--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" <bm.brian@...> wrote:
>
> At 7:53:31 AM on Tuesday, March 6, 2012, Torsten wrote:
>
> > --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott"
> > <bm.brian@> wrote:
>
> >> At 4:04:52 AM on Tuesday, March 6, 2012, Torsten wrote:
>
> >>> Archaeologists do much to explain away possible ancient
> >>> violent ethnic cleansings, seeing it as their task not to
> >>> upset modern people.
>
> >> Ignorance on your part, or deliberate insult?
>
> > It is my interpretation of the tendency of their
> > interpretations. Is there something you feel I'm ignorant
> > about
>
> Archaeologists.
>
> > which you would like to tell me,
>
> Not particularly.
>
> > or did you feel like insulting me?
>
> No.
>
Do you feel that
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Heather
is ignorant of archeologists too?
Empires and Barbarians
pp. 12-21
'THE GREAT MIGRATION DEBATE
Since 1945, so many key elements of this migration-driven narrative of the European past have been challenged that the old certainties have been eroded. In some parts of Europe, the narrative continues broadly to hold sway, but particularly in English-speaking academic circles, migration has been relegated to a walk-on part in a historical drama that is now largely about internally driven transformation. This intellectual revolution has been so dramatic, and its effects on more recent accounts of first-millennium migration so profound, that none of what follows will make sense without some understanding of its major outlines. A key starting point is the completely new understanding, which emerged in the postwar era, of how human beings come together to form larger social units.
Identity Crisis
It may seem strange that the first port of call in thinking about migration should be group identity, but the old grand narrative of European history has ensured that migration and identity are inextricably linked, at least when it comes to the first millennium ad. This is for two basic reasons. First, the billiard ball model of migration that powered this narrative assumed that human beings always came in compact groupings of men, women and children who were essentially closed to outsiders and reproduced themselves by endogamy (marrying someone who was already a member of the group). Second, in what is essentially the same view of group identity played out over the long term, it was presumed that there was a direct and tangible continuity between immigrant groups of the first millennium and similarly named nations of modern Europe. Thus the Poles were the direct descendants of the Slavic Polani, the English of Anglo-Saxons, and so forth. National identities were ancient, unchanging 'facts', and their antiquity gave them a legitimacy which overrode the claims of any other form of political organization. Where they did not prevail as the prime mode of political organization, then some other power structure (such as the old multinational empires of central and eastern Europe) had in the meantime erected itself by the illegitimate use of force, and needed to be overturned. Both assumptions have been shown to be flawed.
Nazi atrocities played a key role in stimulating historians to think again about the presumption - generated at the height of European nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - that nations had always existed, and were the fundamentally correct way to organize larger human communities. In Nazi hands, these ideas led straight to claims for Lebensraum, based on how much of Europe the ancient Germani had once controlled, and, with the added dimension of claimed German racial superiority, to the horror of the death camps. Historians would probably have got there anyway at some point, but the excesses of runaway nationalism provided a powerful stimulus to corrective reflection. On closer examination, the assumption that ancient and modern speakers of related languages somehow share a common and continuous political identity has proved unsustainable. The kinds of national identities that came to the fore in nineteenth-century Europe were created in historical time, and did not represent the re-emergence of something fundamental but long submerged. Without the kind of mass communications that became available in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it would have been totally impossible to bind together numerically huge and geographically dispersed populations into national communities. Group identity simply did not function in the same way in earlier eras without canals, railways and newspapers, a world where 'country' meant 'county', for instance, for the vast majority of the British population. The creation of modern nationalism also required the conscious input of intellectuals, who created national dictionaries, identified national costumes, and collected the dances and folktales which were then used to 'measure' ethnicity (I've always thought of these men as looking a bit like Professor Calculus out of Tintin). These same individuals then also generated the educational programmes that solidified the elements of national culture that they had identified into a self-reproducing cultural complex which could be taught at school, and by that means reach a still larger body of humanity in an era when mass primary education was rapidly becoming - for the first time - a European norm. The emergence of nationalism is a great story in itself, and has rightly attracted a lot of attention in the last generation or so of scholarship. The point for us, though, is straightforward. Europe has not been peopled since the first millennium by large blocks of population conscious of distinct nationalist affiliations which fundamentally shaped their lives and activities. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century affiliations cannot be imposed on the deeper past.12
Feeding into this reconsideration of the nationalist phenomenon was an equally revolutionary set of conclusions emerging from the work of social scientists studying exactly how, and how strongly, individual human beings are ever attached to any kind of group identity. In this field, the world was turned upside down in the 1950s by an anthropologist called Edmund Leach, who investigated how identity worked in the hills of northern Burma. Leach was able to show that an individual's group identity does not necessarily vary with measurable cultural traits, whether material (types of houses or pottery, for example) or non-material (shared social values, belief systems and so on). People sharing the same set of measurable cultural traits (including language: the great symbol of group identity in the nationalist era) can think of themselves as belonging to different social groups, and people with different cultures can think of themselves as belonging to the same ones. Fundamentally, therefore, identity is about perception, not a check-list of measurable items: the perception of identity the individual has inside his or her head, and the way that individual is perceived by others. Cultural items may express an identity, but they do not define it. A Scotsman may wear a kilt, but he remains a Scotsman even if he doesn't.
