Boii (Bohemia)

Geography

The Boii are placed in the basin of Bohemia and the neighbouring parts of Moravia, within the broad and ill-defined zone that ancient authors called the Hercynian Forest. The region has been traditionally associated in scholarship with their seat from the early La Tène period onward, and the place-name Boiohaemum seen as preserving their name. The western limit is uncertain. The place-name Boiodurum (modern Passau) on the Danube has sometimes been read as a marker of Boian presence in the valley, although Falileyev derives it equally from a personal name Boius.

This localisation has been contested by some scholars. Miklós Szabó, following András Mócsy, holds that the relevant ancient evidence, chiefly Caesar's definition of the Hercynian Forest and the passages of Strabo, places Boiohaemum and the Boian homeland not in modern Bohemia but north of the Danube, toward south-western Slovakia, with a possible extension into eastern Austria and Moravia.

History

Early La Tène period

Bohemia is traditionally regarded in scholarship as the lasting centre of Boian power. On this reading the development of settlement runs without a break from the late Hallstatt period into the early La Tène, so that the Celtic population of the region may already have called itself Boii. In the 6th and 5th centuries BC a wealthy ruling class is visible in the princely tumuli of southern Bohemia, such as those at Hradiště near Písek. The fortified site of Závist, opposite the confluence of the Berounka and the Vltava, held a cult area of the 5th century BC that was deliberately burned at the beginning of the 4th century. Drda and Rybová treat Závist as the power centre of this early period, and Bouzek reads it as the main centre of the Boian confederation before the migration into Italy. Gerhard Dobesch argues that Bohemia had been given up under Suebic pressure before the time of Caesar, since Caesar found only the Volcae Tectosages around the Hercynian Forest, and describes a great empty tract east of the Suebi that may be northern Bohemia.

The presence of La Tène Boii in Bohemia has, however, been questioned. Miklós Szabó holds that it is a modern topos that turned into a common preconception. He argues that the medieval identification of Boiohaemum with Bohemia generated the assumption that the homeland of the Boii lay in modern Bohemia, from which the hypotheses of Boian migrations to Italy and to the Carpathian Basin followed. Jan Kysela has traced how the perception of the Boii shifted in Bohemian scholarship over the centuries and was sometimes influenced by nationalist views. Following the Bavarian interpretation of the sources, 16th-century Czechs writers saw the Boii as 'German tribe' fighting the hero Maroboduus, while they were later described as "our Celts" by František Palacký (1798–1876) during the Czech National Revival.

Migration into Italy

Around 400 BC Celtic groups, among them the Boii on the Czech reading, crossed the Alps into Italy and settled around Bologna, north of the Po. Strabo reports that the Boii later expelled from Cisalpine Gaul moved to the Danube, lived alongside the Taurisci, and warred on the Dacians until the people was destroyed. Whether the Italian migration is historical is disputed. Gerhard Dobesch rejects it, noting that the fully preserved Livy is silent on any such departure and that the loss of territory did not force a Celtic people to leave. Wolfgang David instead reads Strabo's notice as the earliest, if indirect, evidence for Boii on the Danube, and ties it to the Roman expulsion of the Boii from Italy in 190 BC.

The model of a single dated invasion has been questioned. David holds that the Cispadane Boii were not one group that crossed the Alps, but the outcome of repeated infiltration of mixed contingents over several decades, whose shared identity took shape only in Cisalpine Gaul. J. H. C. Williams argues that the ancient migration narratives cannot carry the weight placed on them, that an invasion must be a hypothesis to be tested rather than a premise, and that burial rite and material culture are not secure markers of ethnicity. Ralph Häussler likewise treats the arrival of the Gauls in Italy as a matter of gradual migration and infiltration over many generations rather than a single event.

Middle La Tène period

In central Europe the Middle La Tène period is marked by flat inhumation cemeteries without mounds, common in the most fertile parts of Bohemia and Moravia. Their first stage begins soon after the migration into Italy and, on Bouzek's reading, belongs to a different Celtic population from the one that had moved south. A later phase is marked by fibulae of the Duchcov type, named from the large deposit at the Giant's Spring near Duchcov. Venceslas Kruta has suggested that the population that formed after this influx gave rise to the Volcae Tectosages. The difference between the culture of the later oppida and the land to the north of them has been read as a division of Bohemia between two peoples. The settlement and craft centre at Mšecké Žehrovice, with its sapropelite bracelets and its sanctuary yielding the well-known stone head, belongs to this horizon.

