ROME'S IMPACT IN NORTHWEST EUROPE

This chapter is about a fundamental transformation in the design and circulation of objects at the end of the first century BC in northwest Europe – a change that coincides with the merging of parts of the region into the formal political structure of the Roman empire. A traditional means of approaching this period is to frame it in the events of the surviving textual sources and a historical narrative of conquest and Romanisation, beginning with the battles and campaigns of Julius Caesar in the 50s BC. These events were momentous in both a geo-political sense and in terms of the lives, deaths, and enslavement of thousands of people from a wide transect of the European continent, and as a result have been studied in great depth. Despite the massive upheaval caused by such episodes, their impact on the relationships between people and objects in northern Gaul seems to have been rather minimal, as seen in the previous chapter. For example, it is possible to discern a peak in the practice of depositing weapons and martial equipment in cemeteries roughly contemporaneous with Caesar's campaigns. However, it remains the case that societies continued to select and deposit the same kinds of objects in graves as they had done in the first half of the first century BC. Even at a major stronghold such as the Titelberg (Luxembourg), which seems likely to have provided winter quarters to Roman regiments in the immediate aftermath of the Gallic War period, objects of Mediterranean origin make up a meagre presence in graves of the associated Lamadelaine cemetery: a few wine amphorae fragments, a handful of Republican coins of Hirtius, an Alesia brooch, and a signet ring with the image of a trireme. In essence, aside from the already well-established practice of placing amphorae fragments in graves, these choices seem ephemeral against a backdrop of practices of funerary object selection that were established in the region from the mid second century BC, if not earlier.

Other wide-ranging material changes are visible as a consequence of the Gallic Wars, such as a massive decline in the circulation of gold coinage, which can be explained primarily through the sending of the spoils of conquest to Italy, and to a lesser degree, payments made to Gallic clients in Britain and across the Rhine.