Technology and social change: The Iron Age and Gallo-Roman copper-working industry at the Titelberg, G.D. Luxembourg, circa 125 B.C.-A.D. 300

The conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar in 58-51 B.C. was preceded and followed by centuries of interaction between the Gauls and the peoples of the Mediterranean. It has been realized in the last two decades that the acculturation of the Gauls to Roman civilization, the process called Romanization, was far more complex than the simple, wholesale assimilation of Roman culture that scholars had formerly assumed it to be. This dissertation seeks to examine this complex process of acculturation by investigating changes in a specific technology in the light of the concept of sociotechnical systems. The dissertation begins by reviewing the development of the anthropology of technology, followed by a review of classical anthropological concepts of acculturation and the more recent use of concepts of acculturation in archaeology. The specific field of archaeometallurgy and what it can tell anthropologists is summarized. After the social and political background of the Iron Age and Gallo-Roman periods in Gaul is presented, the site of the Titelberg and the specific data set, a large corpus of copper-base artifacts and debris, is described. Though it has always been assumed that brass was introduced by the Romans, the results of the metallurgical and compositional analyses demonstrate that brass was in use at the Titelberg before the Conquest, and that there was a clear difference in the kinds of artifacts preferred for brass, bronze, and copper. The use of brass in particular for brooches and religious figurines in Gaul and for coinage and military items in the Roman world, plus the demonstrated restriction of certain ores and workshops to brass or bronze working, indicates that the introduction of brass created new sociotechnical systems of material, labor, and meaning in both the Gallic and the Roman worlds. These independent sociotechnical systems merged and disappeared in the late first century A.D. The findings support the contention that systems of cultural meaning, and changes in such systems, can be reached through analysis of technological behavior