- The Celts in France -
The coalitions led by the Aedui, friends of the Roman people and active partici-
pants in international commerce, and the Arverni, the last Gallic champions of
political and perhaps cultural resistance against the legions, were short-lived and
opportunistic. On Caesar's testimony, the whole of Gaul was internally divided, both
as regards its civitates (tribal units) and within individual families. The dilemma
existed less at the scale of individual nations - an alliance with Rome being no more
questionable than an accord with a neighbouring civitas - than at the level of the
choice of life style. Urbanization or countryside, stone and mortar or earth and wood,
Gallic ale or red wine? By 52 BC Gaul as far east as the Rhine had already oscillated in
and out of the Mediterranean orbit for a long time, and thus the conquest was no more
than a political and military formality to processes already long under way.
THE MEDITERRANEAN FRINGES
It would be an error to consider Celtic Gaul and the Mediterranean world as in
absolute opposition. Gallic tribes and Mediterranean city-states, although divided by
language and culture, had maintained close contacts for several centuries before the
conquest led to their fusion. Provence and Languedoc, at the crossroads of the Rhone
valley with the route between Italy and Spain, came under many influences. This is
translated into an incredible wealth of archaeological remains in these areas, which
display diverse cultural impacts. Research in this area has been advancing rapidly for
forty years and here we can only outline the main results.
The indigenous population during the Iron Age was in contact with the colonizers,
first the Phoenicians, and then with the Greeks who founded Massalia and Ampurias.
Trading stations multiplied not only along the Mediterranean littoral, but also up the
Rhone as far as Arles. The influence of these colonies on the indigenous way of life
and its economy is very clear, even if the territory, up to the gates of Marseilles
itself, was still controlled by the latter until the first century Be. The third-century
Punic wars led Carthaginian and Roman armies to traverse the region and to conclude
alliances that divided the local population, while favouring contacts with these
Mediterranean cultures. Was it an extension of the Massaliote chara, or warlike
tension on the part of the native population that provoked the conflicts of 125-120
BC? It was, in any case, a good pretext for the intervention of the Romans, who
wanted to obtain a land link to their Spanish territories, to exploit a rich province and
to ensure a base for their traders from which to extend northwards into the markets
of Gaul.
The climate and vegetation of these southerly regions were different from those
in the rest of the Celtic world, and geographical differences in themselves are
sufficient to explain many differences between the way of life of their populations
and those of more northerly residents. Thus the available building materials were
stone and earth rather than wood. The need to erect structures to resist extremes of
heat on one hand, and wind and storms on the other, led to an architecture which
was radically different from that in more temperate parts of the country. It would be
difficult for the archaeologist to identify cultural unity from material remains in the
face of such different living conditions.573