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taken up by a market and sanctuaries. If this urban plan is taken at face value today, then the idea of living conditions, which reflect the workings of a real town, from the end of the second century b.c. become characteristic of the late La Tène period, and subsequently the reply to F. Braudel’s question, “Was there really a type of Gaulish town before the Roman conquest?” would be yes.

The archaeological remains were reexamined in 1984, supported by a research center that was welcomed by university teams from all over Europe because the site of Mont Beuvray had remained an important point of reference for all Celtic specialists. The large numbers and variety of artifacts attracted numismatists, epigraphers, and ceramologists, and the stratigraphy, as an open-area site, was the source of much useful archaeological research. The first results focused on what had developed essentially between the second and the first centuries b.c., between the La Tène C (II) and the Roman stratigraphic horizons, wedged before the camps of the German limes (fortified frontier). Neither the buildings, nor the phases of construction, nor the events of the years 58–52 b.c. could be read at the site, but dendrochronology provided some sort of precision in dating, with the identifiable phases in combination with all the variables covering a period of about twenty years.

The remains of the Porte du Rebout revealed at least four principal phases of construction between 90 and 10 b.c. The first phase of this gate was more than twenty meters in size, gigantic in comparison to similar gates found at more modern Celtic oppida. The gate’s northern access consisted of a passage forty meters in depth. During subsequent phases, its size was reduced, and the Gaulish wall was replaced by wooden foundations and earthen embankments. The fortification, with its role as much monumental as defensive, would have necessitated thousands of hours of work, dozens of tons of iron, and thousands of cubic meters of wood.

Bulliot had already assigned a significance and luxury to the houses of the rich residential quarter, which rivaled the houses of pompeii. One of the houses covered 3,000 square meters, and its atrium and peristyle were Roman in style. The remains revealed five successive building stages and floors, all built during the first century b.c., and the original wooden construction was little by little transformed into a stone mansion.

Trade and the craft industry evolved more quickly than architecture. Artisan production soon became mass production, for example, in the fabrication of fibulae (metal pieces); materials, shapes, and molds were modified to ensure greater productivity. We can follow the evolution of the supply of wine, from different parts of italy and spain, thanks to the innumerable amphorae at the site.

It is this process of acculturation that is being followed today at Bibracte. The sanctuary, the lanes, and the tombs will all reveal, in a very short time, how they were transformed from an oppidum, a concept that was perhaps completely new in the second century b.c., into a veritable Roman town. It was the generosity of the Emperor Augustus, when he allowed the creation of the town of Autun-Augustodum to be built from the remains of Bibracte in about 15 b.c., that ruined the site and eventually led to this archaeological project of the late twentieth century.

Oliver Buchsenschutz

Binford, Lewis R.

(1929–)

One of the most influential archaeologists of the twentieth century, Lewis R. Binford was born in Norfolk, Virginia. After high school he attended Virginia Polytechnic Institute (1948–1952), and