As a great deal of further work has confirmed, this suggests an entirely different view of the bonds that create human group identities from that which prevailed before the Second World War. Up to 1945, identity was viewed as an unchanging given, a defining aspect of any individual's life. But studies inspired by Leach's work have shown both that an individual's group identity can and does change, and that a particular individual can have more than one group identity, sometimes even choosing between them according to immediate advantage. In our post-nationalist world, this seems less surprising than it might have done sixty years ago. My sons will have both American and British passports, where before 1991 they would have had to opt for one or the other at eighteen (at that point you could be a joint American citizen only with Israel and Ireland - an interesting combination); EC citizens have both their home-national and a European identity. And instead of being seen, as used to be the case, as an overriding determinant of life choices, group identity is now sometimes relegated to a much more minor role. Particularly influential in first-millennium studies, for instance, has been a set of essays published by the Norwegian anthropologist Fredrick Barth in 1969. The collective view emerging from these papers portrays identity as no more than a strategy for personal advancement. As circumstances change, making first one group identity then another more advantageous, the individual will vary his or her allegiance. As Barth famously characterized it in the introduction to these essays, group identity must be understood as an evanescent situational construct, not a solid enduring fact'.13
This work transports us a million miles from the expectation that individuals will have one fundamental identity that defines them for life, a notion that not only seemed unchallengeable in the era of nationalism, but was also the basic assumption behind the migration model that drove the Grand Narrative of European development in the first millennium (and, indeed, the deeper past as well). The billiard-ball view of migration absolutely assumed that migrants moved in complete social groups that were closed to outsiders, that replicated themselves by endogamy and that possessed their own culture, which was identifiably different from that of any other group they might encounter on their travels. This vision rested in part, as we've seen, on some historical texts, but mostly on prevailing assumptions about how human groupings were organized, since the historical texts were actually few and far between. Once nationalist assumptions about group identity had been undermined, it was open season on the old Grand Narrative that had rested so firmly upon them.
The New Millennium?
The lead in thinking again about the deep European past from a post-nationalist perspective has been taken by archaeologists. Traditional approaches to European archaeology worked by mapping patterns of similarity and difference in archaeological finds of broadly the same date across a given landscape, so that defined sub-areas - called 'cultures' came to be marked out. Originally such definitions tended to be based almost exclusively on pottery types, since pottery fragments are both indestructible in themselves and relatively easy to find, but any kind of similarity, whether in burial customs, house types, metalwork or whatever, might have been used in principle, and has been since. The empirical fact that boundaries can sometimes he drawn between areas of archaeological similarity and difference emerged quickly in the nineteenth century with the rise of archaeology as a scientific discipline. In that intellectual and political context - again we're talking the height of European nationalism - it proved irresistible to equate the cultures depicted on the maps with ancient 'peoples', who were, after all, each presumed to have had their own material (and non material) cultures. If you were very lucky, and were working on a late enough period, you might even be able to name the bearers of the culture you had found in the ground on the basis of information horn a historical text such as Tacitus' Germania.
