tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-72072657942977479102024-03-13T20:53:25.344-07:00Historian on the EdgeThe Historical, Philosophical and Political Musings of an Autistic HistorianHistorian on the Edgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14069934072719158780noreply@blogger.comBlogger422125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7207265794297747910.post-55136613522978228252024-01-22T07:43:00.000-08:002024-01-22T22:26:56.321-08:00Spectres of Marcus: the Roman Empire ‘between two deaths’<p><span style="text-align: justify;">This time, ah-ah</span></p><p><span style="text-align: justify;">Is coming like a ghost time</span></p><p><span style="text-align: justify;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="text-align: justify;">When I wrote</span><span style="text-align: justify;"> </span><i style="text-align: justify;">Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West</i><span style="text-align: justify;">, getting on for 20 years ago, I used a three-part organisation of the text: Part 1: Romans and Barbarians in an Imperial world; Part 2: A world renegotiated; Part 3: Romans and barbarians in a post-imperial world. I used the term ‘post-imperial’ for a couple of reasons. I borrowed it from Andrew Gillet, who had coined it because of problems with the term ‘post-Roman’. People after 476 weren’t in any sense ‘post-Roman’. Many thought they were still Romans; many were still trying to do things to look Roman; many continued to call themselves Romans (not least in the Greek-speaking east). I also thought at the time that the western Empire</span><span style="text-align: justify;"> </span><i style="text-align: justify;">had</i><span style="text-align: justify;"> </span><span style="text-align: justify;">ended in 480 and that people at the time</span><span style="text-align: justify;"> </span><i style="text-align: justify;">knew</i><span style="text-align: justify;"> </span><span style="text-align: justify;">that it had ended. I thought this partly because of arguments by Jill Harries about Sidonius Apollinaris’ letters at the time, and on the basis of some of the changes that were taking place in material culture in the last quarter of the 5</span><sup style="text-align: justify;">th</sup><span style="text-align: justify;"> </span><span style="text-align: justify;">century. So ‘post-imperial’ seemed like a very good term to use for the period after 480.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I no longer think that the western Empire ended in 480, and I no longer think that people at the time thought that it had ended. About ten years ago I argued that Sidonius’ comments about the Tiber’s dwindling stream compared with the strength of the Moselle, were something that a Gallic poet might equally have written to a third-century Gallic emperor resident at Trier. The work I did on <a href="https://600transformer.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-space-between-undead-roman-empire.html" target="_blank">Style 1</a>, about a decade ago (but never published) also stressed the ‘not knowing’, the indeterminacy of the period and the way that the decorative style played with traditional Roman iconography and indeed could not make its point without that.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">This leaves me with a terminological problem. Neither ‘post-Roman’ nor ‘post-imperial’ now seem to me to be adequate terms for the period between Nepos’ murder and the wars of Justinian – during which I contend people <i>did</i> begin to realise that they were no longer living in the Roman Empire. So what do I/we call that period? If (or, as I hope, when) I do a 2<sup>nd</sup> edition of <i>Barbarian Migrations</i>, what do I use as the title for Part 3?<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">During that period I argue that western European polities (and politics) continued to operate as though the Empire <i>did </i>still exist and they were a part of it. By the earlier 6<sup>th</sup> century Frankish and Ostrogothic rulers displayed serious imperial pretensions. Indeed it was this that seems to have led the eastern emperors to start to promulgate the idea that the West had ended, been lost, been conquered by barbarians, in the fifth century (in 455 or 476). Politics were oriented towards the notion of an Empire, but an Empire that did not function as such in the west. It was something spectral, or phantasmic: something believed to be there and affecting people’s actions, but not there in reality. It’s in this sense that I like to think of the period between 480 and say 550 as the western Roman Empire ‘between two deaths’. In one sense, as a functioning political organisation, the Empire really did die with Nepos in 480, but in another sense it only died when Justinian declared that it was dead, 50 years later. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I was interested in the thought of Jacques Lacan, ten to fifteen years ago, I toyed with the idea of trying to think this issue through his writing about Antigone ‘between two deaths’. In – in Lacan’s terms – the ‘symbolic’ register (loosely, the register of language and the world as it is) the Empire died in 480; in his register of the Imaginary (the world as we think it should, or ought to, be) it didn’t die until Justinian’s wars. Now, away from my books, I can’t remember whether the two deaths at stake in <i>Antigone</i> are in the same sequence, first in the Symbolic and then in the Imaginary, but I think there are issues to think about there, in analysing the society and politics of that period.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">For now, what I want to stress is that spectral aspect of the period (again, see also my unpublished piece on Style 1 for the 'undead' Roman Empire). So I give you (and, provided no one has come up with this before, claim as my coinage) a new term for the period between c.475 and c.550:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">Ghost-imperial <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I thank you.</p>Historian on the Edgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14069934072719158780noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7207265794297747910.post-37722568547283882212023-11-30T04:43:00.000-08:002023-11-30T04:43:23.939-08:00Reflections on 'The End of Western Antiquity': 4. The supposed ‘Rupture’ of the Ancient Mediterranean, Part 4<p style="text-align: justify;">Several problems are raised by the economic/political
paradigm. As indicated last time, my aim here is not to replace them but to add
a new level more concerned with ideas, attitudes or culture. To this end it’s
important to note that the broad outlines of economic development sketched in
Part 3 match, in general, those of the shifts in culture mapped out in Part 2,
of the gradual turning away from each other of west and east (especially of east).</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">One difficulty is the lack of fit between the political
change and the archaeologically-revealed patterns of exchange. The alleged end
of the western ‘tax spine’, after the Vandal conquest of Africa, does not seem
to me to fit the data very well. One issue is what exactly the Vandal conquest
of Byzacena/Proconsularis and the 442 treaty with the imperial court actually
meant. This is really for another time, but it seems to me that the treaty is
generally reconstructed in terms of a ‘barbarian invaders/conquests’ paradigm
that relies on a lot of assumptions that are not necessarily supported by the
evidence itself. More importantly for current purposes, though, the patterns of
African trade don’t really change after c.440. As we have seen, African traders
if anything found new markets after that date and continued to trade with Italy
and the south of Gaul as before, even if quantities might have declined. These
issues also affect the argument that claims that the end of the western
imperial command economy produced a dramatic shift in interregional
connections. Logically, this ought to have happened but it does not seem to me
to be readily visible in the archaeological data, in which pre-existing
patterns continue, even if along (similarly pre-existing) trajectories of
reduction in scale. You might not find much ARS or many African amphorae in
northern Gaul in the fifth century but then you wouldn’t in the fourth either.
Most of the northern Gaulish landscape was harnessed to the provisioning and
remuneration of the Rhine army and it seems likely to me that, as James Harland
has suggested, Britain might have also played a major role in the supply of the
frontier garrisons. Consequently, the breakdown of regular government and the
end of the imperial command economy is seen in the well-attested crisis in
those areas, not in the patterns of Mediterranean trade.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">We might also ask whether the reimposition of imperial rule
is in itself sufficient to explain the startling shift in the direction of
African trade in the sixth century. This seems superficially attractive as an
explanation but closer reflection raises some important problems. One might,
first of all, ask why the government would redirect the African <i>annonae</i>
to Constantinople, which was amply supplied from Egypt and elsewhere already.
Would/should we not see a decline in the market share of Egyptian exports if
that were the case? More importantly, why would the imperial government not
have reestablished the supposedly-ended (and supposedly crucial) ‘tax-spine’ to
the newly reconquered city of Rome, and Byzantine Italian territories? African
exports continue to reach Italy, albeit mostly (and increasingly to the
detriment of other areas) Rome and in gradually decreasing numbers, until the
end of the seventh century.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">We might also think more closely about the ways in which
wars affect long-distance exchange. Pirenne and others ascribed the breaking of
long-distance Mediterranean trade to seaborne piracy, whether Arab or Vandal,
but this is an implausible mechanism. Even if one were to assume that no one
ever thought to provide merchant vessels with armed escorts, the relationship
between piracy and seaborne commerce resembles that – in that early computer
programming exercise – between foxes and chickens. If the chicken population [or
seaborne merchant traffic] grows, the fox population [or profitable pirate
activity] grows with it, because of the increased availability of food [loot];
there comes a point though where the fox population is so great that it is
killing chickens faster than the chicken population can reproduce itself; at
that point the lack of food leads to a decline, through starvation, in the fox
population; eventually, however, the low numbers of predatory foxes allows the
chicken population to grow again; and so on. Put more simply, you can’t have
pirates without merchant ships for them to prey on. Pirenne’s thesis creates an
image of a period during which Arab pirates wearily put to sea in spite of
there being no shipping to attack. ‘Well, me hearties, none of us has seen a
merchantman for ten years but here we go again; another day another dollar.’
The other strange point about Pirenne’s thesis is that although he thought –
correctly – that long-distance trade flowed mostly from east to west, and
although he thought this on the basis of texts describing imports from
Palestine and Egypt, he still thought that the decisive blow to Mediterranean
trade was dealt by the Arab conquests and/or by Arab fleets – creating the
image of Arab pirates attacking ships that had sailed from their own ports [‘pirates
on the starboard bow, cap’n!’ ‘Don’t worry lad, their ours.’]…<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Be all that as it may, we might wonder how warfare affects
trade. The key point I want to make is that for it to have seriously
detrimental effects it needs to be ongoing for a long time. Even heavy fighting
for a year or two, or a few years, is unlikely to bring about any serious
shifts in trading patterns. Such events can be factored in to the usual
response strategies. Campaigning by even small armies (as were the norm in late
antiquity and the early Middle Ages) could produce famine but such could be responded
to within the normal patterns of redistribution and relief, where they
functioned. They might even produce windfalls for merchants able to sell at
famine prices. More serious contenders as causal factors in long-term change
are long periods of warfare such as the Gothic wars in Italy, or the wars with
the Moors after the reconquest of Africa from the Vandals, or, especially, the
long war between the Empire and Persia, and then with the Arabs. Such warfare
is important not (or not just, or principally) for disrupting commerce, though
it probably did so (though we might also remember that armies need provisioning
and can act as markets) but through the disruption of production/supply and
demand. Displacement of population or disruption of seasonal agricultural
activities through the movement (year in, year out) of armies, associated
famine and disease (plague especially from the mid-sixth century) dislocates or
prevents the production of the surplus that in some way or other acts as the
basis for commerce, as well as (partly in consequence) the ability for
craftsmen to make the products that are traded, or the ability for markets to
be held regularly with the usual security. It might be that twenty years of
insecurity after Belisarius’ conquest had serious effects on some African
production, but clearly it didn’t kill it off entirely. Similarly, the Gothic
wars didn’t entirely end the market for African products in Italy. The wars in
the east from 610 to mid-century do seem to have been fatal for the old eastern
Mediterranean complex of commercial networks, production, and distribution,
etc. Once again, though, we’re entitled to ask why, when the dust settled, they
didn’t reemerge even if the materials being produced took different forms.
Certainly, the creation of the Caliphate led to a profound rearrangement of
trading networks – greater links between North Africa and the sub-Saharan world
being one of the most important developments – but again, one would have to ask
whether there was anything economically more logical or natural about those
networks than the previously existing ones. Any investigation of that issue
will lead you quite quickly to the role of attitudes, ideas, mentalité in
shaping networks and connections, commercial and otherwise.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Some of the economic explanations adduced (concerning supply
and demand, production costs, etc), while plausible and sophisticated, function
mainly as descriptive extrapolations from data. They don’t necessarily emerge
from the data themselves. Clearly, too, they are teleological extrapolations
backwards from the eventual outcomes. All of this is fair enough, but the issue
does need to be flagged up. And again there are some problems that arise, in my
opinion anyway. One concerns the demise of the Mediterranean commercial links
with the north-west. Some things from the Mediterranean were simply not
available locally – olive oil is the obvious commodity here. Given the
dominance of African oil production in the late imperial west, this ought to
have been an important basis for commerce (and surely was). But what markets
were there for this? Western towns generally contracted in size from the third
century onwards but Mediterranean wares continue to be found in some
north-western regions. The church’s need for oil for lighting and also for
anointing, and the growth of Christianity may have provided new markets as, in
the fifth century, might the new elite in western Britain wanting to show its
prestige and Roman-ness. Alongside the seeming demise of the old Roman elite
further to the east, this might explain the shift in the routes via which
African exports entered Britain. What seems odd to me, though, is that when the
economy in the north-west recovered in the late sixth century (with the revival
of towns, greater aristocratic control of surplus, related increase in church
foundation, increased monetisation of the economy, growing
craft-specialisation, newly established markets, etc) the market share of
Mediterranean products, having managed to persist through over 200 years of
economic change and (especially) decline, suddenly disappeared. Imports found
on sites all around the Irish Sea (east and west, north and south, rather than
principally on its southern and western shores, as hitherto) seem to come
almost entirely from various parts of Gaul. Descriptively one can say that more
local products squeezed out the African imports but one would still need to ask
why. Costs, etc, don’t seem to me to present the whole story. The whole point
of my discussion thus far is, on the one hand, that normative, supposedly
natural, logical, or eternal economic laws of supply and demand are in
themselves inadequate to the task of explaining the changes of the fifth to
seventh centuries. But so too is the notion that trade can just be ‘turned
off’, like a tap, by high-level political events.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">It's time, I think, to try to add some elements of ideas and
worldviews to the picture to round it out (rather than replace other
explanations with them). I have already said that the development of western
economic systems runs to some extent parallel to some changes in outlooks and
attitudes (though not necessarily to high politics or governmental shifts).
This is not in itself news. Long ago it was pointed out (maybe by R.S. Lopez –
I will check and correct if necessary when I have my books) that the papacy was
quite happy to import Egyptian papyrus until the rulers of Egypt started
stamping papyri with (to Christians) unacceptable quotations from the Qur’an.
The shifts in trading routes and networks after the creation of the Caliphate
are also clearly about something other than laws of economics. The demand for
Mediterranean goods in western Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries was
surely in large part because of the cultural cachet of commodities produced in,
or somehow associated with, the Christian, Imperial, Roman World. As has been
mentioned this period represents the high point of <i>Romanitas</i> in the
region. Were easterners simply no longer interested in western trade and
markets? It’s not as if there were no important commodities to be had there,
and – as noted – the market opportunities ought, if anything, to have been improving.
Three letters of Gregory the Great (and I am grateful to Helen Foxhall Forbes
for drawing my attention to them) are significant here. Gregory is writing to
the Patriarch of Alexandria who, he has heard, needs large timbers for Alexandrian
vessels. Gregory could, and did, get his hands on just the sort of timber that’s
wanted (in Calabria if memory serves), and get it transported up to Rome, but
the Egyptians didn’t send ships that were big enough to take them, and cutting them
to fit would, obviously, rather defeat the object. Gregory, it seems, is quite
keen to help and to provide this timber, which obviously isn’t available in
Egypt, but the Patriarch, it appears, can’t even be bothered to write back.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Thus, I would propose that an important reason (not, for
clarity <i>the</i> reason, or the <i>most</i> important) for the end of any
significant market share for Mediterranean commodities is that final cultural turning
away of east and west after the mid-sixth century. This is a conclusion that
has some important bearings on the debate upon pre-modern economies, between ‘formalist’
and ‘substantivist’ positions.<o:p></o:p></p>Historian on the Edgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14069934072719158780noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7207265794297747910.post-3748765678229679552023-11-30T04:42:00.000-08:002023-11-30T04:42:11.860-08:00Reflections on 'The End of Western Antiquity': 3. The supposed ‘Rupture’ of the Ancient Mediterranean, Part 3<p style="text-align: justify;">In the third part of these reflections we finally enter the
territory of the Pirenne Thesis, and indeed of my project: the changes of the
late sixth and early seventh centuries.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Let’s recap. Around 530, in spite of all the developments
discussed last time, in spite of the socio-cultural dislocation that had been
going on since the third century, and in spite of the dramatic events of the
fifth, western Europe still thought of itself as part of the Roman Empire.
