 Thank you very much, and we move on with the next paper, Manuel van der Skutsch. Yes, good afternoon and thank you for inviting me to present a paper in this session. I have to apologize that I came in a bit late and I have to leave immediately after my paper, but this is because we are having the EAA Executive Board meeting and I will have to return, so sorry for disappearing after this. So I will try to give a very brief overview on urbanization processes in the late Iron Age and obviously in 15 minutes I can just select a few things. I will particularly focus on the question, if well this process is rather bottom up or top down. There's a lot of recent literature on the topic of centralization and urbanization in the Iron Age. I'm just listing here three edited volumes that are many others and if you are interested in reading more about the arguments I'm presenting here, I also published an article at the beginning of this year in the Journal of Archaeological Research which is open access, so you can have a look at that. So I'm particularly focusing on Central, Western Europe and in this area during the Iron Age in the 1st millennium BC we have two different periods of emergence of large agglomerations. An important point is that there is no continuity between these two different stages. So this is our first period mostly in the 6th and 5th centuries BC where we see the emergence of some large settlements, the so-called first and 6th or princely seeds with some sites such as the hornywork or bush that could reach at certain moments up to 100 or even a case of bush 200-300 hectares. And then there's a period of discontinuity in the 4th and part of the 3rd centuries BC where we see the disappearance or at least a marked decline of these centers. And then in the 3rd century BC we see the start of a new process of concentration of population and activities at certain sites and this gives rise to a number of open agglomerations and also the fortified settlements that we know as OPIDA. And as I say it's important to emphasize that this is a non-linear development so this is important in order to react to linear models of evolution which do not work here for the European Iron Age. I have published in the last years and many other colleagues as well quite a lot on the earlier stage of the 6th, 5th century BC first and 6th, today I will focus on the late Iron Age urbanization processes that took place between the 3rd and the 1st centuries BC. So after the period of decentralization of the 4th and early 3rd centuries BC we see a new movement towards concentration of population increase in economic production trade activities related to demographic growth and here we have open agglomerations and fortified sites. And for a long time scholars have focused mostly on the fortified sites the OPIDA but actually we know that the situation now that the situation was much more complex and actually these processes of concentration of population and economic activities began much earlier than the foundation of the fortified sites. So some scholars have created new categories to acknowledge this diversity of large sites in the period for example Vladimir Salat distinguishes between four different categories the first two of them are open settlements the second ones are fortified. So he speaks about centers of production and distribution centers of the names such as Roseldorf type these two were open and then among the OPIDA he distinguishes between mountain OPIDA and lowland OPIDA and he also attaches a series of criteria and characteristics for all the centers. What has been particularly important in the last few decades is the acknowledgments of the importance of the open agglomerations. They started earlier than the fortified OPIDA already in the 3rd or in the early 2nd century BC depending on the site and we can name some important examples that we have between western France and central eastern Europe for example Orna, Lebrou, Bécher, Poulantin, Lausice, Nemsich, Sallopetri and some of these open agglomerations were large production and distribution centers so they fulfilled a very important economic role and in some of them we also have evidences for sanctuaries religious political activities. Among the features that we can find are many of these open agglomerations we have coin minting imports from distant regions including sometimes from the Mediterranean a metallurgical production on a large scale manufacture of glass objects etc so a whole set of economic activities that in some cases have been described as proto-industrial. So how should we interpret this and how does the role of open agglomerations make us rethink the urbanization process in the late iron age. So the OPIDA the start mostly around the end of the very end of the 2nd and beginning of the 1st century BC and this has often been linked particularly in regions such as in central gold or southern Germany with the growing expansion of Rome the conquest of southern France, the Narbonenses and this would have triggered the appearance of the OPIDA. So in this garden I'm not neglecting that this increasing pressure from Rome played a role in the development of the OPIDA but what we see and the open agglomerations make it very clear is does the process of centralization or urbanization was earlier this goes back to the 3rd century BC and it's part of what I have already mentioned product trends that we can observe demographic growth, increasing agricultural and artistic production new tools, new applications flourishing trade so the roots of the entire process well there's obviously a combination of internal and external roots but I think we need to give more importance to the internal roots at least for the beginning, at least for the open agglomerations and then obviously in later stages we see an increasing contact and pressure from Rome that accelerated the process. If we compare open agglomerations and 45 OPIDA we see that on occasions one more fine recovered at the open settlement even exceeds the fines that we have from some prominent OPIDA this is a table published for example by Vladimir Salac and the range of activities that were happening at this site are often very similar for example if we compare Beshin-Polandin and the nearby OPIDA of Manchin So several scholars and I support this idea have emphasized