Now often called 'culture history', the development of this approach is particularly associated with the German scholar Gustav Kossinna, who was active from the late nineteenth into the early twentieth century. His approach was a touch more sophisticated than is sometimes appreciated. He did not say that all areas of archaeological similarity should be equated with independent ancient peoples. This was only true, he argued, in cases where sharp boundaries could be drawn between different archaeological areas, and where the similarities within the bounded area were marked and distinct. But terms such as 'sharp', 'marked' and 'distinct' were always made to be argued over, and the fundamental assumption of archaeological investigation in this era was that you would normally find your remains neatly packaged in distinct 'cultures', and that these cultures were the remains of 'peoples'.
The key point for us is that Kossinna's culture history underpinned much of the Grand Narrative. Thinking of archaeological cultures as 'peoples' carried within it a powerful tendency to explain major archaeological change in terms of migration. Where particular and distinct assemblages of material remains - archaeological 'cultures' -were each equated with ancient 'peoples', who were also viewed as the basic unit of human social organization, it was only natural to think any change to an existing pattern of remains represented the impact of a new 'people'. Given that each people had its own 'culture', when you suddenly found a new 'culture' on top of another, you then might well think that one 'people' must have replaced another. Migration, particularly in the form of the mass replacement of one population group by another, thus became the characteristic means by which observable changes to archaeological remains were explained. In modern parlance, although the term had not yet been coined, the peopling of Europe was envisaged as being driven forward by one massive episode of ethnic cleansing after another, in what has been evocatively dubbed the 'invasion hypothesis' view of the past.14
The impact of new understandings of group identity on this old intellectual structure has been profound. Once the assumption was removed that the material remains of the past would present themselves in neatly packaged 'cultures' left by ancient 'peoples', it became much less clear that they did. As more material has come to light and existing finds have been subjected to closer scrutiny, many of the boundaries between supposedly distinct cultures have started to blur, while the identification of important local variants has often undermined the homogeneity of supposed cultures from within. Equally, and perhaps even more important, while patterns of similarity do nonetheless sometimes exist, and, where they do, usually mean something important, it has also become clear that no simple rule (such as 'cultures' = 'people') can be applied universally. The precise significance of any particular pattern of similarity and difference will depend in fact on exactly what is similar and different about it. An observable archaeological 'culture' might represent the physical remains of anything from an area of general social or economic interaction, to an area of shared religious belief (where, for instance, funerary rites are similar), or even, in some cases, an area of political association (as Kossinna essentially supposed). A good way to summarize the difference in approach, it seems to me, is that Kossinna thought of archaeological cultures as the remains of entities - 'peoples' - but modern archaeologists regard them as the remains of systems of interaction, and the nature of that interaction does not have to be the same in every case.15
Rethinking the nature of cultures in this way has allowed archaeologists to demonstrate that even major material cultural changes can have causes other than outside invasion. Since patterns of observable archaeological similarity can be generated for a variety of reasons -trade, social interaction, shared religious belief or anything else you can think of- then changes in one or more of any number of these areas might be responsible for an observable change. Changes do not have to reflect the arrival of a new social group but might be caused by any substantial alteration in the system that originally created it. Indeed, it was deep dissatisfaction with the intellectual limits of the invasion hypothesis, overemployed as a monolithic model of change, as much as the impact of the new understandings of group identity, that drove a whole generation of archaeologists in the English-speaking world to reject its tenets in the 1960s, and in many other parts since.