Trade and exchange still united the Mediterranean and some areas beyond. Commercial
networks reached round the western coasts of the Iberian Peninsula, and Gaul,
as far as the eastern shores (mainly) of the Irish Sea. These contacts made the
fifth and sixth centuries the period when the <i>Romanitas</i> of the western
highlands of Britain was most strongly asserted. An inscribed stone in North
Wales shows that those inhabitants of the region who were interested or cared
were still aware of who the current consul was.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Obviously, there had been cultural changes. By this date, in
most regions of the western Empire, villas had ceased to exist as such. Did
this mean an end of <i>Romanitas</i>? Clearly not. The idea that the end of the
villas reflected a conscious decision to reject Rome was one of the sillier and
most insular ideas (of many) to permeate British archaeology in the ‘90s and
‘00s. Only a few areas still had any significant number of villas (occupied
recognisably as villas) by the second quarter of the sixth century (notably the
south-west of Gaul, though a revival might have been under way in Italy) but
there was heavy investment (including on the site of former villas) in
Christianity and in other, new expressions of Roman-ness. As noted, westerners
still thought they were living in the Roman Empire. Further, a martial model of
masculinity had emerged in the late imperial period which, although
ostentatiously setting itself up as rejecting traditional aspects of civic
masculinity, was still very much a manifestation of a Roman identity and relied
on the existence of traditional ideas for its socio-political cachet. At the
start of the sixth century, both Theoderic the Ostrogoth and Clovis the Frank
allowed themselves to be addressed as <i>augustus</i>. This turned out to be
crucial, as we’ll see.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Let’s pause here, though to look again at the turning away
of the east from the west. Jeroen Wijnendaele recently reminded me of the point
made by R. Blockley that even in the fifth century, Eastern Roman writers had
started to refer to the inhabitants of the <i>Pars Occidentalis</i> as
‘Italians’ or ‘westerners’, while referring to themselves as Romans. Around the
middle of the sixth century, Cosmas Indicopleustes wrote his <i>Christian
Topography</i>. This, mostly, is concerned with his voyages, early in the
century, around the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, with famously valuable
accounts of various regions in and around that sea (whether or not he had
actually visited them). What I find interesting, though, is that, although
resident in Alexandria and writing about the nature of the world, Cosmas shows
pretty much no interest in the western Mediterranean. He knows it exists and
goes as far as Cádiz (not actually on the Mediterranean…) but that is about it.
One might of course argue that Cosmas’ own experience simply hadn’t taken him
that way, and that he was writing a Christian topography based, obviously on
the holy land, but that wouldn’t entirely negate my point. After all the Holy
Apostles (Peter and Paul) had headed westwards. At around the same time,
Procopius wrote his history of Justinian’s wars, the bulk of which concerns the
western Mediterranean. What strikes me about Procopius’ work is just how
remarkably badly informed about and/or interested in the west he is. His
ignorance about the geography of Gaul makes this abundantly clear. Even
educated easterners who had been in Italy knew or cared very little about
regions to the west. One might argue that Procopius, unlike, say, Ammianus,
never went further than Italy but my point is hardly altered by that fact. I
don’t think Ammianus ever went to Britain but the information he acquired
enabled him to write fairly reliable accounts of what happened there. Procopius’
comments about <i>Brittia</i> (<i>History of the Wars</i> 8.20), by contrast, resemble
traditional Graeco-Roman ethnography about the outermost regions of the world
rather than things that relate to a former imperial province. Even he thought
it sounded more like the sort of thing that you might dream and, for this
reason, he seems to have decided that they must relate to a different island
completely (<i>Brittia</i>, rather than <i>Britannia</i>[<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/Blog%20Posts/Reflections%20on%20EoWA%203.docx#_edn1" name="_ednref1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>]).
Procopius’ ignorance or lack of interest is part of a trend that is only
amplified in the Byzantine historians that follow him. While western writers
(like Fredegar for example) show an interest in news from the east, however
garbled it had become, there seems to be no reciprocation in historical works
written in the eastern empire.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Unsurprisingly, if you have been following my thoughts on
this stuff over the years, the crucial change seems to have been the new
ideology that emerged in Constantinople in around the 520s, usually associated
with Justinian (even if it appears earliest under his uncle and predecessor
Justin I). Possibly building – to a greater extent than I had realised (see
Blockley’s point about fifth-century vocabulary, above) – on attitudes that had
developed during the fifth-century, Justin or Justinian added the new – and significantly
different – point that the west was no longer even a part of the western
Empire, and (by the 530s) needed to be ‘reconquered’ by the Roman Empire. As I
have repeatedly argued, this cut away the bases of almost every traditional
idea about legitimate power or authority and caused people in the west to try
to find new bases of authority. As I see it, this put the cap on over a century
of shifting attitudes. Especially from Justinian’s reign, the West became lands
of barbarism and heresy, or at least of insufficiently rigorous orthodox
religious thinking. It’s a common mistake, however, to think that the West
somehow looked up to the eastern Empire in <i>imitatio imperii</i>.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/Blog%20Posts/Reflections%20on%20EoWA%203.docx#_edn2" name="_ednref2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[ii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
After Justinian, in the late sixth to eighth centuries at least, this seems
fundamentally mistaken. The west certainly reciprocated the east’s view of the other
as sullied by heresy. In Spain, Visigothic writers seem, if anything, to have
adopted an attitude of <i>translatio</i> [rather than <i>imitatio</i>] <i>imperii</i>
(see Jamie Wood’s work on this, in particular): a diametrically different
attitude. Chilperic of Neustria seems to have had a similar idea (Gregory, <i>Histories</i>
6.1). Otherwise, and probably most commonly, the touchstones used to justify
various aspects of social organisation unsurprisingly moved away from Rome,
especially towards the Old Testament, even if some of the general virtues etc
remained the same. By the early seventh century the old trading patterns between
the Mediterranean and the Irish Sea had died out, to be replaced by new ones
connecting the European Mainland, whether the Rhineland or the Bay of Biscay,
with lowland Britain as well as the western highlands, now both shores of the
Irish Sea, and the Scottish/Pictish north. Major changes were also under way in
the Mediterranean itself. We’ll return to this.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">What conclusions can we draw about the end of Mediterranean
unity by about 600? (Here there will be a little repetition from the last
article.) It seems to me to be important to note that, viewed from c.600, it
looks like the culmination of a process that, in social, political, and
economic terms, had begun as early as the 3<sup>rd</sup> century, had picked up
pace in the 4<sup>th</sup>, and taken on new cultural aspects in the 5<sup>th</sup>.
Justinian’s ideology and – especially – his wars can be said to have brought
this process to an end. As I said last time, however, it’s important to tread
carefully here. On the one hand, I think it’s probably a mistake to see this
development as ‘natural’ or ‘inevitable’ and to cite the point that, in
long-term perspective, the period of Mediterranean unity is rather more unusual
than periods when the east and west form generally separate spheres. Similarly,
Chris Wickham made the very good point that long-distance trade round the
Mediterranean shouldn’t be assumed to be <i>natural</i>, especially given that
most regions around the Mediterranean produce the same principal tradable
commodities (grain, oil, wine: the ‘Mediterranean trilogy’). While the
difficulties posed to communications or travel by physical geography shouldn’t
be underestimated, the idea that, somehow inevitably, they would eventually
undermine the features that had brought about unity seems to me to be too
crude. After all, the aspects of physical geography that facilitated ‘natural’
connectivity and communication (the sea, rivers, etc) remained just as much as
the ones that presented ‘natural’ barriers to the same (mountains – or indeed
rivers and the sea…). <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Second, and again this is a point that will surprise no one
who’s followed my thinking over the past 15 years or so, looking back from
c.600 gives a misleading sense of unidirectionality and teleology to the series
of events and their final outcome. All of the events I have talked about could
have been reversed; none was the only possible response to the situation
pertaining at the time; some of the political changes – as noted in the last
part of these thoughts – had beneficial aspects as well as, at least with
hindsight, negative ones in terms of Mediterranean unity; many had effects,
negative or positive, that were not deliberately intended. The narrative arc
mentioned at the start of the previous paragraph can be deconstructed (in the
proper sense) at every turn.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/Blog%20Posts/Reflections%20on%20EoWA%203.docx#_edn3" name="_ednref3" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[iii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The main point I want to stress, though this will really be
discussed in Part 4, is the importance of ideas, attitudes, and political
culture. With that in mind, I return to the core of the Pirenne Thesis:
economics. He generally rated Mediterranean unity according to the continuity
of the trading patterns that existed in the Roman period and so thought that
when (as he thought) Arab conquests and seaborne raids and piracy killed off
east-to-west trade that ruptured the unity of the Middle Sea. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Decades of sophisticated study of forms of evidence that
weren’t available to Pirenne (principally archaeological evidence of various
types) and of more refined study of the evidence that <i>was</i> available to
him, has modified some important aspects of his ‘thesis’ while leaving others
broadly in place. As we saw in Part 1 of these thoughts, the north-west of
Europe formed an economic sphere largely separate from the Roman Mediterranean
by the fourth century; on the other hand, the final demise of the eastern
Mediterranean economic sphere appears to take place at about the time of the
Arab conquests. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">A brief summary of my understanding of recent/ish thinking
on this might be helpful. There are very good discussions of the problems of
this evidence in Simon Loseby’s chapter on the Mediterranean economy in <i>The
New Cambridge Medieval </i>History Vol.2 (ed. Fouracre) and in the relevant
chapter of Chris Wickham’s <i>The Framing of the Early Middle Ages</i>. One
point I would emphasise though concerns the implications of distribution maps.
We might find an African amphora in Cornwall, or some African tableware in
Marseille. The implication of those places in networks is complex, however.
Roman law envisaged that a ship might be away from its home port for at least
two years (it enacted that it had to come home within two years), plying
different routes perhaps in different ways with different forms of cargo.
Material might move from A to B via several shorter hops involving different
people rather than just via one long-haul voyage from a place close to the
material’s production to one near its consumption. Commodities might be being
moved in ships that have little connection to the place where those commodities
were produced. It’s possible then that our distributions give misleading
impressions of connectivity and mask the nature of the networks, and possibly
conceal even more change than they reveal. For example, the general
distribution of African finewares between modern Tunisia, Italy, and the south
of France might look broadly similar between the fifth and seventh centuries,
even if declining in absolute numbers. Theoretically, however, it’s possible
that the fifth-century African pottery in Provence came more or less directly
from Carthage, in ships that stopped off at various points on the way, whereas sixth-century
African wares came via various entrepôts, ultimately being delivered, in short-haul
hops, in the ships of Italian merchants. Or vice versa.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">There had always been a difference between the eastern and
western halves of the Mediterranean (going back to the Bronze Age at least).
The Aegean is a sea of many islands facilitating a dense web of routes, while
Crete and Cyprus make handy staging posts for sailors travelling in several
directions. That said, in the late Roman period, the different regions formed
fairly distinct economic regions in many regards. A ‘tax-spine’ connected Egypt
and Constantinople. In the West, as intimated in Part 2, the west had also
fragmented into a number of economic regions, often quite large. This
fragmentation was related to the (generally cultural or socio-political) issues
that had eroded the unusual unity of the Mediterranean world by the third
century. The Carthage-to-Rome ‘tax spine’ mentioned earlier, certainly
dominated exchange between Africa and Italy, the far south of Gaul and the west
of the Iberian Peninsula, but it seems to have had rather less effect on other –
quite large – regions like central <i>Hispania</i> or the north of Gaul. There
were nevertheless general similarities between the two halves of the
Mediterranean world. The fundamental dominance of regional over interregional networks
is similar in both zones. The Egypt-to-Constantinople ‘tax spine’ shows some
similarities to the western Carthage-to-Rome spine, though it has been
suggested that it was less dominant (I think that this begs a number of
questions). Nonetheless, long-distance commerce around the Mediterranean
continued. African Red Slip (ARS) was found (in quantities that varied over
time) in the east, and Phocaean Red Slip (PRS) in the west. Other, less
archaeologically-visible commodities were also traded from east to west.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Differences seem to be more pronounced in the fifth and
sixth centuries. The east continued to be prosperous and the various links
between the regions remained. The connections between western regions decline
further. The extent of African commerce declines, though it continues to be the
most important axis of interregional commerce. On the other hand, as has
repeatedly been pointed out, African wares continue to reach the west of
Britain, possibly by more direct routes than before. These patterns continue
into the sixth century, but after the Eastern Roman reconquest there is a
revival of connections between Africa and the East. Trade nevertheless continues
between Africa and Italy, Provence and the regions further afield. What at
least seems to me to be under-appreciated is the preponderance, within the
sphere of African exports, of the imperial territories (not just in the east
but in Sicily, Rome, and other Italian regions). Stories suggest that in the
late sixth century, the west of Britain was still known in the east as a source
of tin. Some luxury products from the east continued to reach Gaul, via
Marseille (whether via intermediaries in Carthage and elsewhere is unknown).<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">All this changes in the seventh century. Some of the change
happens pretty quickly. The connections between the Mediterranean and the Irish
Sea generally fizzled out between the late sixth and early seventh century.
