ABSTRACT
Transition from the societies of the pre-Roman Iron Age to the Roman period is usually perceived by archaeologists and historians as one of the clearest examples of cultural change in the history of Europe. This is no less true of Iberia. Following the arrival of the Romans in 218 bc a process of cultural change is understood to have swept the Peninsula, culminating in the absorption of northwestern Iberia from the end of the first century bc onwards. Wholesale ‘Romanization’ is thus the inevitable result of conquest, whether forcibly imposed by Rome or willingly embraced by native communities. Established academic texts continue to emphasize the administrative and historical framework within which this is seen to have taken place and use the archaeological evidence to illustrate these known ‘truths’. The implicit assumption seems to be that either it is not possible to engage in the sort of dialogue with their evidence that historians enjoy or that it is only legitimate to do so within certain ‘constraints’. In either event the depressing end-result is that much archaeological research is leading to little more than buttressing the accepted picture with little or no room for developing alternative perspectives.