For very good reasons, therefore, archaeologists have increasingly looked beyond the invasion hypothesis to other types of explanation altogether, since the 1960s. These new approaches have been highly fruitful, and in the process undercut much of the broader sweep of the old Grand Narrative. Up to about 1960, European prehistory was envisaged as one population group after another using their new skills in farming technology or metallurgy - to establish dominance over the landmass and expel their predecessors. Nowadays, much of the evolution of central-western European society between the Bronze Age and the Roman Iron Age (roughly the last two millennia bc) can be convincingly explained without recourse to mass migration and ethnic cleansing. Instead of one set of invaders after another overthrowing each other, the European past is now peopled with human beings who could learn new skills and, over time, develop new economic, social and political structures.16
There is one further element to this intellectual revolution that has had a huge impact on more recent approaches to the story being explored in this book. In the process of freeing themselves from the undoubted tyranny of culture history and the invasion hypothesis, certain (particularly British and North American) elements of the archaeological profession have come to dismiss migration almost entirely as an agent of significant change. Such has been their collective sigh of relief at escaping from Kossinna's conceptual straitjacket that some have resolved never to have anything to do with migration again. For these archaeologists, migration is associated with a previous, less advanced era in the intellectual development of their discipline, when in their view archaeology was subordinated to history. The billiard-ball migration model found some of its justification in historical sources, as we have seen, and when cultures were thought of as 'peoples' it was possible to write about prehistoric archaeological transformation as a quasi-historical narrative, with people X succeeding people Y, and so forth.
As a result, a basic equation has grown up in the minds of some archaeologists between any model of the past involving population movement, and simple-mindedness. As a recent introduction to early medieval cemeteries put it, avoiding migration in explanations of archaeological change 'is simply to dispose of an always simplistic and usually groundless supposition in order to enable its replacement with a more subtle interpretation of the period'. Note the language, particularly the contrast between 'simplistic' and 'groundless' (the world dominated by migration) with 'more subtle' (any other kind of explanation). The message here is loud and clear. Anyone dealing with the geographical displacement of archaeologically observable artefact types or habits, who wants to produce an account of the past that is at all 'subtle' or 'complex', should avoid migration at all costs. The tables have turned. From a position of overwhelming dominance before the 1960s, migration has become the great Satan of archaeological explanation.17
Such a major intellectual U-turn was bound to have a profound impact on the way historians approached the first millennium, where archaeological evidence was always of vital importance, and, of course, historians had in the meantime been thinking about the significance of the great identity debate for themselves. The consequential landmark of change in historical thinking, the starting point for all subsequent approaches to identity and hence first-millennium migration, was a book published in 1961 by the German scholar Reinhard Wenskus. Entitled Stammesbildung und Verfassung (The Generation and Bonding of Tribes), it showed that you don't have to read far even in the pages of the first-century Roman historian Tacitus to find some Germanic groups being totally exterminated, and other entirely new ones being created. And when you get to the great migrations of the fourth to the sixth centuries, the evidence for discontinuity only multiplies. As we will explore in more detail later, all the Germanic groups at the heart of the successor states to the Roman Empire in this era - Goths, Franks, Vandals and so on can be shown to be new political units, created on the march, many of them recruiting from a wide range of manpower sources, some of which were not even Germanic-speaking. The political units formed by the Germani in the first millennium were thus not closed groups with continuous histories, but entities that could be created and destroyed, and which, in between, increased and decreased in size according to historical circumstance. There has been much discussion since of the details of how group identity might have worked among first-millennium Germani, and on its likely strength, and we will need to return to these arguments in due course. But all subsequent discussion has accepted and started from Wenskus's basic observations.18
These observations have had a profound knock-on effect upon understandings of Germanic migration. Under the old view of unchanging closed group identities, if group X was suddenly encounlered in place B rather than in place A, it was only natural to conclude that the whole group had moved. Once it is accepted that group identities can be malleable, then in principle only a few - maybe even a very few - of group X need have moved to provide a core around whom a population from disparate sources then gathered. The billiard-ball view has thus come to be replaced by the snowball. Instead of large, compact groups of men, women and children moving with determination across the landscape, many now think in terms of demographic snowballs: originally small groupings, probably composed largely of warriors, who, because of their success, attract large numbers of recruits as they travelled.