Analyses by Patrick Périn and Thomas Calligaro show that the supply of good
quality Sri Lankan garnets to the west also ended around 600. The demise of the
prosperous eastern Mediterranean regions and their interconnectivity collapsed
in a couple of generations in the mid-seventh century. African commerce to the
west struggled on to the end of the seventh century but not beyond. It cannot
be claimed that east-west commerce ended in absolute terms by 700 but it was
certainly only a shadow of its former self after that, reduced beyond
recognition in terms of quantity and the range of goods traded.<o:p></o:p></p>
<span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Explanations for these changes have
understandably concentrated upon issues such as production, supply and demand,
and on political change (the Vandals allegedly ending the Carthage-Rome ‘tax
spine’; the end of the imperial command economy; the Arab conquests). These
have been the result of close analysis and I certainly don’t intend to dismiss
them. What I want to ask, though, is whether they are the whole story. There
are a number of problems that arise in only looking at this issue either in
economic terms</span></div></span><div style="mso-element: endnote-list;"><!--[if !supportEndnotes]-->
<hr size="1" style="text-align: left;" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<div id="edn1" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/Blog%20Posts/Reflections%20on%20EoWA%203.docx#_ednref1" name="_edn1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
I open <i>EoWA</i> vol.1 (<i>The Fates of the Late Antique State</i>) with a
discussion of this.<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div id="edn2" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/Blog%20Posts/Reflections%20on%20EoWA%203.docx#_ednref2" name="_edn2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[ii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
I was once at a conference where a non-specialist asked a famous Byzantinist
about the relationship between Byzantine culture and the west, and the response
was that Byzantine culture was ‘a dominant culture’. This view seems widespread
even among some specialists on western European history, but it really lacks
any substantive empirical support, other than in the sense that that was indeed
what Byzantines thought. In this case I think it was one of those instances
where, in the same way that people say that people come to resemble their dogs,
historians come to resemble their subjects.<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div id="edn3" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/Blog%20Posts/Reflections%20on%20EoWA%203.docx#_ednref3" name="_edn3" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[iii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
In the last part I promised that I would speculate on whether the circumstances
that had brought about Mediterranean unity in the later Republican period could
have been reproduced. I am going to break that promise. Maybe at some point I
will write some ideas about that but not now. It’s not quite, but it verges on,
‘what if’ history, which I think is mostly ahistorical and intellectually no
more than an entertaining parlour game.<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
</div>Historian on the Edgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14069934072719158780noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7207265794297747910.post-92212161171791463662023-10-16T11:48:00.004-07:002023-11-30T04:41:49.628-08:00Reflections on 'The End of Western Antiquity': 2. The supposed ‘Rupture’ of the Ancient Mediterranean, Part 2<p><span style="text-align: justify;">In the previous post I was arguing, ultimately, that explaining ‘the end of Mediterranean unity’ is not a question of finding an ‘event’ that ruptured Mediterranean unity (the Arab conquests, Vandal Piracy, etc) as much as looking at why the features that had held it together earlier – and which had overcome those features that might militate against unity – came to an end. This post muses rather meanderingly on that issue.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Of course, it might be the case that some decisive event killed off the features that had unified the Mediterranean but there are two points that emerge from that possibility. One is that it seriously recasts the question, and the other is that what we might call structural features do not tend to be killed off by single dramatic events unless they’re already dying. As an example, look at towns ravaged by earthquakes, sacks by enemy armies, great fires, or plagues, but which continued to survive as successful urban centres.<o:p></o:p></p><h2 style="text-align: justify;"><span color="windowtext">How the Roman World came together<o:p></o:p></span></h2><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Let’s look first, briefly, at the features that held the Mediterranean World (and indeed the empire, loosely defined, as a whole) together in the earlier Roman period, and then at how these features came to an end. Above all, though the early Roman polity was created by conquest, it was held together by the desire of local communities to be part of the Roman world. This, as far as I can tell, not being a specialist in either Republican or early imperial history, worked differently, in detail at least, in the different parts of the empire (I am going to use that term, all in lower case, to cover the Republican as well as the imperial period). A point often forgotten, at least by us non-specialists in earlier Roman history, is that Rome conquered most of the eastern Mediterranean before it conquered the West. Roman military intervention in Greece began in the last decades of the third century (at the height of the second Punic War) and Greece was effectively conquered when the Romans sacked Corinth in 146 BC (the same year as the destruction of Carthage). By then, Rome controlled much of North Africa and the eastern half of Spain. Some of the Mediterranean coast of Gaul had taken place in 121BC but by the time Caesar began the conquest of further Gaul in 58 BC pretty much all of the Eastern Mediterranean – Macedonia, Greece, Asia Minor, the Levant, Tripolitania – had either been annexed or made into tributary states. The conquest of Marseille didn’t take place until 49 BC, the final conquest of Spain took place after the conquest of Egypt, and of course that of Britain even later. Even the conquest of northern Italy occurred after Roman claims to hegemony over Greece had been laid down.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">There are several key points that emerge from this. Possibly the most important is that in east and west (albeit in different ways) close cultural ties preceded military conquest. Though not a Greek colony, Rome was already a part of the Hellenistic world by the third century. Many of its rivals for domination in Italy were Greek colonies and the Republic had to fight and win a tough war against Pyrrhus, the king of Epirus, a cousin of Alexander the Great. Additionally, Rome bought into the Greek discourse about ‘barbarians’ in its political claims for domination (see, e.g., Emma Dench’s <i>From Barbarians to New Men</i><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/Blog%20Posts/Reflections%20on%20EoWA%202.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 15.6933px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>). All this meant – and this, it seems to me, is a very important point – that Rome <i>looked eastwards rather than westwards</i>. In some ways the Republic was drawn into military action in the eastern Mediterranean and that leads to a third point, which is that Rome exploited regional rivalries to play contenders off against each other. It did this everywhere and even in the late Empire it remained a key strategy beyond the frontiers.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">That brings us to the issue of military dominance. I don’t want to dwell too long on this but once upon a time, in military historical circles, there was long discussion about the somehow inherent supremacy of the Roman legionary ‘system’ over the Macedonian/Hellenistic phalanx. This sort of discussion rapidly leaves the realm of historical argument (and indeed, in my view, that of history full stop) and enters that of hypotheticals and counter-factuals – ah, but what if the Macedonians had had a general as good as Alexander? What if this or that factor had not applied? Yeah, what if…? The significant point is that for some reason or other, the Romans do seem to have had a long run of military success against the Hellenistic states (although of course it's worth remembering that the evidence we have is hardly even-handed). The simple fact of being an army that fought regularly and usually won very likely (in my view) had an incalculable effect upon the confidence, morale, and fighting spirit of veteran Roman troops, while repeated defeats possibly had an equal and opposite effect on their enemies. This would be the case regardless of the ‘tactical system’ being used. Certainly, above all, it increased the attraction of allying with, or subscribing to the protection of, Rome. This was the case,<i> a fortiori</i>, in the west, where Roman armies must have outnumbered, ‘out-armoured’, and ‘out-equipped’ their ‘barbarian’ enemies, in addition to having better logistics, heavy siege weapons and so on (Roman accounts of Gallic or Germanic armies numbering many tens of thousands are simply incredible); this fact needs to be internalised when thinking about Roman wars, and indeed the quality of the Roman army, in the West (after all, sometimes they lost…). The ‘bottom line’ was that Roman military success made Roman support or protection worth having and that meant that some communities turned to Rome and drew it further into local rivalries.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">In the West, communities in Gaul, Britain and Germania were already linked into Roman cultural orbit before they were conquered. Objects from the Roman world <a name="_Int_cYoN9QNH">were</a> deployed to display status and prestige and drew people into Rome’s sphere of influence (see Greg Wolf’s <i>Becoming Roman</i><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/Blog%20Posts/Reflections%20on%20EoWA%202.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 15.6933px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>). This continued after conquest when people within local communities competed for standing (after being demilitarised and having their more warlike elements hived off into the <i>auxilia</i>: see Ian Haynes’ work on this, especially: e.g. <i>Blood of the Provinces</i>) by displaying their ‘Roman-ness’ in new Roman-style towns, villas and so on, and above all by seeking status through involvement in local government. These features seem to have been far less significant in the East (where after all it was more a case of the Romans being drawn to Hellenistic culture, something topped up, in the late first and early second century especially, with the Roman attraction to the Greek culture of the ‘second sophistic’) but they were not absent. A few towns even built amphitheatres... Competition between for communities, played out by striving for the advantages of particular legal status, within the Roman system, remained an important element of local or regional politics even into the late imperial period, and even beyond.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The features sketched out created an exceptional situation, as mentioned, where the west and north-west were drawn into a Mediterranean world and where that world was itself unified by constant reference, in local and regional politics, to Rome and its rulers. Eventually I will come back to the issue of whether this situation was repeatable. For now, let’s examine what happened when these circumstances no longer pertained.<o:p></o:p></p><h2 style="text-align: justify;"><span color="windowtext">The fracturing of the early Roman world</span><o:p></o:p></h2><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">By the third century, if not slightly earlier, many of the factors that had led to unity no longer applied. The products that, in the West at least, had been used to signal participation in the Roman world were by then mostly being manufactured regionally rather than being imported from Mediterranean centres. Economically the western half of the empire went back to being a series of largely independent regional economic networks. Possibly more importantly, the political advantages gained by involvement in, and financial expenditure on, local government, monumental works and so on, were generally no longer brought by this sort of activity. Parts of the west had been over-urbanised in the rush to become Roman. A retreat from this high-point followed. When the Antonine Constitution made all free-born inhabitants citizens, Roman citizenship was no longer something to be competed for. In this situation, in some ways the ‘<a name="_Int_362QfwU4">crisis’</a> of the third century was always going to be on the cards. <a name="_Int_mW3ACsWg">However</a> one adds nuance to old views of the ‘third-century crisis’ (it wasn’t as bad everywhere, and not at all on some regions; it didn’t last as long, or occur at the same time everywhere, etc), this was a serious moment. The Palmyrene and Gallic Empires showed that the notion that there might be multiple ‘Roman Empires’ was not seen as entirely alien. With a few different conjunctures the Empire could have fragmented in the third century. One feature that helped ensure that this didn’t happen, as I suggested in <i>Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West</i>, was the continuing hegemony of the notion of Roman ‘civic masculinity’. There were as yet no real alternatives to that in establishing legitimate power at a regional, local, or even familial level. What this meant was a continued relevance of some of the aspects of ‘being Roman’ that had brought the Roman world together. This was a crucial resource and a glue that still held that world together. Again, note that the crucial issue here is one of mentalité.<o:p></o:p></p><h2 style="text-align: justify;"><span color="windowtext">Responses and problems<o:p></o:p></span></h2><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">As it happened, of course, the Empire did not fall apart and responded effectively to the changes that had threatened fragmentation. Obviously, much of this response was pragmatic and piecemeal and effected over a long time, rather than being the result of the imperial rulers sitting down with their advisors one day and formulating a coherent set of policies. Nonetheless, the Empire as it emerged at the end of the Tetrarchy was a very different place from that which had existed 100 or 150 years earlier.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Various responses, changes, and developments – administrative reform; the emergence of a new civil bureaucracy; the separation of civil and military branches of service; new forms of aristocracy and rewards for service; new capitals; moving the emperor to the frontier – all produced an Empire that was as strong as it had been in the second century and remained so, in the West, for a century (and longer in the East). All these developments, though, had corresponding weaknesses. The picture that follows is broad-brush and (over-)simplified, as well as almost certainly needing updating, but it and – more importantly – the issues it raises still seem to me to be generally valid, in outline at any rate.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The foundation of Constantinople created a focus for the eastern provinces (pinning the Balkans to and Greece to Asia Minor and the Levant, etc) and thus increased the coherence of the East (and continued to do so in some ways well beyond the Arab conquests and into the middle Byzantine period; I am thinking here of John Haldon’s argument that the seventh-century Empire functioned effectively as one huge city state<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/Blog%20Posts/Reflections%20on%20EoWA%202.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 15.6933px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>) it created a separate, alternative, eastern pole of attraction. The fact that it was a new foundation had important advantages but it also meant a crucial reorganization of fiscal resources. The Egyptian grain fleet was now diverted to the Bosphorus. As I see it, this made for a more significant rearrangement of existing economic ties and networks than would perhaps have been the case had the emperors decided upon, say, Antioch as the central point of the East.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Moving the western capital to frontier cities, above all Trier, was pragmatically a very effective move. It bound Gaul, most importantly, but also other frontier regions tightly into the imperial state. Older nobilities had to travel to the north to compete for imperial patronage in order to maintain their traditional aristocratic culture of <i>otium</i> and <i>negotium</i>. At the same time, though, it seems to have created a certain resentment among those traditional elites, not used to being sidelined. By early in the fifth century the Gallic and Italian aristocracies largely formed separate networks and this, as I see it, became a crucial feature to be overcome in fifth-century politics. Gratian’s move of the capital back to Milan in 380 was also, in my view, crucial. Though, as I look at it now – 16 years on from <i>Barbarian Migrations</i> – it seems like a potentially imaginative response to the emerging problems of the fourth century western Empire,<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/Blog%20Posts/Reflections%20on%20EoWA%202.docx#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 15.6933px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> as it turned out it precipitated crisis. It removed most of the Gallic and Germanic provinces, and Britain, from the close connection with the Emperor to which they had become accustomed; stress and usurpation soon followed.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">With the emperors in the west hardly ever resident in Rome, the Empire now had two very separate political centres or foci for political activity. Indeed, the end of the <i>de facto</i> political (rather than ideological) centrality of Rome itself helped unpick the ties that had bound the eastern and western worlds together. The two halves of the Empire began to face in different directions. The social and cultural contacts between east and west began to reduce (which is, obviously, not to say that they ended or became insignificant). I also have an impression (rightly or wrongly) that, after the early fifth century, the direction of those links that remained very much tended to be west to east.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Similarly, though it was an effective response to the problems of the third century, the separation of civil and military branches of imperial service, led to the emergence of an alternative, martial or military model of Roman masculinity, one that stressed things that were antithetical to civic masculinity. This would turn out to provide a political resource for those outside the ambit of the legitimate imperial government in the fifth century: one that hadn’t existed in the third century. Another alternative was found in Christian models of masculinity, not least those stressing asceticism and renunciation. (I have a feeling that the disputes within Christianity also helped divide east and west.)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">A key point is that although the new system worked well for a century in the west (and for longer in the east), it was, at least in the west, fundamentally fragile. It worked very well as long as there was an adult emperor able to command armies and manage the distribution and redistribution of patronage (offices etc) between the various interest groups within the Empire. There were numerous groups, especially <a name="_Int_5ExkC3uE">regionally-focused</a> ones, whose interests needed to be balanced. In <i>Barbarian Migrations </i>I appeared to think that this was a peculiarly late Roman weakness; clearly it wasn’t but the problem does still seem to me to have a distinctive flavour in the late period. Without an active, adult emperor, the focus of politics would turn inwards on the palace itself and efforts to maintain the governing faction’s position. The legitimate western Emperor was a child (or adolescent) for twenty years after 383 leading to internecine struggles for control of the palace and repeated usurpations.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">That leads me to my next point. The West was riven by repeated civil wars between 383 and 425. The importance of this can’t be overstressed. The Romans had massive reserves of manpower, of course, but what was lost in these battles was the cutting edge of the Roman army: troops who could be replaced in quantity but not quality. The wars followed at such regularity, moreover, that there was hardly time for a new army to be built up and recover its effectiveness and esprit de corps before it was fighting other Roman armies again and suffering heavy losses even if it won. It was these wars, not the Great Invasion of 406 – which seems not to have involved any serious defeat of a Roman field army – that fatally weakened the Western Empire’s army, leading to the creation of new types of army, based around the groups of barbarian descent that were now within the imperial frontiers.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i>On the other hand</i>, all of this wasn’t irreversible. After 425, the lesson learnt after 40 years of failed usurpations seemed to be that dynastic succession trumped everything else. For the next decade the western empire had a minor on the throne but the nature of politics changed away from attempted usurpation to struggles to control the court, which could potentially act as a cohesive force.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/Blog%20Posts/Reflections%20on%20EoWA%202.docx#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 15.6933px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Nevertheless, and unsurprisingly, when the Valentinianic/Theodosian dynasty came to an end with the assassination of the (like Honorius) possibly underestimated Valentinian III in 455 (a date later given significance by Marcellinus Comes as that of the end of the western Empire) the lack of such legitimacy proved fatal for all the different emperors and their backers. None could defeat the others decisively or otherwise persuade them to submit to their authority.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">And yet … two things:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">First, people in the west still thought they were part of the Roman world, indeed of the Roman <i>Empire</i>, beyond 480 and on into the 6<sup>th</sup> century. After 476, if Candidus the Isaurian is to be believed, embassies from Gaul still reached the emperor in Constantinople asking him to resolve western disputes. Western kings still based the legitimacy of their claims to rule on their Roman titles.