Rome's Gothic Wars: From the Third Century to Alaric (Key Conflicts of Classical Antiquity) (9 page)

Even if that is true, however, it tells us very little about how a sense of identity was constituted within or between barbarian groups. How did the Tervingi tell themselves apart from the
Greuthungi, who both appear in our fourth-century sources as political divisions of the Goths? In other words, can we get at barbarians’ own criteria of identity and alterity?
Language must surely have been important in creating a sense of alterity. Yet despite the deep rooted nineteenth-century conviction
that belonging to the same language family produces some sort of shared identity, too many different
gentes
spoke mutually intelligible languages for a common tongue to contribute much to a sense of identity.
Religion may have been more significant – some of our ethnonyms, for instance that of the
Suevi, may originally have referred not to political or kinship units, but rather to a variety of groups who shared sacred cult sites. Unfortunately, we have virtually no access to authentic traces of barbarian religion, certainly not enough to chart what function, if any, it had in defining the boundaries of identity and alterity. What of
dress? Clothing does have, and has always had, a very important function in expressing identity and alterity. Precisely because it is instantly visible, clothing can serve an emblematic function for those in a position to decode what any particular item of dress, or any combination of such items, means. Greeks and Romans were fully aware of the importance of clothing as a signifier of identity: imperial laws from the fourth century restrict the wearing of ‘barbarian’ costume in certain places, exemplified by a ban on trousers in the city of Rome from A.D. 397.
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Yet if we try to move from the recognition that clothing could be used to tell the difference to an analysis of
how
it did so, we run up against one of the most vexed and vexing questions of late antique and early medieval studies: what can archaeological evidence tell us about identity, and ethnic identity more specifically?

The material remains of the frontier regions are an extremely valuable source for barbarian social history, as will become clear in the
next chapter
, but they are much less useful as evidence for ancient ethnic divisions. Although that fact has been demonstrated by a great deal of recent work – both practical and theoretical – it flies in the face of more than a century of scholarship. The correlation of particular types of material evidence with particular barbarian groups named in the literary sources has long been, and remains, normal practice, as does the tracing of migrations on the basis of artefacts. The origins of these approaches lie in the early twentieth century and are particularly associated with the archaeologist
Gustav Kossinna, though they underpin the
work of other great archaeologists of the European
barbaricum
like Hans Zeiß and Joachim Werner. Kossinna’s
Siedlungsarchäologie
(‘settlement archaeology’) postulated that materially homogeneous archaeological cultures could be matched up with the ethnic groups attested in our literary sources, and also with the language groups defined by philologists. The shifting extensions of material cultures should therefore be interpreted as the movements of peoples. The rigidity of Kossinna’s approach has long been repudiated, but its legacy is pervasive. One widespread belief ultimately rooted in that legacy is that artefacts themselves carry ethnicity: that one particular form of brooch is Gothic, another Vandalic, and that wherever we find such brooches we can locate Goths and Vandals.
This ‘ethnic ascription’ – the attaching of ethnic identity to particular material artefacts – is still ubiquitous in archaeological study of the barbarians, as is the designation of complexes of material evidence with ethnic names drawn from our literary evidence. Ethnic ascription is what allows some scholars to maintain that the Gothic migration recorded in Jordanes is also visible in the archaeological evidence.

Unfortunately, it has now been definitively shown that artefacts do not carry ethnicity in such a fashion.
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Whether in the cemeteries from which most of our artefacts come or in the remains of barbarian settlements, material evidence tells us a great deal about vertical social relationships – those between different status levels within a society – but much less about horizontal relationships between ethnic or linguistic groups with separate identities. Thus while it is comparatively easy to characterize vertical distinctions within a single archaeological assemblage – such as bigger houses, better grave goods – defining assemblages by contrast to others is much more difficult. For one thing, it is a wholly artificial process that involves selecting out several characteristics – for instance the positioning of weapons in burials, or particular brooch forms or building techniques – and holding them to be diagnostic, either singly or in combination, of a particular archaeological culture. The selection of defining characteristics can itself be a problem, as there is always a danger of taking as diagnostic characteristics that are actually very widely diffused. But even if we avoid that danger, we are still making another problematical assumption: that the characteristics we have
selected as definitive are the same ones that contemporaries would have recognized as defining their sense of identity or alterity. That assumption can never be possible in purely archaeological terms. Although we can be sure that some items of dress were used as emblems of identity and alterity – of belonging and exclusion – we need the human voice of the past to tell us which items communicated that sense of identity and how they did so. As we have seen, the only human voice that exists for our late antique barbarians is that of an
interpretatio romana
which is as alien to the barbarian perspective as we are ourselves. For that reason, we cannot be confident that our archaeological cultures really do represent something other than our own selection of dead remains – that they do in fact identify some sense of cultural identity that living contemporaries might have recognized. In consequence, we risk investing the material evidence with a historical significance it does not intrinsically possess. That is to say, we risk turning an abstract set of material markers, which we have ourselves selected, into a historically real group of humans to which we then attribute a collective identity or ascribe collective actions. These intrinsic risks are only exacerbated when we draw a connection between an archaeological culture and a historical group named in our sources.

