The First Cities North of the Alps: Interview with Professor Manuel Fernandez-Götz

Tides of History

Wondery / Patrick Wyman

Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 4 September 2025

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The European Iron Age is known almost solely through archaeology, and the material record of the period is still showing us fascinating new aspects of ancient life. Professor Manuel Fernandez-Götz of Oxford joins me to talk about his incredible research on the Iron Age and the first cities to ever appear north of the Alps.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Tides of History early and ad-free right now.
0:04.6	Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
0:13.5	Hi, everybody.
0:18.5	From Wondery, welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm Patrick Wyman.
0:22.2	Thanks so much for joining me today.
0:24.6	Iron Age Europe looks to the modern observer like a forbidding place and a forbidding subject for research.
0:30.4	Few texts inform us as to what was happening and the written works we have don't tell us very much.
0:35.8	We're left with archaeology, material remains,
0:38.7	the mute remnants of ancient societies left behind after millennia into European dirt.
0:44.5	Material remains do not speak for themselves, but thanks to new excavations, new techniques,
0:49.4	and new ways of thinking about the material, we now have a pretty radically different
0:53.2	understanding of what
0:54.4	Iron Age Europe actually looked like.
0:57.7	Today's guest works on the cutting edge of research on this incredibly exciting period.
1:02.8	Manuel Fernandez Goetz is professor of later European prehistory in the School of Archaeology at Oxford
1:08.0	University. He's published a wide variety of papers on different
1:11.4	aspects of the Iron Age, ranging from state formation and urbanization to mobility, and his
1:16.4	research is absolutely fascinating. You will not think about the Iron Age the same way again
1:21.6	after reading his work. Professor Fernandez Goetz, thank you so much for joining me today.
1:27.2	Thank you for having me, Patrick. It's great to be here.
1:30.2	So how did you get interested in studying the Iron Age?
1:35.0	So when I started university, I was initially just interested in history in general,
	...

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