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Second, through the period cultural connections remained. Traders still sailed the length and breadth of the Mediterranean after the end of the western imperial command economy, demonstrating that, as more recent work has argued, that the latter was not the only force to determine continued commercial and exchange connections. Indeed, as the increasing connections round into the eastern shores of the Irish Sea show, those who were involved in commerce could still adapt to changing circumstances. A key factor here might be the fact that those links became very important to western British leaders responding to the crisis of the fifth century. Like their predecessors, centuries earlier, it mattered to them to be connected to the Roman Mediterranean.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">So – where (if anywhere) have we got to? A few key points:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span><!--[endif]-->Cultural networks seem to me to be vitally important. Rome looked eastwards because of the cultural world it had become part of; the western expansion of Rome was very much driven by cultural relationships.</li><li><span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span><!--[endif]-->The expansion of Roman power relied as much upon local and regional groups buying into Roman protection and or Roman culture as upon simple conquest.</li><li><span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span><!--[endif]-->Ideas and culture remained crucial in maintaining the cohesion of the Roman world throughout the period discussed (from say 200 BC to 500 AD).</li><li><span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span><!--[endif]-->Political history, economic history, and the history of culture, ideas and mentalité do not always run on parallel tracks. Events in the first do not always have effects in the others; changes in the other areas do not always have political consequences.</li><li><span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span><!--[endif]-->Physical geography – seas, tides, currents, the direction of rivers, the location of mountain ranges, high plâteaux, forests, etc – do tend to bind or separate regions but, while extremely important we should not (<i>pace</i>, maybe, Halsall 2007) regard this as naturally, or automatically, determinant, and certainly not as insurmountable. Mountains can be barriers, but passes are links and thoroughfares; seas and rivers connect <i>and</i> divide. None of this is new. We should not assume that the cultural features that overcome certain aspects of physical geographical constraints cannot themselves come to be seen as just as ‘natural’. After all, why would Rome, a city state on the western coast of Italy, look east, especially given the difficulties of navigation between Rome and the eastern Mediterranean?</li><li><span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span><!--[endif]-->We might then, equally, suppose that when physical geography does (as I put it – and I am now wondering whether this wasn’t considerably oversimplistic) ‘rear its ugly head’ and connections between regions weaken or end, this might be just as much a cultural response, a decision rather than the inevitable triumph of nature and geography over mentalité (<i>spoiler alert</i>: this will be crucial to my argument next time).</li><li><span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span><!--[endif]-->Key events or developments are contingent upon the circumstances that created them. We ought not to see them as automatic, or that the results they had were those that the actors involved had in mind (the piecemeal imperial response to the failings of local government and their overall result might be a case in point).</li><li><span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span><!--[endif]-->Nor do we have to assume that the strategies that were adopted, and which worked, or the features that tended in a particular direction, were (even in the case of strategies or policies followed consciously) automatically the best, or the only ones that could have had that outcome. As Roman history shows quite clearly, there are various ways in which the supposedly determinant features of physical geography could be and were overcome. There were always different paths that could have ended up being followed.</li><li><span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span>Hand-in-hand with that, just as particular effects might not be the result of deliberate policies or strategies achieving their goals, and that even beneficial long-term results might not have been those actually intended (or conceived), none of the developments I have been considering seems to me to have been irreversible. [I think that none of the last three points will be surprising to anyone who has followed my work over the last 25 years at least.]</li></ol><!--[if !supportLists]--><o:p></o:p><p></p><p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">Having proposed all this, we are – I hope – now in a position to have another look at what <i>did</i> happen in the later sixth and early seventh century and possibly even to suggest a slightly different take on it.<o:p></o:p></p><p></p><div><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><h2 style="text-align: left;">Notes</h2><hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><!--[endif]--><div id="ftn1"><p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/Blog%20Posts/Reflections%20on%20EoWA%202.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> It occurs to me that several of the works I allude to in this piece are 20-30 years old. This is essentially because I haven’t thought much about the issues they discuss for over a decade. That said, they’re good books and the general points they make, and to which I refer, seem to be good ones. Clearly, if I was doing anything more serious, I would need to get up to date.<o:p></o:p></p></div><div id="ftn2"><p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/Blog%20Posts/Reflections%20on%20EoWA%202.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> See note 1.<o:p></o:p></p></div><div id="ftn3"><p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/Blog%20Posts/Reflections%20on%20EoWA%202.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> See note 1.<o:p></o:p></p></div><div id="ftn4"><p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/Blog%20Posts/Reflections%20on%20EoWA%202.docx#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> I might write a separate post speculating on this.<o:p></o:p></p></div><div id="ftn5"><p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/Blog%20Posts/Reflections%20on%20EoWA%202.docx#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> This after all is the argument usually deployed with regard to later seventh-century Francia.</p></div></div>Historian on the Edgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14069934072719158780noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7207265794297747910.post-77546412390645668102023-10-04T06:43:00.004-07:002023-10-16T11:43:24.990-07:00Reflections on 'The End of Western Antiquity': 1. The supposed ‘Rupture’ of the Mediterranean World, Part 1<p> </p><h2 style="text-align: justify;">Re-cap</h2><h1><o:p></o:p></h1><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Readers of this blog will be all-too-wearily aware that I have been working on the changes that took place in western Europe between 550 and 650 for well over a decade, since I received a Leverhulme fellowship for a project called ‘The Transformations of the Year 600’ in 2009. What I thought the final outcome of that would be has been through many versions but I currently envisage it as a trilogy, whether formally as volumes 1, 2, and 3 or as three ‘companion volumes’ will depend upon the decisions of publishers (if any publisher will take it of course!). The volumes themselves are: <i>The Fates of the Late Antique State</i> (politics and government), <i>The Transformations of the Year 600</i> (society and economics), and <i>The End of the Roman World</i> (ideas). I have about 90,000 words of <i>The Fates of the Late Antique State</i> written (in draft) and rather less of the other two. What I thought I would do on this near-dead blog is to write up some reflections on the subject matter: things that won’t necessarily make it into the book in any solid form – maybe the odd comment here and there but probably not a block of text and possibly nothing at all – in the hope that it might be of interest and as a spur to me to keep at it, which has not been easy. My never-exactly-robust mental health has taken a profound battering over the past three years (to cut a long story short I lost my mind) with the result that I am leaving the profession in November. In some regards, then, these blog posts are a message to myself that I possibly still have things to say and that it might yet be worth finishing this project. Believe me, many are the days when I don’t agree with either of those propositions. I am not sure that these reflections are going to be particularly profound or original but they seem to me to be of some significance.<o:p></o:p></p><h2 style="text-align: justify;">The rupture of the Mediterranean’s ‘natural’ unity</h2><h1><o:p></o:p></h1><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">One thing that keeps coming back in the course of thinking about this project (and about a possible second edition of <i>Barbarian Migrations</i>) is just how profoundly <i>unusual</i> the period between the late Roman Republic and the third century was. This was a period when:</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"></p><ul><li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">The whole Mediterranean littoral was under the control of the same polity. </span></li><li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">A coherent economic system united the western Mediterranean/western European world.</span><span style="font-family: Symbol; text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span></li><li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">Consequently, the north west of Europe was part of the same economic network as the Mediterranean world</span></li></ul><p></p><p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: -18pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: -18pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: -18pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">What I find interesting is how at some point historians have come to regard all of these things as a norm. Thus we find people – from Pirenne onwards – discussing the end of Mediterranean unity or the separation of north-western Europe from the western Mediterranean as historical problems. Famously, Pirenne sought an explanation of the ‘rupture’ of the Mediterranean World and the ‘turning in on itself’ of North-Western Europe in the Arab Conquests. The Pirenne Thesis produced perhaps 60 years of debate, during which people questioned the chronology for the end of Mediterranean unity, or proposed new causes for its end. Indeed, another of the great historical works of the last century, Braudel’s <i>The</i> <i>Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II</i> discussed the ‘Middle Sea’ and the regions that bounded it as forming a historical unit. This too set in train a long and important historiographical debate or set of debates and a much larger corpus of work on <i>the</i> Mediterranean.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Yet, in any sort of long-term perspective, the fundamental separation of the western and eastern Mediterranean worlds, or that of the north-west from the south, are really the normal state of affairs. Reading Cyprian Broodbank’s <i>The Making of the Middle Sea</i> brings home the point that the eastern and western Mediterranean were fundamentally very different theatres of social, political and economic activity. The Eastern Mediterranean acts as a link and thoroughfare connecting the north-east of Africa, the south-east of Europe and parts of western Asia (Asia Minor, the Levant). All of these links bound these regions to each other, for centuries, in a web of relationships far denser than those that connected the south-east of Europe with the regions to its west. That is important in itself when one thinks about the fluctuating and inchoate – but politically important – notion of ‘Europe’ (let alone The West). Indeed, the way in which Egypt (and the eastern parts of Libya) was a part of this world throws a similar light on this issue.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Before going further with that we should ask which of these issues really concerns the ‘Year 600’? The separation of the east from the west had been on-going since the third century, and the same is true, or even more so, of the separation of the north-west from the western Mediterranean littoral. Nonetheless something significant did happen in the 6<sup>th</sup> century, especially in its later half. Western Europe simply drops off the radar of writers in the East, and changes in trade and commerce emphasise the separation of the two halves of the Mediterranean (Pirenne was correct to notice that, even with the limited data at his disposal, but the chronology is too early for the Arab Conquests to be the cause).<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Looking at these issues in the long term thus sheds a rather different light upon them and that does in some ways compel a rethink of what we might think of as the historian’s agenda. Are we looking at things the wrong way round? You could argue that it’s not the rupture of the Mediterranean that is the great historical problem requiring explanation – explanation frequently in terms of dramatic politico-military events – but the creation of Mediterranean unity, or of connections between the north-west of Europe and the regions to its south, in the first place.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">What are the implications of that conclusion, though? Is it an argument in favour of the of ‘longue durée’ approach? People familiar with my work since 1995 will know I have serious reservations about the ‘longue durée’, but nevertheless the way viewing problems in the long term can recast what I just called the historian’s agenda does seem like a powerful argument in its favour. For that reason taking a long view ought to be a part of at least shaping the questions we think are important, and why. It can shed an important light on issues of causation, or causal factors. The problem, for me, is that if we are not careful about what we do with such a perspective it can imply a sort of determinism or inevitability about change through time. That, I remain profoundly opposed to. Things are much more random and unpredictable than that. Further, if such structural features can be overcome at particular points of history, then they can’t be assumed to be naturally determinant. On the other hand, though, if it can be argued that what happened between, say, c.250 and c.650 was just physical geography rearing its ugly head, then do we need to look for decisive politico-military actions to hang causation on?<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Structural features are important. It is important to isolate what these were, specifically, and in context, rather than just assuming them to be natural, extrapolating them from long-term description, or just assuming them on ‘first principles’. What were the long-term structural issues with regard to the West’s separation from the East, or in north-west Europe’s separation from the western Mediterranean? I will try to put some thoughts together on this for the next instalment.</p>Historian on the Edgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14069934072719158780noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7207265794297747910.post-81185119752455702132022-12-15T08:48:00.001-08:002022-12-15T08:48:22.728-08:00Professor Grumpy's tips on how to write a lecture quickly (not counting PowerPoint)<p> <b style="text-align: justify;">Don’t</b><span style="text-align: justify;"> </span><span style="text-align: justify;">write a script that will take you 50 minutes to read out: this will be far too much information for the students to take in</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b>1</b>: Decide upon the <b>four</b> things you want your students to know about at the end of the lecture. Add Introduction and Conclusion<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b>2</b>. Make those your four main sections and assign ten minutes to each of them. Put those on the left indent of your page. (make a power-point of the section title)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b>3</b>: Are there key sub-divisions of those areas? If so, divide up your 10 minute- sections accordingly. If not, no worries. Put sub-sections 1 tab indent in from the left hand margin<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b>4</b>: Divide up your 10 minute section (or small sub-section) into the key things that a (say) term 4 student <u>needs to know</u> about. Think of at most one per minute. Write down each basic point 2 tab indents in from the left margin.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b>5</b>: Will they need illustrations? If so how many (max) will make the point effectively? Remember students will look at illustrations to take them in, so key that into your timing calculations<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b>6</b>: By now the first bits of your lecture should look something like this (use the Word formats for Heading, Heading 1, Heading 2 etc if this will make your notes easier to read and keep track of):<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Intro<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Main Section 1<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Sub-section of main section 1.1<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Point<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Point<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Point<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Point<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Point<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Sub-section of main section 1.2<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Point<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Point<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Point<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Point<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Main Section 2<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Sub-section of main section 2.1<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Etc.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I call this a ‘dendritic’ lecture plan because it branches out like a tree<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b>7.</b> For each point jot down what it is that you want to say. If you have a quotation or a reference that you need to read, put that here (or alternatively on a new line indented by three tabs).<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b>8.</b> Write a conclusion (5 mins) that sums up the issues you wanted to put across, and sets up the next lecture – use the same scheme as above if you like.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b>9.</b> Write an intro (5 mins) that sets the scene for the lecture, why the topic matters/is important for the course, tells the students what you’re going to talk about. PowerPoint with the 4 main sub-headings. Talk them through it.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b>10.</b> I find that the intro (esp) and conclusion are sometimes the bits that I do want to write out in full, so that I can get the students’ attention, and be clearer and less ‘ummy-and-ahhy’, and have some memorable phrases that they can take away.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b>11.</b> Once you have that you have 50-minute lecture.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b>12.</b> Keep your eye on time when you give the lecture, and compare where you are with where you ought to be<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b>13.</b> If, when you give the lecture, you find you have spent too long on a section, you can make up the time by speeding up a bit in the next sections, this is easier done with these bare-bones notes than with a full text.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b>14.</b> If on the other hand you find you’re going too quickly, <b>recap</b>. Sum up you sections, sub-sections, points even. Introduce your sub-sections and why they matter. No student ever complained about that. True story: once I had so much on that I had no time at all to prepare a lecture I’d never given before (or not in that form anyway) – <u>do not get yourself into this situation</u> – I only had time (like 5-10 minutes beforehand) to write down some key headers. So I spoke slowly and hammered each point home, re-capping, stringing things out. All the while I was thinking ‘my god, this is a disaster’. At the end the students all said, ‘that was such a good lecture tonight [this was when I was at Birkbeck] Guy – it was really clear and helpful.’ As I said, don’t get yourself into that situation (on the other hand, it did kill off the anxiety dreams about unprepared lectures...) but it makes my point about recapping and underlining points never being a bad thing.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b>15.</b> You can get a lecture text much more quickly this way, one that allows more flexibility and more engagement and which spells out and gets over the main points that you want the students to get.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b>16.</b> Now you can structure you PowerPoint around your plan. Time saved on text means you have time to make your PowerPoint better. Have a power-point for each sub-section at least, that maps the content (the points) of what you’re going to talk about. A power-point slide per point can help as an aide-memoire and perhaps put up other supplementary information.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><b>17</b>. Power-point: Remember that students stop and read all of the text on a PowerPoint slide even if you tell them not to, so don’t overload slides with text and if you have a long quotation on one, go through it with them.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p>Historian on the Edgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14069934072719158780noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7207265794297747910.post-80441298467727582992022-12-15T08:40:00.004-08:002022-12-15T09:41:47.457-08:00Archaeology, History and Bad Science: A critique of the analysis of DNA at Szólád (Hungary) and Collegno (Italy). Part 3 (Conclusions)<h2 style="text-align: left;"><span color="windowtext">Conclusions</span></h2>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">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:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoQuote" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span color="windowtext" lang="EN-GB" style="font-style: normal;">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[<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>])
is as yet unclear.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">Towards the start of the article we read:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoQuote" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span color="windowtext" lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit; font-style: normal;">We note that we are not
