Were the Oppida Sustainable? Examining the Persistence and Provisioning of Late Iron Age Agglomerations in Temperate Europe

During the last two centuries bc , large fortified settlements known as oppida developed across extensive parts of temperate Europe, from France to Hungary and from Spain to Britain. Due to their significant size and socio-economic roles, the oppida — or at least most of them — have traditionally been identified as the first towns of pre-Roman temperate Europe. However, research over the last few decades has shown that urban centres had already developed earlier in the Iron Age, both in the form of fortified sites (the so-called ‘princely seats’) and open agglomerations. Some authors have argued that the oppida represented a ‘wrong step’ towards urbanization that surpassed the economic potential of Late Iron Age societies, making these settlements destined to fail. Others, contrastingly, envisage the oppida as the culmination of urbanization trajectories in the Iron Age. In this article, we review the question of the sustainability of the oppida focusing particularly on settlement persistence (i.e. how long did the oppida last) and the provisioning of these centres with foodstuffs and other goods. General reflections are combined with references to selected case studies from Western and Central Europe, challenging some previous notions but also highlighting gaps in our knowledge.