that we need to discard the idea the traditional idea that the important economic activities were concentrating 45 sites, they were not in many cases open settlements had an equally or even more important economical role and we should also question the role of wars of fortifications as proxies for urbanism in fact many open agglomerations are closer to contextual definition of city than some of the 45 sites we have some, I would say some OPIDA yes some OPIDA we can say that they were towns or cities but others we also know others that have very little evidence for internal occupation so in terms of social processes, power dynamics it seems that most open agglomerations developed over a period of time as a result of organic rows and in this sense bottom up processes seem to have played an important role and I would like to contrast this with the OPIDA the fortified settlements, we know more than 150 of them within the Atlantic coast and Hungary, Slovakia they date from mostly in the end of the second or beginning of the first centuries we see and usually when scholars use the term OPIDA we are referring to a fortified site from this period with an area of at least 10 hectares in some cases several hundred hectares as you can see here and obviously some Latin term that was used by also particularly Julius Caesar to describe the settlement and this was adopted by archaeologists in the 19th century so we have this emergence of the OPIDA but with an already pre-existing network of open agglomerations so what happened to the open agglomerations when we see the foundation of the OPIDA where actually there are many answers there is no one single scenario we can distinguish four main scenarios sometimes we have the abandonment of an open agglomeration in favor of a new settlement so I move from the plain to the hill for example Le Brou in France sometimes we see the continuation of an open agglomeration despite the foundation of an OPIDA nearby in other cases a pre-existing open agglomeration becomes fortified at a certain moment of its history this is the case for example in Manching in Bavaria and finally in some cases we also have the foundation of an open agglomeration in the immediate vicinity of an already existing OPIDA and this last case for example happens in Bibracte in central France where we have the large OPIDA mentioned in Britain sources which has an area that in different moments got about 200 and later 130 hectares more recent research carried out by colleagues such as Domour has identified an important open agglomeration in the immediate vicinity of the fortified site on the mountain more than 100 hectares large and then we have a very dense network also of contemporary rural sites so when people speak about Bibracte it should be only think about the fortified site in the mountain enclosed by the walls or was Bibracte actually a much larger settlement complex and we need to understand this as being part of the same system the fortified area, the open agglomeration and the surroundings in the case of the OPIDA the majority of them seem to have been founded as the result of a deliberate political decision that in many cases might have involved processes of cynicism and in this sense it has been suggested that this were a process directed mostly top down by elites and when we say elites we are not meaning when not mean necessarily one single person that we can think about a system of different representatives of different lineages different aristocratic members that then take decisions and at some point found this OPIDA but there were mostly foundations ex-noble most of the OPIDA were created at a certain period of time as a deliberate project rather than the process of a larger evolution as in the case of open settlements this doesn't mean that there are no links with the past in some cases the OPIDA occupy sites that had an earlier significance so there were probably places that were important in the social memory some of them we know they had some kind of ritual religious significance but they were founded ex-noble and we can also see this process as and have developed this in a number of papers adopting a Foucaultian perspective as a new technology of power that was enabled and a more hierarchical and centralizing ideology another example of the complexity of iron age settlement landscapes that needs us to re-sync some of our previous models Mathieu Poux has been carrying out extensive research in the area of Corot in Daubert in France and here we have three OPIDA that are located in close proximity Corot, Cécovie, Gondol previously it was believed that it was a chronological decalage so one was created, then abandoned and then they moved to the next one and then to the next one new research suggests that there were at least partly contemporaneous so he has suggested in a paper from 2014 that we need to sync this as a complex settlement system encompassing a large territory rather than just syncing in single sight we need to understand this as a whole and to an end what happened to the system where it mostly ends with the Roman conquest but not necessarily immediately with the military conquest actually in Gaul and partly also in other areas such as Britain and Iberia the majority of the OPIDA were not abandoned during or immediately after the Roman conquest actually in some cases we even see a flourishing of the OPIDA in the decades after the Roman conquest for example in Biberac we have aristocrates Domus copying italic models by local aristocracies the foundation of Basilica the east of the Rhine is a different scenario there we have other processes and in some OPIDA in Biberia for example seem to have been abandoned before any Roman legions when there so this were other processes but in the areas of Gaul and partly also in other areas of the west the major break that we observe is not the Roman conquest but Julius Caesar is in the Augustan period where we see a large reorganization of the landscape of the socio-political and economic system but some OPIDA continue to develop so many ended but others continue to develop and some are even cities today and this was a very quick overview and as I said I'm sorry I will not be here for the discussion if anybody has any specific questions or comments I'm happy to get emails from you and thank you very much