aiming to infer Lombard ethnicity, which is a subjective identity.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">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 <i>not</i> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-GB">But what, if anything, <i>has</i> been shown? </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">explain</i> the use of those rites. The
association between the furnished inhumation burial rite and ‘Germanic’
ethnicity has absolutely no <i>prima facie</i> 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’.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> That cannot be stressed
strongly enough. If repeated aDNA studies reveal that furnished inhumation was
generally employed by incoming groups from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Germania
Magna</i>, that will demonstrate that this old assumption was the luckiest
guess in the history of archaeology! It will not, however, <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">explain <i>why</i></span> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">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.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> 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?<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Some of the areas from
which the alleged newcomers might have come, according to the genetic evidence,
lie <i>inside</i> the Empire. All these possibilities are entirely consistent
with the experiment’s results.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">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.’<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> 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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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 <i>not</i> been excluded by the
experiment. There is actually very little that <i>is</i> ruled out by this
experiment. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Let us suppose, though, that in spite of all my
misgivings the analyses <i>had</i> 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
<i>would</i> 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<i> </i>what they might be
saying about a broader and more interesting range of topics. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Barbaricum</i>)
– 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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br clear="all" /></span></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><hr size="1" style="text-align: left;" width="33%" /><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><div style="mso-element: footnote-list; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->
<!--[endif]-->
</span><div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> Why ‘barbarian’?<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> Amorim <i>et al.</i> ‘Understanding’, p.8.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
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<div id="ftn3" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> Amorim <i>et al.</i> ‘Understanding’, p.2.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
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<div id="ftn4" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> I. Barbiera, ‘Remembering the Warriors: Weapon Burials and
Tombstones between Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages in Northern Italy’, in <i>Post-Roman
Transitions: Christian and Barbarian Identities in the Early Medieval West</i>,
ed. W. Pohl & G. Heydemann (Turnhout, 2013), pp.407-35.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
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<div id="ftn5" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> Amorim <i>et al.</i>, ‘Understanding’, fig 2a, 2b.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
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<div id="ftn6" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> As is famously recorded in Eugippius’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Life of Severinus.</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Life of
Severinus: Eugippius. The Life of St. Severin, </i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">trans. Bieler, L., (Washington, 1965).</span><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
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<div id="ftn7" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit; mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Amorim <i>et al.</i> ‘Understanding’, p.9.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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</div>Historian on the Edgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14069934072719158780noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7207265794297747910.post-263682435427044832022-12-15T08:37:00.010-08:002022-12-21T02:44:28.013-08:00Archaeology, History and Bad Science: A critique of the analysis of DNA at Szólád (Hungary) and Collegno (Italy). Part 2 (Method; Results).<h2><span color="windowtext" lang="EN-GB">Method</span></h2><p style="text-align: justify;">Imagine a historical study that claimed that a general north-south division was visible in, for the sake of argument, the prologues of medieval charters and that this model had predictive value, such that the geographical origin of a charter could be accurately discerned from the sequence, appearance, or non-appearance of particular phrases. This would be quite an assertion, if not necessarily implausible. Imagine, however, that this model had been constructed from a sample of no fewer than 2,233 charters from Switzerland and southern Europe but of only 179 from northern Europe. The claim would – at best – be regarded as shaky. Yet, the geographical distribution of the modern DNA samples against which the aDNA extracted at Szólád and Collegno were compared takes exactly this form. The POPRES (POPulation REference Sample) data base,<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn1">[1]</a> the largest of those used to establish the distribution of genetic types across modern Europe, contains 1349 subjects from Switzerland, 599 from the United Kingdom, 147 from France, 131 Portuguese subjects, 114 from Italy and 92 from Spain. For the variable ‘Country of Father’, the uneven distribution was skewed further: 1,404 samples from Switzerland, 310 from Italy, 184 from Spain, 177 from France and 158 from Portugal, compared with 91 from Germany, 50 from Belgium and 38 from England.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn2">[2]</a> That latter pattern was repeated across the other country of parent or grandparent variables. Every other nation represented, and from which regional characteristics were constructed, contained a few dozen individuals at most. Remember, too, that that the Swiss and southern European subjects were drawn from a population of 193.185 million people: they represented, in other words, just over a thousandth of one percent of the modern population. Even the largest sample, which happened to be taken from the smallest population (that of Switzerland), represents only a hundredth of 1% of the latter. The whole POPRES reference population totals only 5,886 subjects reduced, after quality-control procedures, to 3,082. These are infinitesimally small samples.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br />The POPRES data was compiled from ten collections with the overall aim of providing useful material ‘for population, disease, and pharmacological genetics research’.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn3">[3]</a> Its UK data came overwhelmingly from a sample of 431 South Asian and 938 Northern European subjects, aged between thirty-five and seventy-five, collected from fifty-eight GPs in west London for the purposes of research into cardiovascular illness. The largest population (2,809 subjects) was assembled from the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois in Lausanne (hence the dominance of Swiss and southern European samples). Other collections included only healthy subjects. Much of the European genetic data was assembled from the declarations of US, Canadian and Australian subjects of their paternal and maternal ancestry. According to the publication of the POPRES project, ‘[t]he second round of quality control included further PCA [Principal Components Analysis] to identify subjects with ... misreported genetic ancestry’.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn4">[4]</a> What this means is unclear but it gives the impression that ‘misreporting’ was established upon the basis of perceived statistical anomaly. Another statement of method is worth quoting in full:<br /></p><blockquote>Based on this information, we first attributed a best-guess geographic label to each of the family members based on the following rules: 1) missing data was ignored; 2) if ethnicity conflicted with birthplace or first language data, only ethnicity was considered; 3) if birthplace and first language disagreed, a higher level container label was chosen (e.g. an individual who was born in France but reported his first language to be Norwegian was labeled European); and 4) white individuals born in the US or Canada were attributed according to the first language information alone, if other than English.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn5">[5]</a></blockquote><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Such methods and assumptions may be fair enough, especially for the purposes for which the database was assembled, but they might all be subject to discussion if employed to study historical population movement and ethnicity: not a purpose for which the data were collected. Furthermore, there are serious differences in the reliability of these data between their use at the level of population and their employment at the level of individuals.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn6">[6]</a></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br />The other reference populations were smaller than the POPRES sample.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn7">[7]</a> The ‘1000 Genome Project’, from which the genetic ancestry of the Szólád-Collegno individuals was estimated, used populations of only 100-200 subjects.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn8">[8]</a> Those that were most significant in the discussion of the results were ‘Central Europeans in Utah’ (CEU: 184 samples); ‘Toscani’ project (TSI, from a small town near Florence: 117 samples); Great Britain (GBR: 107 samples); and ‘Iberians in Spain’ (IBS: 162 samples). Statistically we are looking at fragments of droplets in oceans.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br />The small modern DNA sample was compared with a still smaller (435 subjects)<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn9">[9]</a> sample of aDNA collected from archaeologically-recovered skeletons of Bronze Age date ‘or more recent’<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn10">[10]</a> and the conclusion drawn that, over the past three and a half millennia in Europe, there has been only the barest drift of population, generally to the south.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn11">[11]</a> It is significant, however, that the distribution of the Bronze Age sample was almost the diametrical opposite of that of the modern reference population: ninety-three subjects from north of the Alps (mostly from Germany), compared with thirty-three from south of the mountains (including only four from Italy).<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn12">[12]</a> Some areas heavily represented in the modern sample (Switzerland; France, the UK) featured barely or not at all in the Bronze Age reference set. We have no idea what the population of Bronze Age northern Europe was but one imagines that eighty-eight would be a small fraction of one percent of it. This should raise all sorts of red flags. On this statistical basis, the claims made by Amorim and his fellow authors are, to be generous, bold indeed.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br />The kindreds were illustrated through a comparison of their genetic ancestry, expressed in terms of the admixture of seven types, of which the most important were labelled ‘CEU+GBR’, ‘TSI’ and ‘IBS’ (see above). It might seem fair to refer to ‘CEU+GBR’ as ‘northern’ and ‘TSI’ and ‘IBS’ as ‘southern’. It should be noted though that the analyses of the aDNA were incapable of clearly separating ‘GBR’ and ‘CEU’. The ‘CEU’ population, as will have been noted, was of modern Americans of European descent. How accurate and precise are its results likely to be in a European context? Even without the problems of sample and method, combining these ancestries covers a very broad region of Europe, inside and outside the Roman frontiers, one unlikely to sustain the very precise but sweeping claims made in the article.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br />This experiment takes data suggesting immobility, constructed at the level of populations, and compares it against data drawn from individuals and putatively showing migration. If, against the backdrop of a 3,500-year-long history of supposedly general population immobility, aDNA taken from sixty-three burials at two different cemeteries revealed, at both sites, evidence of the arrival of genetically distinct populations, this must have been the equivalent of randomly locating the proverbial needle in a haystack, worthy of a media ‘splash’ in itself. The other implication ought to be that – given the supposed genetic difference of the incomers at Collegno from modern north Italians – whatever its scale, this population movement turned out to be a genetic dead-end, leaving no significant trace in the region’s modern population. If so, the value of this research for the study of the Völkerwanderung should be quite the opposite of that which has been supposed.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br />Finally, it is worth mentioning that one set of results, which lay outside the expected range, was rejected on hypothetical grounds: ‘this sample showed high levels of contamination (which we hypothesize is the result of plastic wares produced in China that were utilized in DNA extraction) and thus the results are unreliable.’<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn13">[13]</a> If that were the case, surely that whole body of data should be thrown out of the experiment, not just selected results that did not ‘fit’.</p><h2 style="text-align: justify;">Results</h2><p style="text-align: justify;">We must assume that the laboratory analyses and subsequent mathematical modelling were flawless but there are strong reasons to discount the experiment’s results on the grounds of its set-up and the problems with its samples. Let us nonetheless treat the results on their own terms. My first point concerns the geographical plotting of different genotypes. The SPA (Spatial Ancestry Analysis) plots geographical coordinates for each allele within a Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) according to the location of the individual from whom the DNA sample was taken.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn14">[14]</a> This data can then be used to predict the location of individuals according to the frequency of particular alleles within the SNPs of their genome. After running a series of SPA analyses, the geographical location of the individuals whose DNA was collected could be represented on a graph, using x and y coordinates, in such a way that the means of samples from different regions stood in a spatial relationship to each other that more or less replicated the geographical relationships between those regions. Thus the mean of samples from, say, the Republic of Ireland, United Kingdom and the Netherlands would be located near each other in the top left quadrant of the graph, above and perhaps to the left of the mean for France, and so on. Now, as Yang et al. illustrate, a very similar result can be produced using Principal Components Analysis.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn15">[15]</a> <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">If that is so, it must also be the case that geographical coordinates describe (that is to say represent the variation within) the data to a greater degree than variables within the genotypes. Otherwise, the means of samples taken from particular countries or regions would be pulled into clusters according to those genetic variables rather than their geographical relationships. Alternatively the genetic variables have been represented in such a way as to describe the data less well than the geographical coordinates and so allow the latter to determine the plot to a greater extent. Now, for the medical purposes for which SPA or other genetic models were created, this need not be an issue; indeed it might be desirable. For the discussion of historical genetics, however, one is left wondering exactly how significantly the genotypes differ from one another.</span> [<span style="caret-color: rgb(43, 0, 254); color: #2b00fe;">I am no longer sure that I have expressed (or got) this quite right, but there’s something very problematic about this mapping and its implications, and the assumptions made about it.</span>] The plotting of individual samples against these geographically-driven plots seems to produce anomalies.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">The presentation of the experiment’s results steers the reader towards a particular interpretation. At both Szólád and Collegno analyses suggested the existence of two genetically distinct groups. The argument is that one such group represents ‘northerners’, implicitly immigrants, and the other ‘locals’ (we can bracket the question of whether these assumptions are valid). On the published diagrams the former is coloured blue; the latter red. There is no good reason to have used exactly the same colour-coding at both sites or, alternatively, to have overlaid the results from both sites on the same figures,<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn16">[16]</a> especially when we might suppose that they represent significantly different populations. Clearly, the reader is intended to associate the two groups at the two sites and to see them as parts of two larger, generally distinct populations – of incoming Longobards and local provincial Romans, respectively. This hampers any critical reading of the data.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br />The analyses strongly suggested that there were genetically distinct kindreds present at both Szólád and Collegno. They also showed, however, that the two sites’ populations were quite similar overall.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn17">[17]</a> Both included people with genetic ancestry of predominantly ‘CEU+GBR’ (‘northern’) type and others with ancestry that was overwhelmingly of ‘TSI’ (‘southern’) type,<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn18">[18]</a> although most individuals showed combinations of the two. ‘IBS’ ancestry at both was only found in subjects who showed ‘TSI’ ancestry (although in most cases ‘CEU+GBR’ was also present). Both sites contained some people with entirely ‘northern’ and others with entirely ‘southern’ genetic ancestry. On the basis of the genetic data, however, there would be as much reason to suppose that, at least in in Szólád, the people with ‘southern’ ancestry were the incomers, and those with ‘northern’ ancestry the locals, rather than vice versa. That might superficially seem less likely at Collegno but the lack of significant Italian aDNA comparanda means it is possible there too. The – hardly numerous – prehistoric Italian aDNA subjects clustered in a quite different part of the SPA diagram from the Collegno ‘southerners’.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn19">[19]</a> That the kindred with ‘northern’ ancestry were newer to the region of Collegno than the other kindreds was only revealed by the isotopic analyses which were, overall, more interesting than the genetic studies. At Szólád those analyses suggested that kindreds of both ancestry types had moved there quite recently.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br />Two of the analysts’ presuppositions come into play here, neither of which emerges from the data themselves. The first is that the pattern illustrates a specific episode of demographic movement; the similarity results from one population moving to the area of the other. The second is that, more specifically, this episode was the Longobard migration from Pannonia to Italy. Without these, one could argue that the profiles of the two sites revealed that, genetically, populations in sixth-century northern Italy and in Pannonia were fairly similar and attested to continuous movement back and forth between the two regions as one might expect on historical grounds. This is why a control, or other comparanda, was (or were) essential. How likely is it that a sample of any cemetery in the Po Valley, dating to any period between the ‘Celtic’ settlement of Cisalpine Gaul and now, would – like Collegno – contain at least some people with genetic make-up suggestive of comparatively recent origins north of the Alps? I would propose that the answer is ‘very likely’.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br />While difficult and dangerous, population movement across the Alps has been constant since Ötzi the Iceman.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn20">[20]</a> The Celtic migration into northern Italy has been mentioned; later, the different regions were part of the same imperial state for the best part of five centuries; Carolingian Italy was politically connected with the Rhine valley, Germany, and Provence and many armies (and doubtless countless individuals) moved back and forth over the mountains. Those contacts continued in the period of the ‘Holy Roman Empire’, bringing French and German troops into the peninsula, as happened again in the sixteenth-century Italian Wars. The ensuing Hapsburg dominance of northern Italy strengthened the already significant ties between that region, southern Germany, and Hungary up to the late nineteenth century. The idea that genetic similarities between Italian and transalpine populations at any point in history can (let alone must) be explained by then recent, discrete large-scale events lacks empirical basis. In other words, while the similarities between the populations of Szólád and Collegno surely attest to individual movement across the Alps, there is no good reason to suppose that they must testify to any particular, large-scale ‘migration event’, or to change rather than stasis in patterns of population movement. None of that (or indeed any of the arguments proposed here) means there was no Longobard migration or that that movement did not involve a large number of people: both facts are incontestable. What they do mean is that the evidence from these sites is not necessarily evidence of that migration, and that traces of that migration need not be expected to be especially clear in the genomes of late antique northern Italians. In many regards the experiment was fundamentally ill-conceived.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br />Overall, the analyses suggested a generally mixed population of Szólád. The results of Principal Coordinates Analysis (PCA) of Hungarian aDNA samples, when overlaid (using ‘Procrustes’<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn21">[21]</a>) with the Szólád-Collegno and modern reference samples revealed a distribution that overlapped with the ‘northern’ and ‘southern’ Szólád kindreds.