Such post-nationalist readings of the historical evidence for barbarian Europe in the first millennium had similar but independent roots to the new dawn that was sweeping simultaneously through archaeology. But the vehemence of the archaeologists' new mindset has added further momentum to the evident potential for rewriting the story of barbarian migration from historical sources. So convinced now are some historians that large, mixed migration units could never have been a feature of the past that they have started to argue that the handful of historical sources that apparently report the opposite - the source of the invasion-hypothesis model of migration - must be mistaken. Graeco-Roman sources, it has been suggested, are infected with a migration topos, a cultural reflex that made Mediterranean authors describe any barbarians on the move as a 'people', whatever the real nature of the group. A European history composed of long-distance, large-scale population moves is being replaced by a history of small-scale mobile groupings, gathering in followers as they went. Migration - though the word is now scarcely used - remains part of this story, obviously, but with the scaling-down of the numbers of people envisaged as participating in those journeys, the key historical process is no longer the movement itself but the gathering-in of new recruits afterwards.19
There is a beautiful symmetry here. The old Grand Narrative subdued archaeology to the demands of history, with archaeological cultures that were understood as 'peoples' and a migration model derived from first-millennium historical sources which ordered the progression of these cultures into a historical narrative punctuated by episodes of large-scale migration and mass ethnic cleansing. Now, the credibility of these same historical sources has been undermined by a reaction against migration which started with the archaeologists' ferocious rejection of culture history and the invasion hypothesis that was its natural corollary. History used to lead archaeology; now archaeology is leading history. In the process, a vision of early European history driven by outside emigration has given way to another characterized by few immigrants but by many people adapting to whatever stimuli were provided by the few who did move: a story largely of internal development. This is in its own right a beautiful pattern. We have now reached a point that is the mirror image of where we were fifty years ago. But while this is satisfyingly symmetrical as an intellectual progression, is it convincing history? Should migration be relegated to such a minor, walk-on part in the history of barbarian Europe in the first millennium ad?
...
12 See note 9 above. The general point is accepted even by those, such as Smith (1986), willing to conceive of relatively solid and sizeable group identities in at least some corners of the pre-nationalist past.
13 Leach (1954); 'evanescent situational construct': Barth (1969), 9. For more recent overviews, see e.g. Bentley (1987); Kivisto (1989); Bacall (1991).
14 That hypothesis was already marked in the work of Kossinna himself: see especially Kossinna (1928). It showed itself even more strongly in the equally influential work of Gordon Childe (see note 11 above), who generalized many of Kossinna's ideas, while dropping some of his assumptions about Nordic racial superiority. On Kossinna's legacy, see e.g. Chapman and Dolukhanov (1993), 1-5; Renfrew and Bahn (1991).
15 For an overview of these intellectual developments, see Shennan (1989); Renfrew and Bahn (1991); Chapman and Dolukhanov (1993), 6-25 (which includes an instructive difference in emphasis on the part of the two authors); Ucko (1995). The work of Ian Hodder - especially (1982) and (1991) - has been particularly important in rehabilitating the view that patterns of similarity and difference in material cultural items might sometimes reflect important aspects of human organization.
16 Clark (1966) represents a key turning point away from the invasion hypothesis. For accounts of the range of explanatory hypotheses that have been tried since, see e.g. Renfrew and Bahn (1991); Preucel and Hodder (1996); Hodder and Hutson (2003).
17 Halsall (1995b), 61; and see his further comment: '[The invasion hypothesis] is rarely given much credence in archaeological circles today. It is too simplistic, rather on a par with asserting that the change from neo-classical to neo-Gothic architecture or from classical to romantic art in the nineteenth century was the result of an invasion' (p. 57). This 'before' and 'after' approach to migration is quite common. See, for a further example, the comments of Nicholas Higham in Hines (1997), 179, where a reinterpretation of a set of remains that had excluded migration from its discussion is lauded as 'more complex". The discussion in question is in Hines (1984).
18 Wenskus (1961); cf., amongst others. Wolfram (1988) on the Goths, and Pohl (1988) on the Avars.
19 Geary (1985) and (1988) provide introductory essays composed from this perspective, Halsall (2007) a full-scale study of the fourth to sixth centuries. The migration topos features in Amory (1997) and Kulikowski (2002).'
So?
Of course you can refuse to comment on this and be snarky instead, but then I, and I believe others too, will suspect that you are the one who is ignorant about archeologists.
Torsten