Empires and Barbarians (5 page)

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 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 be 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 from 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 encountered 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.