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn22">[22]</a> If the authors’ assumptions about long-term population stability between the Bronze Age and the present day, and about their methodology, were correct<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn23">[23]</a> this evidence would surely not show very conclusively that either group had moved into the region from a significantly distinct area. Analysis of the strontium content of the teeth at Szólád did not suggest that the ‘northern’ group were necessarily more likely to be outsiders than the ‘southern’ group. They were, however, evidently more heterogeneous in origin than the latter. According to the ‘narrative’ the study was supposed to be ‘testing’, barbarian immigrants were heterogeneous but on what basis would one assume that the population of late Roman Pannonia was not? From historical sources we know that it was a frontier province in which garrisons of diverse origins were stationed; in the late fourth century, Goths passed through the region more than once; the fifth century saw several groups, not least the Huns and Ostrogoths, resident there. The latter, of course, later moved to Italy and established a kingdom there.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br />The results of the analyses, as presented in the diagrams in Nature, seem less than convincing when examined closely. Subjects with different genetic ancestry are plotted against modern and Bronze Age subjects, as mentioned earlier. However, their grouping raises critical issues as the Principal Components Analysis, for whatever reason, pulled the data in such a way as to reveal, in some cases, a greater range within the groups defined by their ancestry than between them. For example, the Szólád ‘northerner’ and the two Szólád ‘southerners plotted nearest the origin lie closer to each other than they do to the members of their groups plotted farthest from the origin. It is also clear that some Principal Components Analyses have described the data far less clearly than others. Something in the data gives us grounds to wonder about the combination of different analyses of different data sets. Is the PCA calling the ‘Admixture’ analyses into question? This especially muddles the results at Szólád. That issue is further obfuscated by the overlaying of the results from both sites on the same plot and the use of the same colours in their representation, discussed earlier.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br />The ‘northern’ group at Collegno is in fact clustered more compactly, in a different region of the plot from the Szólád ‘northerners’. Indeed we see that the different genetic kindreds at Collegno are far more significantly separated on that plot, something that might support the conclusions the authors wished to draw. However, we also perceive a third group clearly distinguished from both: those with over 50% ‘TSI’ and ‘IBS’ (Tuscan and Iberian) ancestry who, one would have thought, ought to be plotted much further towards the ‘south’ or ‘south-east’ (or lower left-hand) quadrant on the PCA plot rather than in the region where modern Central European subjects cluster. This must question some of the experiment’s assumptions.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn24">[24]</a> Ultimately, though, while there are nine ‘northerners’ (with over 70% ‘GBR+CEU’ ancestry) plotted, there are only four with over 70% Tuscan ancestry and four with Tuscan/Iberian. We may wonder why the authors chose to emphasise only the group with Tuscan ancestry as locals when the ‘TSI + IBS’ group could just as easily be called ‘southerners’, unless it was because this was inconvenient for the narrative that they had decided their results should present.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br />Finally, given the stress laid upon ancestry in the article’s conclusions, the cautionary note sounded recently by Mathieson and Scally is important:</p><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote>Another source of confusion is that three distinct concepts – genealogical ancestry, genetic ancestry, and genetic similarity – are frequently conflated. ... but note that only the first two are explicitly forms of ancestry, and that genetic data are surprisingly uninformative about either of them.</blockquote><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn25">[25]</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><p class="MsoQuote" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn25" name="_ftnref25" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"></span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p><p>
</p><div><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><h2 style="text-align: justify;">Notes</h2>
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<div id="ftn1">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/gap/cgi-bin/study.cgi?study_id=phs000145.v4.p2">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/gap/cgi-bin/study.cgi?study_id=phs000145.v4.p2</a>
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> <a href="https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/dbgap/studies/phs000145/phs000145.v4.p2/pheno_variable_summaries/phs000145.v4.pht000659.v2.p2.POPRES_v1_v2_Subject_Phenotypes.var_report.xml">https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/dbgap/studies/phs000145/phs000145.v4.p2/pheno_variable_summaries/phs000145.v4.pht000659.v2.p2.POPRES_v1_v2_Subject_Phenotypes.var_report.xml</a>
(accessed 26/02/2021)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Nelson MR, <i>et al.</i>, ‘The Population
Reference Sample, POPRES: a resource for population, disease, and
pharmacological genetics research.’ <i>Am J Hum Genet.</i> 2008
Sep;83(3):347-58. doi: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2008.08.005. Epub 2008 Aug 28. PMID:
18760391; PMCID: PMC2556436. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> Nelson <i>et al.</i>, ‘The Population Reference Sample’.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn5">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/gap/cgi-bin/dataset.cgi?study_id=phs000145.v4.p2&phv=173964&phd=&pha=&pht=2998&phvf=&phdf=&phaf=&phtf=&dssp=1&consent=&temp=1">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/gap/cgi-bin/dataset.cgi?study_id=phs000145.v4.p2&phv=173964&phd=&pha=&pht=2998&phvf=&phdf=&phaf=&phtf=&dssp=1&consent=&temp=1</a>
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn6">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> Mathieson I, Scally A (2020) ‘What is ancestry?’ <i>PLoS Genet</i>
16(3): e1008624. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1008624">https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1008624</a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn7">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> The next largest reference population was
that created by G. <span style="background-color: white; background: white; color: #212121;">Hellenthal, G.B.J.
Busby, <i>et al.</i>, ‘A genetic atlas of human admixture history.’ <i>Science</i>.
2014 Feb 14;343(6172):747-751. doi: 10.1126/science.1243518. PMID: 24531965;
PMCID: PMC4209567. This contained 1,490 subjects from ninety-five genotyped
population groups worldwide (thus an average of fifteen subjects each).</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn8">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[8]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> A. Auton <i>et al.</i>, ‘A global reference for human genetic
variation.’ <i>Nature</i> 526, 68–74 (2015). <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/nature15393">https://doi.org/10.1038/nature15393</a>.
See <a href="https://www.internationalgenome.org/1000-genomes-project-publications/">https://www.internationalgenome.org/1000-genomes-project-publications/</a>
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn9">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[9]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> Mathieson <i>et al.</i>’ ‘Genome-wide patterns of selection in 230
ancient Eurasians.’ <i>Nature</i> 528, 499–503 (2015); Mathieson <i>et al.</i>,
‘The genomic history of southeastern Europe.’ <i>Nature</i> 555, 197–203
(2018). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn10">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[10]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> ‘For the latter two studies we only utilize individuals dating from
the Bronze Age (within which we included the Beaker Culture) or more recent’.
K.R. Veeramah, ‘Supplementary Note 6. Modern and ancient reference dataset
construction’. Amorim <i>et al. </i>‘Understanding’, OSM, pp.28-30, at p.29. The
implications of the phrase ‘or more recent’ are unclear.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn11">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref11" name="_ftn11" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[11]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> C.E.G. Amorim & K.R. Veeramah ‘Supplementary Note 7. Principal
Component Analysis’ analysis’, Amorim <i>et al.</i>, ‘Understanding’,<i> </i>OSM,
pp.31-35, at pp.32-33.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn12">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref12" name="_ftn12" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[12]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> Mathieson <i>et al.</i>, ‘Genome-wide patterns’, Supplementary Data
1; Mathieson <i>et al.</i>, ‘The genomic history’, Supplementary Data. Most
data were from eastern and south-eastern Europe and western Asia. There were
two more Italian aDNA samples from Neolithic subjects.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn13">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref13" name="_ftn13" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[13]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> C.E.G. Amorim & K.R. Veeramah, ‘Supplementary note 7.’, p.31.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn14">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref14" name="_ftn14" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[14]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> Yang, <i>et al.</i>, ‘A model-based approach’.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn15">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref15" name="_ftn15" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[15]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> Yang, <i>et al.</i>, ‘A model-based approach’, fig.2.e.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn16">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref16" name="_ftn16" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[16]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> Amorim <i>et al.</i> ‘Understanding’, fig.2.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn17">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref17" name="_ftn17" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[17]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> Amorim <i>et al.</i> ‘Understanding’, fig.3.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn18">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref18" name="_ftn18" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[18]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> On which, see above, pp.<b>000</b>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn19">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref19" name="_ftn19" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[19]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> Amorim <i>et al.</i> ‘Understanding’, fig.2b.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn20">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref20" name="_ftn20" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[20]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> Ötzi, ironically, was included in their ‘Bronze Age’ sample. Above,
n.<b>30</b>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn21">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref21" name="_ftn21" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[21]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> A transformation of one plot so that it overlays another with the
best fit.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn22">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref22" name="_ftn22" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[22]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> Amorim <i>et al.</i> ‘Understanding’, fig.2b.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn23">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref23" name="_ftn23" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[23]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> An assumption questioned by the fact that modern Hungarian DNA
samples clustered in quite a different part of the diagram; Amorim <i>et al.</i>
‘Understanding’, fig.2a.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn24">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref24" name="_ftn24" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[24]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> See above.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn25">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref25" name="_ftn25" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[25]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> Mathieson & Scally, ‘What is ancestry? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
</div><h2 style="text-align: left;"><div><div id="ftn25">
</div>
</div></h2><div style="mso-element: footnote-list;"><div id="ftn32" style="mso-element: footnote;">
</div>
</div>Historian on the Edgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14069934072719158780noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7207265794297747910.post-35502544465920888172022-12-15T08:33:00.008-08:002023-10-04T08:20:55.142-07:00Archaeology, History and Bad Science: A critique of the analysis of DNA at Szólád (Hungary) and Collegno (Italy). Part 1 (Introduction; setting up the experiment).<p style="text-align: left;"> </p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">[</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: #2b00fe;"><i>This is a critique I wrote to form my part of an article I co-wrote with Prof Martial Staub (Sheffield) about genetics and archaeology. Later I cut it down, with the idea of publishing the more detailed elements as 'online supplementary materials'. It didn't get published, sadly. I think that there were two main problems: one was a significant jump in the scale and breadth of Martial's part and mine; the other was that detailed critique like this is maybe what needs to happen before an article like that under discussion comes out, rather than afterwards. Nonetheless, I think this detailed critique is worth making, and if anyone does know of a journal or other publication that might be interested in considering this (or a shorter version of it), do please let me know.</i></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB"><i><span style="color: #2b00fe;">I have split the piece into three shorter blogs for ease of reading. This part contains the introduction and discussion of the problems involved in the setting up of the 'experiment'; part 2 discusses methods and results; and Part 3 contains the overall conclusions, and an afterword.</span></i>]</span></p><h2 style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB">Introduction</span></h2><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">As a more specific focus for our critique, we consider one
particular study which made something of a media splash in 2018.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
This thought-provoking piece compares evidence from a cemetery at Szólád near
Lake Balaton in modern Hungary (Late Antique Pannonia) and another at Collegno in
Piemonte, Italy, two areas linked historically by the sixth-century Longobard
(or Lombard) Migration to Italy. The analyses revealed discrete groups within
both cemeteries, showing different genetic traits, which were related to
northern and southern Europe. These groups correlated with different methods of
burial and (to a lesser degree) in terms of their diet.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">When it appeared, the link to the online publication was retweeted by
one Twitter account with the claim that ‘Peter Heather was right. The
Völkerwanderung was a thing!’<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
We can leave aside for now the point that Heather certainly was right, for the very
good reason that no serious scholar has ever denied that the ‘Great Migrations’
happened.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
What requires more rigorous examination is whether this article supports the
interpretation of the Barbarian Migrations that lies behind the term ‘Völkerwanderung’:
not simply a large-scale, short-term population movement, but one that
introduced novel cultural practices into the regions where the migrants
eventually settled. More specifically, we can ask whether it does anything to
help us ‘understand’ ‘6th-century barbarian social organization and migration’,
as its title proclaims. Here the problem might be a disciplinary divergence in the
meaning of the phrase ‘understanding society’ but, if viewed in a purely
historical or archaeological sense, my answer will be definitive: no, it
doesn’t. It describes two situations where people had (in some way) moved into a
specific locality from elsewhere and had (possibly) used different burial
practices. That is valuable. If, however, we want to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">understand</i> those specific local phenomena and, <i>a fortiori</i>,
if we wish to draw conclusions from them about the wider events of the
‘Barbarian Migrations’, I will demonstrate that we are no further on than when
we were at the start. The only way in which the micro (local) and macro
(pan-European) phenomena can be linked is via a number of uncritical
assumptions, which the publication in question does nothing to interrogate.
Those assumptions are, first, that if migration occurred then that <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">must</span> have been ‘barbarian’ and,
second, that social organisation and variation in material culture <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">must</span> be <i>explained</i> by migration.
In other words, the fact of ‘barbarian migration’ (which no one is denying) is
the necessary and sufficient cause for late antique population and cultural
change. It is in the current climate of ‘push-back’ against, and indeed flagrant
misrepresentation of the views of,<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
those who deny a unique causal primacy to the Völkerwanderung, the enthusiastic
expostulation about how science had proven that the Great Migrations were ‘a
thing’ finds its context.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">A more critical look at the analysis and its approaches is, however,
necessary.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
The popular reception of such studies and the nature of their media coverage
are heavily grounded in suppositions that the methods of laboratory science are
superior to the inevitably subjective assumptions and opinions of the historical
disciplines and the partial – in both senses of the word – nature of their
evidence.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Popularly, the epistemological claims of ‘hard science’ trump those of the arts
and humanities. The Online Supplementary Materials (hereafter OSM) of the
article under discussion set out the procedures employed in the laboratory analyses
and mathematical modelling. I can see no reason to comment critically on these.
It is no part of this discussion to cast – or even to imply – any doubts upon
their quality and rigour. Whatever else one might say, it is an impressive
piece of mathematical modelling and complex data analysis. My critique departs
instead from consideration of the study’s rigour as a scientific experiment and
thus confronts the broader epistemological claims. To anticipate my
conclusions, my argument will be that – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in
that more general sense</i> – the experiment represents bad science.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<h2 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span color="windowtext" lang="EN-GB">Setting up the experiment</span></span></h2><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">The authors describe the experiment and its
results thus:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoQuote" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-style: normal;"></span></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-style: normal;">[W]e obtained
ancient genomic DNA from 63 samples from two cemeteries (from Hungary and
Northern Italy) that </span><span lang="EN-GB"><i>have been previously associated
with the Longobards, a barbarian people that ruled large parts of Italy for
over 200 years after invading from Pannonia in 568 CE</i></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-style: normal;">. Our dense cemetery-based sampling revealed that
each cemetery was primarily organized around one large pedigree, suggesting
that biological relationships played an important role in these early medieval
societies. Moreover, we identified genetic structure in each cemetery involving
at least two groups with different ancestry that were very distinct in terms of
their funerary customs. Finally, our data </span><span lang="EN-GB"><i>are
consistent with</i></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-style: normal;"> the proposed
long-distance migration from Pannonia to Northern Italy. [Emphasis added]</span></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The experiment was designed to confront the following questions:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoQuote" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit; font-style: normal;"></span></p><blockquote><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit; font-style: normal;">Were specific barbarian peoples described
in texts culturally and ethnically homogeneous populations, or were they ad-hoc
and opportunistic confederations of diverse, loosely connected groups? What
role did biological relatedness, being that of close kinship relations or
long-term shared ancestry, play in the organization of these barbarian
communities and how are such relationships related to patterns of material
culture? Did this period involve long-distance migrations as described by late
antique authors? </span></blockquote><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit; font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">The most troubling aspect of the experiment concerns the way it was
shaped by assumptions about its likely results. The OSM include a brief history
of the Longobards but not one of late antique northern Italy and its long
history of social, cultural, economic, and political relationships with
transalpine areas. A reader of the article and its supplementary materials can
be forgiven for believing – entirely incorrectly – that the Longobard movement
was the only significant migration into Italy to occur in the period.
