ABSTRACT
The Late Iron Age of the southern Pannonia and northern/central Balkans has been for decades mainly interpreted through the notion of the Scordisci, a Celtic tribe that settled and dominated the area since the “Gaulic invasion” (279 bce) until the Roman Empire’s conquest of the region in the end of the first century bce. However, when questioned from a theoretical position away from ethno-determinism and cultural-historical paradigm, this interpretative framework loses its alleged support in historical and archaeological evidence. What emerges is a confusing picture of a world broken into networks of settlement clusters of uncertain mutual relationships and interactions, which does not fit a previously supposed hierarchical structure ruled by the tribal warrior aristocracy.
On the other hand, although the concept of heterarchy is better suited for understanding the character of the communities in the area, it also leaves some important questions unanswered. For example, What was the role of the precious objects accumulation and hoarding? How are we to explain coinage and its use? Why were there some individuals whose interment, though not exclusively different, was still more elaborated than the majority of others? What was the role of economic/occupational professionalisation and specialisation? How did the part played by warriors influence these structures, and so forth? While I do stand on the position that the idea of heterarchy or segmentary societies provides overall fruitful insights, it is also worth considering the state of “in-betweenness” of some Iron Age societies. I argue it is important to acknowledge that the Iron Age communities might have functioned with a combination and mixture of phenomena we nowadays classify as hierarchical or heterarchical, and that no imagined pure-state sociopolitical condition is to be expected for multiple layers and directions of their relationalities. In general terms, I hope to open discussion on how to approach the examples of the confusing Iron Ages that do not easily match our clear-cut theoretical expectations.
