From: Bhrihskwobhloukstroy
Message: 68922
Date: 2012-03-11
>
>
>
>
> --- 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
>
>
>