Furthermore, the cemetery-sites investigated are located in the regions linked
by historical accounts of the Longobard migration. In other words, the
selection of data was made on <i>a priori</i> grounds. Now, genetic scientists
might be led to believe that the epistemological status of the ‘Longobard’
label or identifier attached to the sites from which their samples were drawn
was much more secure than it is in actuality, or that such a label might imply
a genetically discrete population. They can understandably not be familiar with
the broader historical and archaeological issues to which we shall return. One
may therefore assume a ‘good faith’ procedure on their part in accepting
certain parameters in the setting up of the experiment.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">Fundamentally, though, one must ask where
the control sample is. Assessment of the results’ significance requires
comparable analysis of other sites either from the same period but not
connected by the Longobard migration, or in the same regions but from a
slightly earlier period. The main comparative aDNA evidence used was a pan-European
range of samples from the Bronze Age, 1500 years or more before the Longobards’
migration.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
This is insufficient. One needs comparanda from, say, the middle Roman period. A
few early medieval samples were considered but their selection was problematic.
A cluster taken from a 4<sup>th</sup>-7<sup>th</sup>-century English context was
listed as ‘Anglo-Saxon’. Others, from the Caucasus, were labelled as being
‘Alans’. This raises questions in the context of a study of Barbarian Migrations
as these names are late antique or early medieval ethnonyms not necessarily
linked to genetics or to material culture in any straightforward way. In
particular, the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ implies that these subjects had migrated
into the Empire, in this case into the diocese of <i>Britanniae</i>. When
linked to the burials of supposed migrants in Hungary and Italy it risks giving
the impression of a shared ‘barbarian’ origin.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">Only six Italian aDNA samples were consulted
in the whole analysis, all from prehistory, and three from the same site. On
the basis of this lacuna alone, one is entitled to doubt the results’ validity.
The authors state that what they consider to be ‘northern’ DNA is otherwise
unknown in Italian samples.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[8]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
This is illogical unless one assumes, <i>a priori</i>, that those graves with
such DNA at Collegno were not of Italians. The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">only</i> Italian aDNA from the relevant period to be considered was
that at Collegno, so it is equally true to say that ‘northern’ DNA was found in
<i>every </i>early medieval Italian population examined in the study. Without
appropriate comparanda it is not possible to know how atypical this profile
would be for a late antique cemetery in the Po valley. The only mitigation
again concerns the information passed to the genetic scientists. If the assumption,
made in good faith, was that Szólád and Collegno were both sites that could
reasonably be accepted as having had Longobard populations, then the issue of a
control might possibly have been seen as moot. If the Longobard nature of these
cemeteries, their populations, and some of their material culture is taken as a
given, its correlation with other variables being the subject of analysis, it
does not need testing.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-GB">But therein lies the problem. On what basis
is either Szólád or Collegno ‘Longobard’? The assignment of ethnic identities
to forms of archaeological evidence has been hotly debated for over thirty
years.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[9]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
The Szólád/Collegno analyses were initially intended to contribute critically
to this debate. While many archaeologists now accept that giving ethnic labels
to forms of material culture is dubious, these reservations and the newer
interpretations which they have engendered have been bitterly resisted;
Longobard archaeology is one of the more conservative areas in this respect.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn10" name="_ftnref10" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[10]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
This problem even affects the sites’ dating. The earliest period of ‘Longobard’
archaeology begins in 568 precisely, because (so runs the argument) there were
no Longobards in Italy before 568 and the material is Longobard. The ethnicity
of the associated people is thus entirely prejudged. The same is true in
Hungarian archaeology where, conversely, Longobard material cannot be <i>later</i>
than 568. There is no archaeological reason to suppose that the first phase of
‘Longobard’ burials at Collegno could not belong to a period perhaps ten (or
more) years before 568. Archaeological periodisation cannot be fine-tuned to
that level of accuracy and the development of its techniques over the past forty
years has shown that phases of change can drift back or forward by decades<a name="_Hlk65686016">. For example, a key archaeological transition in artefact-forms
which, in the 1980s, was dated to ‘c.600’ is now placed closer to 575/80.</a><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn11" name="_ftnref11" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn11;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk65686016;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[11]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk65686016;"> </span>The extent to which early Italian
‘Longobard’ material is still generally congruent with comparative material
from the period after 568 is unclear. Without the influence of the historical
record, some of it could unproblematically be placed earlier. Equally, there is
no archaeological reason why Szólád could not have been used for a decade or more
after 568. Overall, there are no prima facie archaeological grounds for supposing
that the earliest phase at Collegno is not contemporary with the last period </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">at
Szólád, </span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe UI Symbol"; mso-fareast-language: JA;">whether before, after, or straddling 568. This must
influence how we employ cemetery evidence to think about trans-Alpine
connections and the Longobard migration.</span><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">The link between this material and the
Longobards’ arrival is, however, too well entrenched in most Italian
archaeology to permit detailed or rigorous scrutiny of the idea. Indeed, the
archaeology of this period is currently experiencing a backlash against
attempts to reassess the role of Barbarian migration in material cultural
change, further making critical revaluation unlikely. The lead-author of the OSM
Collegno discussion has written a forceful – if unconvincing – defence of the traditional
idea that ethnicity is manifest in late antique burial customs<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn12" name="_ftnref12" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn12;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[12]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
and the lead-author of the Szólád discussion subscribes to a similar viewpoint.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn13" name="_ftnref13" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn13;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[13]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
The team involved in the Szólád-Collegno analyses included only archaeologists
who subscribe to traditional ‘ethnic’ readings of material culture so no
serious consideration was given to alternative interpretations.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn14" name="_ftnref14" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn14;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[14]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Against that background it is extremely difficult to avoid the implication that
incomers distinguished from locals are to be identified as Longobards.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">We must also scrutinise the assumptions
about the nature of population movement, which can be illustrated with three
quotations:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 36.0pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 36pt 8pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">While previous sampling from the era has
been limited, we note that published fourth- to seventh-century genomes from
Britain, Bavaria, Lithuania, and the Caucasus, analysed alongside our own
ancient samples, cluster close to their modern counterparts. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 36.0pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 36pt 8pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">We found no evidence that such ancestry was
present in northern Italy during this time (who instead resemble modern
southern and Iberian Europeans), which would be consistent with inferred long
term barriers to gene flow in Europe across the Alps. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 36.0pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 36pt 8pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">Modern European genetic variation is
generally highly structured by geography.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn15" name="_ftnref15" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn15;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[15]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">The fundamental assumption is of long-term population immobility,
against which seemingly rare migration can be set and, one assumes, be clearly
identifiable. Whatever the scientific grounds, historically it is a counterfactual.
As will be discussed later, movement of individuals or large groups across the
Alps, in both directions, has been constant since prehistory. Instead, support was
drawn from an article claiming that the study of a person’s DNA allowed their
geographical origins to be reliably estimated even to village level.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn16" name="_ftnref16" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn16;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[16]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
This conclusion was reached from analysis of populations from three islands off
Scotland, three villages in the Alps, and three villages in Croatia. When separated
by up to thirty miles of sea or several thousand metres of mountain, it is
scarcely surprising that marriage tended to take place within each individual
locality. The Croatian case study, where such natural barriers were absent, was
far less conclusive. Another support was a study of the British Isles which
claimed that modern British DNA showed the persistence of the political units
of the ‘Dark Ages’<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn17" name="_ftnref17" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn17;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[17]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
but actually came, very clearly, to the hardly staggering conclusion that
people in low-lying arable areas find it easier to move around to find sexual
partners than those living in the middle of mountain ranges.<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn18" name="_ftnref18" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn18;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[18]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Some of these issues resurface when considering the experiment’s methods. The
logical accompaniment to the idea that difficult physical geography creates
barriers to gene-flow – that areas of easier communication might accelerate it
– seems not to feature anywhere in the cited literature. The methods of
plotting the spatial distribution of particular genetic components<a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftn19" name="_ftnref19" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn19;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[19]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
assumed a ‘flat earth model’ – in other words, a genetic feature would normally
diminish across space in an even fashion. This contradicts the assumption that
physical geography presents long term barriers to gene-flow, as indeed does the
very wide geographical spread of modern subjects listed as Swiss.<o:p></o:p></span></p><h2 style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="text-align: left;">Notes</b></span></h2>
<div style="mso-element: footnote-list; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->
<!--[endif]-->
</span><div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> ‘Understanding 6th-century barbarian social organization and
migration through paleogenomics’, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nature
Communications</i> (2018) 9:3547 (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-06024-4). For
interesting discussion of the media and aDNA studies, see, Källén, Anna &
Mulcare, Charlotte & Nyblom, Andreas & Strand, Daniel. (2019). ‘Archaeogenetics
in Popular Media: Contemporary Implications of Ancient DNA.’ <i>Current Swedish
Archaeology</i>. 27. 69-91. 10.37718/CSA.2019.04. I am grateful to Oren Falk
for this reference.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> This tweet or the account seems subsequently to have been deleted or has 'blocked' me.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> Susan Oosthuizen, <i>The Emergence of the English</i>, is the
latest attempt to deny that there was an Anglo-Saxon migration but her argument
is extremely problematic.</span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn4" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> G.P. Brogiolo, ‘Dati archeologici e beni fiscali nell’Italia
Goto-Longobarda’ in <i>Between Taxation and Rent: Fiscal Problems from Late
Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages/Entre el Impuesto y la Renta. Problemas de
la fiscalidad tardoantigua y altomedieval</i>, ed. P.C. Díaz & I. Martín
Viso (Bari, 2011), pp.87-105, at p.100; G.P. Brogiolo & A. Chavarría Arnau,
‘Chiese e insediamenti rurali tra V e VIII secolo prospettive della ricerca
archeologica’ in ‘Ipsam Nolam barbari vastaverunt’: <i>L’Italia e il
Mediterraneo occidentale tra il V secolo e la metà del VI. Atti del Convegno
internazionale di studi (Cimitile-Nola-Santa Maria Capua Vetere, 18-19 giugno
2009)</i>, ed. C. Ebanista & M. Rotili (Cimitile, Tavolario edizioni,
2010), pp.45-62, at 46-47. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn5" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> In 2019 I presented a preliminary critique of this piece at the
University of Sheffield. The authors’ response, made before the lecture’s text
was publicly available (at <a href="https://600transformer.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-barbarian-migrations-in-21st-century.html">https://600transformer.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-barbarian-migrations-in-21st-century.html</a><span class="MsoHyperlink">)</span>, was dismissive at best. Cp. the similarly
aggressive response by the authors of Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">et al.</i>, “A Female Viking Warrior Confirmed
by Genomics,” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American Journal of
Physical Anthropology</i> 164.4 (2017): 853-60, to Judith Jesch’s similarly
blogged response: “Let’s Debate Female Viking Warriors Yet Again,” Norse and
Viking Ramblings (9 September 2017) <a href="http://norseandviking.blogspot.com/2017/09/lets-debate-female-viking-warriors-yet.html">http://norseandviking.blogspot.com/2017/09/lets-debate-female-viking-warriors-yet.html</a>.
Källén <i>et al.</i>, ‘Archaeogenetics in Popular Media’, p.85. I am grateful
to Oren Falk for letting me read his unpublished paper ‘Death and the
Shield-Maiden: Viqueering Vikings and Viquens’, a detailed critical discussion
of the supposed woman-warrior found at Bjirka and the ensuing debate.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn6" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> Källén <i>et al.</i>, ‘Archaeogenetics in Popular Media’.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn7" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> Below, n.<b>28</b>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn8" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[8]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> Amorim <i>et al.</i> ‘Understanding’, p.5.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn9" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[9]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> This debate was reignited by G. Halsall, ‘The origins of the <i>Reihengräberzivilisation</i>:
Forty Years on.’, in <i>Fifth-Century Gaul: A Crisis of Identity? </i>Ed. J.F.
Drinkwater and H. Elton (Cambridge, 1992), pp.196-207; G. Halsall, ‘Archaeology
and the late Roman frontier in northern Gaul: the so-called Föderatengräber
reconsidered’, in <i>Grenze und Differenz im früheren Mittelalter</i>, ed. W.
Pohl & H. Reimitz (Vienna, 2000), pp.167-80. These studies are reprinted in
G. Halsall, <i>Cemeteries and Society in Merovingian Gaul. Selected Studies on
History and Archaeology, 1992-2009</i> (Leiden, 2010), pp.93-130, alongside
‘Commentary 2: Careful with that axe, Eugenius’ (pp.131-67), which responds to
critiques made up until about 2010. For similar criticisms of the traditional
ethnic reading, see above all, S. Brather, <i>Ethnische Interpretationen in der
frühgeschichtliche Archäologie</i> (Ergänzungsbande zum Reallexikon der
germanischen Ältertumskunde 42: Berlin, 2004); P. von Rummel, <i>Habitus
Barbarus: Kleidung und Repräsentation spätantiker Eliten im 4. und 5.
Jahrhundert </i>Ergänzungsbande zum Reallexikon der germanischen Ältertumskunde
55: Berlin, 2007);<i> </i>F.J. Theuws & M. Alkemade, ‘A kind of mirror for
men: sword depositions in late antique northern Gaul’, in <i>Rituals of Power.
From Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages</i>, ed. F.J. Theuws & J.L.
Nelson (Leiden, 2000), pp.401-76; F. Theuws, ‘Grave-goods, ethnicity and the
rhetoric of burial sites in late antique northern Gaul’, in <i>Ethnic
Constructs in Antiquity. The Role of Power and Tradition</i>, ed.<i> </i>T.
Derks & N. Roymans (Amsterdam, 2009), pp.283-319.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn10" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[10]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> See the works by Brogiolo, above n.<b>4</b>; V. Bierbrauer, ‘’Zur
ethnischen Interpretation in der frühgeschichtlichen Archäologie’, in <i>Die
Suche nach den Ursprüngen von der Bedeutung des frühen Mittelalters</i>
(Vienna, 2004); Kazanski, M., & P. Périn, 2008. ‘Identité ethnique en Gaule
à l’époque des Grandes Migrations et des Royaumes barbares: étude de cas
archéologiques’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Antiquités Nationales
39, pp.181-216. the articles by Giostra and Vida cited below, n.12</span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn11" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref11" name="_ftn11" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn11;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[11]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> R. Legoux, P. Périn & F. Vallet, <i>Chronologie Normalisée du
Mobilier Funéraire Mérovingien entre Manche et Lorraine</i> (3rd revised
edition; Condé-sur-Noireau, 2009).<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn12" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref12" name="_ftn12" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn12;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[12]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> C. Giostra ‘Goths and Lombards in Italy: the potential of
archaeology with respect to ethnocultural identification’, <i>Post-Classical
Archaeologies </i>2011, pp.7-36. There is no space for detailed refutation of
the argument here. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn13" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref13" name="_ftn13" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn13;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[13]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> T. Vida, ‘Conflict And Coexistence: The Local Population Of The
Carpathian Basin Under Avar Rule (Sixth To Seventh Century)’, in <i>The Other
Europe in the Middle Ages. Avars, Bulgars, Khazars and Cumans</i>, edited by F.