Further migrations and the end of Boian Bohemia

At the turn of the 2nd and 1st centuries BC part of the Boii left Bohemia and Moravia for south-western Slovakia and western Hungary, where they formed a kingdom centred near Bratislava. Another group joined the Helvetii and left for Gaul in 58 BC. By Caesar's account these Boii had earlier settled beyond the Rhine and passed into Noricum, where they besieged Noreia, before they joined the Helvetian migration. Caesar's notice is the only ancient text that explicitly links the central European Boii to Gaul. After the defeat of the Helvetii the Boii were settled among the Aedui. They formed a small and poor community, as Caesar's figures and his reference to their tenuitas both show.

The end of the Boii in Bohemia is bound up with the localisation dispute. Gerhard Dobesch reads the homeland as given up before Caesar, under Suebic pressure, so that Caesar already found only the Volcae Tectosages there. Conversely, Bouzek has the oppida of southern Bohemia continue late into the 1st century BC. Kruta dates the occupation of Boiohaemum by the Marcomanni of Maroboduus to about 9 BC, which on this reading ended all Celtic power in the country. Whether the Tacitean pulsis olim Boiis refers to this Marcomannic conquest or to the earlier withdrawal under Suebic pressure is itself disputed. Vladimír Salač questions the Tacitean notice altogether. He observes that neither Strabo nor Velleius Paterculus, both contemporaries of Maroboduus, records any fighting with Boii, that Strabo has Maroboduus settle his Marcomanni in the land of the Germanic Quadi, and that the archaeological record shows Bohemia already held by Germanic groups from about the middle of the 1st century BC. Salač nonetheless locates Boiohaemum in the Bohemian basin, against the view of Miklós Szabó and others that placed it near Bratislava at the confluence of the Morava and the Danube.

Settlement and material culture

From the second quarter of the 2nd century BC the first oppida were founded in Bohemia and Moravia, at the same time as their rise in Gaul and southern Germany. According to Bouzek, the re-foundation of Závist arose on the initiative of Boii who came from Cisalpine Gaul, where the victorious Romans had stopped them from remaining a free people, and was bound up with the memory attaching to the old site. The principal Bohemian oppida were Závist, Stradonice, Hrazany, Nevězice and Třísov, with České Lhotice guarding the route through the Iron Mountains. In Moravia the largest was Staré Hradisko near Prostějov, with the smaller Hostýn.

The oppida share the timber-laced stone rampart with vertical posts, the type later termed Pfostenschlitzmauer, and plain-faced walls resembling the murus gallicus of Gaul also occur. About half the known gates are of the inturned Zangentor form that allows a flanking defence, and tower gates are known from the largest sites, Závist, Stradonice and Staré Hradisko. In a final phase, in the 1st century BC, the stone-and-earth walls of several sites were rebuilt as multiple earthen ramparts. Alžběta Danielisová notes that this multiplication of lines is limited to a central European zone covering Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia, and has been read as marking out a hypothetical Boian territory north of the middle Danube.

The economy of the Bohemian oppida rested on deposits of gold and graphite. Amber working is recorded at several sites, above all Stradonice and Staré Hradisko, along an eastern branch of the Amber Road running through the Moravian Gate. In Moravia, situlae with stamped decoration on the lower rim, often of graphitic clay, are typical of the Middle La Tène and point to workshops in central Moravia. The gold coinage of the region was central to the La Tène world. The earliest issues imitated the staters of Philip and Alexander, and the later gold coinage took the form of the rainbow cups (Regenbogenschüsselchen) and shell staters. The attribution of this coinage to the Boii is conventional, and Vladimír Salač notes that it rests on the identification of Boiohaemum with Bohemia and on a circular procedure by which coins from the region are called Boian and their distribution is then used to map Boian territory.