060058 VO Interdisciplinary Special topics in Cultural Studies and Natural Sciences (2022S)

We have several historical and epigraphic sources from the European Iron Age on Law and Order (customary law on the Law of Persons, Family, Contracts, Penal Law, Public Law and the Laws of Warfare, etc., as well as on Court Procedure and Case Law) from Southern, Central and Western Europe. It thus has to be assumed that most aspects of life in most regions of this wide area were at least regulated by orally transmitted customary law, and partially even by (written) set law; and that not just in the Greek city-states and the areas controlled by Rome, but also in the Barbaricum.
Whether and if yes to what extent such regulations can also be identified in the archaeological record (whether features or finds) has hardly been examined as yet. Whether the archaeological informations that have come down to us from the European Iron Age permit us to draw further, at least tentative, conclusions than what is historically attested about Justice, Law and Order, especially in the «Celtic» and «Germanic» Barbaricum, has mostly been left unresearched and often has not even been properly considered, This is despite the fact that with near certain probability, at least some legal norms whether it be in the field of settlement and burial practice, of religious cult, but also of traffic and trade, the violent conflict between individuals and groups of people and many other areas of everyday and not so everyday life will have left more or less clear, more or less regular traces in the archaeology. To discover this «Archaeology of Law» would permit us to gain a fuller and more considered picture of the European Iron Age as is possible by just concentrating on the traditional questions of Iron Age Social Archaeology e.g. wealth rank orders in cemeteries or social hierarchical organisation.
We therefore will consider Law and Order in the Iron Age in this module and determine what we can and cannot say about this important topic by archaeological and other means of historical research.