Conclusions
The aDNA analyses of Szólád and Collegno were combined with study of
stable isotopes in the skeletons and then compared with the distribution of
grave-goods. The essential overall conclusions were expressed – less than
clearly – as follows:
In both Szólád and
Collegno this genetic structure mirrors the variation that emerges from their
mortuary practices, i.e., how living members of the community represented the
individuals that they buried. This perhaps suggests that in these two
cemeteries there may indeed have been a biological basis to the notion that
long-term shared common descent can shape social identity and that this is
reflected in the material culture. However, whether the association between
genetic ancestry and material culture reflects specific peoples mentioned in
historical texts (i.e., Longobards) or stemmed from a deeper/long-term descent
(of mixed barbarian ancestries[[1]])
is as yet unclear.[2]
The stable isotope analysis is very interesting; the discussion of
furnished burial deeply flawed. This, however, is not the place to discuss
those or to present an alternative interpretation.
Towards the start of the article we read:
We note that we are not
aiming to infer Lombard ethnicity, which is a subjective identity.[3]
This is disingenuous. The experiment was designed to examine the
Longobard migration, and chose two sites associated with Longobards, excavated
and discussed by archaeologists predisposed to read variations in the data on
ethnic lines and to see change in material culture as resulting from Longobard
migration and who have previously interpreted the sites in those terms. The
background to the problem analysed was exclusively expressed in terms of the
history of that migration. To say that the implication is not that the
supposed incomers are Longobards, defined and unified by their (supposed)
ancestry, and that that was what gave rise to the variability in material
culture is entirely unconvincing.
But what, if anything, has been shown? It
is, to be sure, interesting that the analyses suggest a linkage between
different kindreds and particular funerary rites and diets, and that these
include the evident incomers at Collegno, but this does not explain the use of those rites. The
association between the furnished inhumation burial rite and ‘Germanic’
ethnicity has absolutely no prima facie evidential support whatsoever in
the archaeological record. As a rite, it was clearly developed within the
frontier provinces of the Roman Empire. As Irene Barbiera has proven,
inhumation with weapons was a rite known in Northern Italy before the
‘barbarian migrations’.[4] That cannot be stressed
strongly enough. If repeated aDNA studies reveal that furnished inhumation was
generally employed by incoming groups from Germania
Magna, that will demonstrate that this old assumption was the luckiest
guess in the history of archaeology! It will not, however, explain why these groups, with
no prior history of using the rite before their migration, suddenly decided to
employ it once on Roman or formerly Roman territory, or retrospectively confer
methodological or logical rigour on the initial assumption.
The analyses made no linkage between the
incoming group in Collegno and the supposedly immigrant group at Szólád, other
than the broad similarity of their genetic make-up when plotted on PCA diagrams.[5] Close consideration shows
them not to overlap by very much even on the analyses’ own terms. The modern
geographical regions associated with the supposedly incoming, ‘northern’ groups
are moreover very broad. But let us in any case accept this conclusion. Does it
necessarily say anything about the migration of Longobards? Think of all the other
possible explanations. If the Collegno incomers do have, loosely, ‘central
European DNA’ could they not (as the authors admit) be descended from
Ostrogoths, or from any of the barbarians who made up Odoacer’s army? For that
matter, although growing up in the locality, why can the different ‘southern’ kindreds
at Collegno not belong to either of those groups? Furthermore, what if they
were descended from ‘Romans’ who had moved back from the transalpine provinces?[6] Some of the areas from
which the alleged newcomers might have come, according to the genetic evidence,
lie inside the Empire. All these possibilities are entirely consistent
with the experiment’s results.
The authors claim that the results are ‘consistent
with an origin of this [putatively immigrant] group east of the Rhine and north
of the Danube and we cannot reject the migration, its route, and settlement of
the Longobards described in historical texts.’[7] Indeed they are, but they
are at least as consistent with a wide range of alternative interpretations and
do nothing to render the authors’ preferred reading more plausible than the
others. In short, the Szólád/Collegno
analyses involved an experiment set up with a series of interpretive
conclusions in mind; that experiment did nothing to rule those out, so it is implied
that they have been confirmed. This is bizarre. Traditionally, scientific method
proceeds by deduction, by ruling explanations out, rather than simply picking,
out of a wide range of possibilities, the one that accords with the analysts’
preconceptions on the grounds that it had not been excluded by the
experiment. There is actually very little that is ruled out by this
experiment.
Let us suppose, though, that in spite of all my
misgivings the analyses had revealed the arrival of Longobards at
Collegno and that they were the people using grave-goods. As noted, it would
still not explain their decision to use that rite; it would certainly not
authorise us to describe the rite and its analogues as Longobard or Barbarian. What
would it tell us? That there was a Longobard migration into Italy and,
perhaps, that it contributed to stress and social competition at a local level?
We knew this. No one to my knowledge is denying – or has ever denied – that
there was a Longobard migration, or that it involved the usually-cited numbers
of people: perhaps 100,000. In other words, the most positive reading of the
results, and one, let me repeat, that by no means automatically emerges from
the data, would tell us absolutely nothing that we did not already know and,
with considerable likelihood, not even that. Forcing the data into the support
of that maximalist reading potentially obscures what they might be
saying about a broader and more interesting range of topics.
The Szólád/Collegno experiment – like many
other studies of this sort – offers us, by way of conclusions, a choice between
the obvious – something we already knew and no which sane person doubted
(people moved into the Roman Empire from Barbaricum)
– and the impossible – that no one moved and populations were entirely
homogeneous. Hence, they frequently rely on setting up the second alternative
as a straw man.
[1] Why ‘barbarian’?
[2] Amorim et al. ‘Understanding’, p.8.
[3] Amorim et al. ‘Understanding’, p.2.
[4] I. Barbiera, ‘Remembering the Warriors: Weapon Burials and
Tombstones between Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages in Northern Italy’, in Post-Roman
Transitions: Christian and Barbarian Identities in the Early Medieval West,
ed. W. Pohl & G. Heydemann (Turnhout, 2013), pp.407-35.
[5] Amorim et al., ‘Understanding’, fig 2a, 2b.
[6] As is famously recorded in Eugippius’ Life of Severinus. Life of
Severinus: Eugippius. The Life of St. Severin, trans. Bieler, L., (Washington, 1965).
[7] Amorim et al. ‘Understanding’, p.9.