It is, of course, sometimes possible to draw a legitimate connection between the material evidence and the barbarians named in our Greek and Roman authorities. If a well-dated material culture is widely present in a region in which our sources locate a named ethnic group over a substantial period of time, then we can say with some certainty that the named ethnic group used that material culture. The correspondence is never absolute, however. All of the archaeological culture zones that we know extend over regions in which the literary sources describe more than one ethnic or political grouping. In other words, a material culture is never identical with a particular ethnic grouping we find in the written sources. The single best illustration of this theoretical position is, as it happens, the Goths themselves. We know that Goths first appear in
contemporary literary sources in the early decades of the third century and that, in the company of various other named groups, they posed a threat to the peace of the empire from bases in the region to the north and west of the Black Sea. As we shall see in the
next chapter
, by the earlier fourth century the Goths had unquestionably become the most powerful group in that region. In that same region – roughly between Volhynia in the north, the Carpathians in the west, the Danube and Black Sea to the south and the Donets to the east – a single archaeological culture is visible from the late third until the early fifth century. This archaeological culture is known as the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture and is reasonably well dated on archaeological grounds. That is to say, the region in which the Goths were dominant fell within the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov cultural zone. This means that we can use the socio-historical evidence of that material culture to help describe fourth-century Gothic social structures and economic relations – as we will in the
next chapter
.

But does the identification allow us to do more than that? For instance, does the identification of the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture with fourth-century Goths allow us to find Goths elsewhere? Many archaeologists and historians would answer yes. The argument has been made most explicitly by Volker Bierbrauer: the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov archaeological culture is Gothic; some of its characteristics – particular brooch and ceramic types, a tendency not to place weapons in graves – are similar to those of the
Wielbark culture, which was centred on the Vistula river and lasted from the first to the fourth century A.D.; the Wielbark culture must therefore also be Gothic. Also, because the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture is Gothic, and because some artefacts associated with it appear inside the frontiers of the Roman empire, these artefacts must represent the movement of Goths from the Danube to Italy, and thence to Gaul and Spain. Bierbrauer’s simplistic ethnic ascription model is extreme, but only because it is articulated so clearly.
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Unfortunately, many other
archaeologists and historians working in the field accept its core assumptions without acknowledging the fact. Even Peter Heather, the most subtle modern interpreter of Gothic history, has written about ‘working backwards’ from the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture to earlier stages of ‘Gothic’ archaeology.
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Two separate considerations, one practical, one theoretical, make this approach untenable.

For one thing, the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture is extremely diverse. As we shall see in the
next chapter
, the artefacts, construction techniques, and burial practices found within the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov zone have parallels with earlier cultural traditions within the zone itself, with Roman provincial culture, with the Wielbark and
Przeworsk cultures to the north and west, and with the steppe cultures of the east. The Wielbark elements in the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture are no more numerous than other elements, so there is no archaeological reason to privilege them over others. Even if Wielbark artefacts were dominant in the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov zone, they would not necessarily signify the same thing in both places: artefacts that are emblematic of one thing in one place may change meaning radically if transposed to another. More importantly still, the closeness of the artefactual connections between the two cultures is not as great as is usually asserted. Indeed, their chief point of intersection is not particular artefacts, but the fact that
weapon burials are absent from the Wielbark and rare in the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov zones. In purely logical terms, a negative characteristic is less convincing proof of similarity than a positive one, and the fact that weapon burials are commonest where archaeological investigation has been most intensive suggests that our evidentiary base is anything but representative.
Given this, why should the Wielbark–Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov connection seem so self-evident to so many scholars? One answer is an old methodology that seeks to explain changes in material culture by reference to migration. The other is Jordanes.

The methodological problem is of long standing. In the early years of archaeology’s development as a scientific discipline, it was normal to
understand cultural changes as the result of one tribe or people conquering or displacing another and replacing the previous material culture with a new one of their own. This interpretative paradigm goes back in part to the nationalist scholarship of the
Volk
at which we have already looked, in part to the preoccupation of our ancient historical sources with invasion, migration and conquest, and in part to
Kossinna’s ascription of fixed and defined material cultures to ethnopolitical groupings.
In the 1970s and 1980s, some archaeological theorists reacted radically against such migration theories. Working from the simple and obvious observation that the material culture of a place can change radically without the population of that place changing much at all, these archaeologists sought to explain change in archaeological cultures by reference to the diffusion of materials and ideas rather than migration. Diffusionist theory became and remains the norm, particularly amongst British archaeologists.

On the other hand, diffusionist theory, like any theory, can be pushed to unrealistic extremes. It is, after all, a simple fact that people move and have always done so, sometimes over long distances – a fine example from our period is the Sarmatian
Iazyges, who moved
en masse
from the vicinity of the Dnieper and Dniester rivers, where
Strabo places them at the beginning of the first century A.D., to the Alföld between the Danube and Tisza, where
Pliny places them in the 70s A.D., having come at the request of the
Quadic king
Vannius for aid against the
Hermunduri. When people move, they often bring large parts of their native culture with them, however transformed it may be when transplanted into a new environment: one need only look at any large immigrant neighbourhood in the U.S. or Britain to see the truth of this fact. What is more, the conquest of one region by people from another can profoundly alter the culture of a conquered region, with or without massive population shifts: the expansion of the Roman empire is history’s best illustration of this. Each of these points contradicts the more extreme statements of radical diffusionist theory, but it is unfortunate that this kind of overstatement has given comfort to those who would rather think solely in terms of migration and conquest. The truth of the matter, as so often, lies in the middle ground. Massive cultural changes
can take place without much movement of population; by the same token, large-scale movements of population have obviously taken place in the past, which means that some massive cultural changes should indeed be explicable in terms of migration. Neither migration nor diffusion will suit every case, neither can be denied in every case, and we should always have a reason for asserting one explanation over the other in any given instance.