saw the world and their place...