Curta, Brill, Leiden, 2008, pp. 13–46. Vida dismisses Brather’s work:
‘Brather’s position may be popular with advocates of a post-processualist
critique of both archaeological sources and the methods of the archaeological
inquiry, but it rests on wrong assumptions’ (p.15). He presents no substantive
reasons why this might be the case. He and Giostra both deploy
‘post-processualism’ – a very loose archaeological school of thought of which
neither seems to have a clear understanding – as a sort of bogeyman, and both
rely on the heavily criticised notion of a pan-Germanic culture. For recent
discussion of the latter, see M. Friedrich & J. Harland (ed.) <i>Interrogating
the “Germanic”: A Category and its Use in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle
Ages.</i><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn14" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref14" name="_ftn14" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn14;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[14]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> The acknowledgements of Amorim <i>et al.</i>, ‘Understanding’,
include thanks, for ‘helpful’ conversations, to Dr Philipp von Rummel and
Professor Frans Theuws, both of whom have published rigorous critiques of the
traditionalist ‘ethnic’ reading of grave-goods (above, n.<b>9</b>). These
conversations have clearly been ignored.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn15" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref15" name="_ftn15" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn15;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[15]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> Amorim <i>et al.</i> ‘Understanding’, p.5, p.5, p.9, respectively.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn16" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref16" name="_ftn16" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn16;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[16]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> O’Dushlaine, C., et al. ‘Genes predict village of origin in rural
Europe.’ <i>Eur. J. Hum. Genet.</i> 18, 1269–1270 (2010).<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn17" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref17" name="_ftn17" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn17;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[17]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> Leslie, S., et al. ‘The fine-scale genetic structure of the British
population.’ <i>Nature</i> 519, 309–314 (2015).<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn18" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref18" name="_ftn18" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn18;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[18]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> Readers should note here the significant difference between the
proposition that mountain ranges act as barriers to gene-flow <i>across</i>
them and the claim that mountains constrain gene-flow among the population
living <i>within</i> the range.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn19" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/guyha/Dropbox/Papers%20and%20publications/DNA%20Research/DNA%20Critique.docx#_ftnref19" name="_ftn19" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn19;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit; mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[19]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Yang, WY., Novembre, J., Eskin, E., & Halperin, E., A
model-based approach for analysis of spatial structure in genetic data. <i>Nat
Genet</i> 44, 725–731 (2012). <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.2285">https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.2285</a></span>
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
</div>Historian on the Edgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14069934072719158780noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7207265794297747910.post-45298561196830547882021-11-18T04:07:00.004-08:002021-11-18T04:08:15.152-08:00Facts and Legends: Britannia after the Romans (until around 700)<p> <span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 12pt; text-align: justify;">[</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #2b00fe; font-size: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><i>This the English original of the short piece I wrote for the German history magazine </i>Damals<i>. My thanks to Mischa Meier and Steffen Patzold for the invitation to participate in that issue.</i></span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 12pt; text-align: justify;">]</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify;"><span face=""Arial",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Historians nowadays very rarely use the phrase ‘The Dark Ages’ to describe the period after the disintegration of the western Roman Empire. It is now understood that it wholly misrepresents the early middle ages by implying that it was somehow a period of cultural collapse, or even an end (or near-end) of civilisation, or that there exists so little information that no one can know anything about it. Yet there is one part of the period that can – in at least one sense – be described as a Dark Age, and that is Britain in the period between about 400 and about 600. In the area of ‘the history of events’ or political history an impenetrable darkness descends upon the island. Around 550, the only stories that reached Procopius from Britain involved such things as a wall dividing the island in two, with a fertile territory to the east and a land where even the air was toxic to the west, and the ferrying of the souls of the dead to this island from the Frankish coast. These seem to have been so absurd, and so incompatible with what he knew of the history of the formerly Roman island of <i>Britannia</i>,<i> </i>that Procopius invented a whole new island, called <i>Brittia,</i> in which to localise them. In Britain itself, in the early eighth century, when Bede wrote his <i>Ecclesiastical History of the English People</i>, he could barely find any more information than we still have today. <i>Britannia</i> had fallen off the historical map.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify;"><span face=""Arial",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Apart from a couple of brief and extremely vague entries in the <i>Gallic Chronicle of 452</i>, there is only one reliable written source that describes some outlines of British political history in this period. That is the <i>De Excidio Britanniae</i> (<i>On the Ruin of Britain</i>) written by someone called Gildas. Gildas included a short historical section in what was otherwise a sermon about the moral back-sliding of the Britons’ secular and ecclesiastical leaders. Given that this section was only written as part of a rhetorical composition, it was never meant to represent a serious historical narrative; indeed, had we any actual historical sources for the period no one would be very interested in this passage at all! Because we don’t, however, it has acquired an importance that probably would have dismayed its author, who wanted people to concentrate on the important part of his sermon and mend their ways. Gildas gives us two actual names (Ambrosius Aurelianus, who was a British leader, and ‘Agitius’, who seems to be Aëtius, the Roman general in Gaul), one allusive reference to someone else (the ‘proud tyrant’), the name of a siege (<i>Mons Badonis</i>) and a general outline of events. Unfortunately, no one knows for sure where or when Gildas wrote, who Ambrosius or the tyrant were or where Badon Hill was, and even his narrative is so rhetorical and stylised that it might not represent one sequence but two, which overlapped in time. It is very difficult to do very much with this, and almost all of the other sources we have are later and entirely unreliable.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify;"><span face=""Arial",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Only the very beginning and the very end of the period are quite well documented. In the first, ‘Rome’, in the form of the army in Britain, leaves Britain; in the second, ‘Rome’ in the form of the papal mission to the Anglo-Saxons, returns. In 406 the British garrison rebelled against the Emperor Honorius and eventually chose a soldier called Constantine (usually called Constantine III by historians) to be their emperor. Like most previous British usurpers, Constantine immediately took the British army across to Gaul. The point was not to <i>leave</i> the Roman Empire (this was no fifth-century ‘Brexit’, as some have claimed!) but to take control of it and re-establish the fourth-century system of imperial rule, from northern Gaul, with the close involvement of the Gallic and British provincials. Of course, Constantine III failed; he was captured at Arles and executed in 411. At the end of his rebellion, the Britons saw the way the war was going, expelled Constantine’s officials and seem to have declared loyalty to Honorius. Some garrison must have remained in Britain but no reinforcements ever reached it; regular imperial government and administration was never restored in Britain or even across much of neighbouring northern Gaul.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify;"><span face=""Arial",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">The political history of Roman Britain ends with these events. Nearly two decades later, in 428, Bishop Germanus of Auxerre came to Britain to help resolve a dispute within the island’s Christian community, as is described in his <i>Life</i>, written in the 480s. Clearly some British institutions still functioned and the Britons could still get in contact with Romans across the Channel, even if, by then, some Romans considered the island lost. After that we have nothing to help us other than Gildas’ vague allusions, until Saint Augustine of Canterbury, despatched to Kent by Pope Gregory I, arrived in Kent and began the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons. Between those two visits by churchmen – Germanus and Augustine – it is impossible to say anything precise.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify;"><span face=""Arial",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">That does not, of course, mean that no history of any sort is possible. We have a huge amount of archaeological evidence in the form of burials, settlement-sites, individual finds, palaeobotanical evidence, and so on. Sometimes the negative evidence – the abandonment of Roman villas and towns – is as interesting as the positive. These data can tell us a great deal about a wide range of issues, ranging from the health and diet of the population, through their economy and management of the land, and the organisation of their communities, through to their attitudes to issues like gender and age. What this material does not and cannot tell us about, however, are the details of political history.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify;"><span face=""Arial",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">For many years, nonetheless, it was believed that the archaeological data could tell us about the ways by which the Roman provinces of Britain became the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England. One thing that is certain is that between the visit of Germanus and the arrival of Augustine the usual or default ethnic identity in the lowlands of Britain changed from being Roman or British to being Angle or Saxon. How did this happen? This has been one of the major debates in the academic study of this period. Some have proposed a mass migration from the northern regions of Germany while others (albeit not many) have gone as far as to suggest that there was no Anglo-Saxon migration at all. A variety of positions in between those two extremes have also been taken. Of the latter, perhaps the best known is that of ‘élite replacement’ or ‘élite take-over’, by which is understood the replacement of the Romano-British aristocracy by one of north German origin. In some ways this is analogous to the ‘ethnogenesis’ interpretation put forward by scholars such as Herwig Wolfram: a militarised elite becomes the focus for a social aggregation, with those who join the group adopting the leaders’ culture, origin story and so on. In this case the cultural ‘package’ to which people subscribed would include the English language as well as a range of cultural practices.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify;"><span face=""Arial",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">The extreme arguments are difficult to sustain, especially the proposal, recently elaborated in a short book, that there was no migration. The notion of a mass population movement, leaving parts of the north of Germany deserted, and large-scale population-replacement is also much too crude. That being said, it seems to me to be very difficult to understand some aspects of the culture of early medieval lowland Britain without envisaging a significant movement of people from the northern, coastal regions of what the Romans called <i>Germania Magna</i>. The linguistic change is one such aspect; another is the appearance in Britain of a cremation rite very similar to that in the Saxon territories in <i>Germania</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify;"><span face=""Arial",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">There is, however, a subtle but vitally important distinction to be made in how we understand such changes. The change of language, or the introduction of cremation, or the popularity of artefacts of styles that originate on the eastern shore of the North Sea may be difficult to understand without population movement; that does not however, mean that such movement <i>explains</i> such changes. Mass migration might occur and yet leave almost no archaeological trace. Take, for instance, the movement of <i>Germani</i> into the Roman Empire between c.AD 1 and c.AD 400. During that period, many thousands – perhaps hundreds of thousands – of people left <i>barbaricum</i> and entered the Empire of their own volition, to serve in the army, or to seek work or lands to farm. There is almost no archaeological evidence of their presence. That which exists, ironically, is usually Roman in form: the name of, for example, a certain Hnothfrith who commanded an auxiliary unit on the Hadrian’s Wall frontier, is recorded in the inscription on an altar he set up, in good Roman fashion, in the fort at Housesteads. Immigrants keen to assimilate into a host population, especially one in which attitudes towards outsiders could be violently hostile, will frequently adopt that population’s material culture at the expense of their own cultural practices. In other cases, we know of the presence of fourth-century <i>Germani </i>in the Empire not because of any barbarian traces they left there but because they went home again and were eventually buried with elements of their Roman uniform<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify;"><span face=""Arial",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Hnothfrith is only known to history because he erected an altar to three of his gods and, sensibly, the <i>numen augusti</i>. Perhaps, like the fourth-century men whose ashes were buried with their old army belts in northern German cremation cemeteries, he went home to <i>Germania</i> at the end of his service and, until the end of his days, used his Roman material to show off the impressive fact that he had served the mighty Emperor. Or perhaps he settled down on a farm in the Roman provinces and lived out his life as a respectable veteran, his barbarian origins entirely invisible. And yet, any distant descendants or relatives of his who arrived in Britain in the earlier fifth century actively proclaimed their non-Roman origins. This was a very different situation. The shifts we can detect on fifth-century lowland Britain manifest different cultural relationships, not necessarily a change in the patterns of human mobility.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify;"><span face=""Arial",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Romano-British society and economy collapsed in the fifth century; the decline had already set in by around 400, possibly in connection with the retreat of the centre of western imperial government from Trier to Milan in the early 380s. It may have contributed to Constantine III’s rebellion. There can be no doubt about that collapse, though nuance can be added to the statement. The melt-down might not have been as absolute as was once believed; some areas – especially those further west – might have survived better and for longer. Nevertheless it is indisputable that the lowlands of Britain in c.475 were unrecognisable from those of a century earlier. In a world where traditional Roman cultural forms, such as villas and towns, had disappeared, new forms of identity and new bases of power had to be established. This did not necessarily mean abandoning Roman-ness; the fourth-century army had adopted all sorts of ‘barbarian’ or ‘barbarised’ identities without thereby ceasing to be Roman. The multiple layers of late Roman identity probably allowed people to navigate these changes, make common cause with soldiers from <i>barbaricum</i> (as throughout the fifth-century West) and even perhaps accept their leadership.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify;"><span face=""Arial",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">In my own book on this period I suggested a ‘two-pronged’ model for political change in lowland Britain, on analogy with a reading of how northern Gaul became Francia. Gildas’ story of how Saxon troops were hired and posted to the British frontier might in reality have meant that they were stationed on the edges of the lowland zone, to which some archaeological evidence might suggest the frontier had been withdrawn in the late fourth century. This border region between highlands and lowlands was the wealthiest part of late Roman Britain and was also the area where the most powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdoms emerged. Whoever controlled the forces in this band of territory would have an enormous advantage. It is also possible that the language of the Saxon leaders could act as a lingua franca in areas like these, where there were Latin- and British-speakers. The other ‘prong’ would be the people migrating from northern <i>Germania</i> and arriving in the eastern coastal regions. The social and economic crisis around 400 had affected the coastal regions of northern Germany too, causing political upheavals and, as was often the case in such circumstances, migration from <i>barbaricum</i> into Roman territory, in this case Britannia, as well as the coast of Gaul.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify;"><span face=""Arial",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">This political struggle for mastery of the lowlands is usually the backdrop for the legends of ‘King Arthur’, a doomed ‘last of the Romans’ attempting to defend civilisation against an onslaught of barbarians. Sadly, we can never know whether Arthur existed. There is no reliable evidence that he was a real historical personage, but equally there is no way of being sure that a genuine figure did not lie behind the later legend. In the fifth century, real figures could easily disappear from history. The Roman general Syagrius (possibly an analogue for Arthur) would have been forgotten, had not Gregory of Tours read a lost source (probably a <i>Life</i> of Remigius of Rheims) that mentioned him in connection with the tale of the Vase of Soissons. But, as is shown by the story of Syagrius and his father Aegidius and their rivalry with Childeric and his son Clovis for control of the Frankish army on the Loire, fifth-century politics very rarely settled down into a neat binary opposition between barbarian invaders on one side and Roman defenders on the other. Gildas talks of ‘civil war’ in Britain as dominating the former provinces’ recent history, rather than barbarian invasions. If the rest of the western Empire provides any sort of guide to the sorts of process that went on in lowland Britain between 400 and 500 we ought to envisage warfare between different factions, each one made up of alliances of Romans <i>and</i> Barbarians. ‘Roman’ generals could command ‘barbarian’ armies, or ‘barbarian’ generals might lead the armies of a ‘Roman’ polity. When, in the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries, writers came to compose their histories of fifth- and sixth-century Britain, what they wanted (as their contemporaries in mainland Europe also wanted) was a story of how one people – that which by their day dominated the area in which they lived – had come to oust those who had occupied these lands before. Conquest and expulsion was the only model they had for explaining how one ethnic identity had replaced another. How had the barbarian Franks or Saxons ousted the Romans? Roman commanders of Saxon troops in a Romano-Barbarian faction had no place in that kind of narrative. In that scenario any Arthur figure who might once have existed had only one place left open for him, and that was legend.</span></p>Historian on the Edgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14069934072719158780noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7207265794297747910.post-44357718103867844102021-10-07T08:48:00.002-07:002021-10-07T08:54:50.786-07:00How the World forgot about Far-Western Eurasia<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">[<i>I am at a bit of a loss as to how to open The End of Western Antiquity. I essayed an alternative opening on here <a href="https://edgyhistorian.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-ghostly-horizon-of-year-600.html">before</a>. I still like that, but one of the things that I want to do in this book is, while writing about western Europe, not give the impression that this history is in some sense privileged. I want to attempt to decentre Europe while writing about it (indeed I would argue that the western concept of 'Europe' belongs to this period of what I think of as the 'closing of far western Eurasia'). I have talked about this <a href="https://edgyhistorian.blogspot.com/2019/01/decentring-western-european-history-in.html">before</a>. A lot of recent history has tried to make the case for information networks between east and west and these, to be sure, existed. I think, though, that for all the effort the harvest is pretty meagre and that the interest is largely one-way. At the same time, though, I don't think that the West was in thrall to the 'Byzantine' East or slavishly copying it. I think it was going its own way, but it was a way that ran separately to the great networks of early medieval world history. See what you think, anyway. This is very much a first draft and, in this version at any rate, it lacks any references</i>.]</span></div><p style="text-align: justify;">Sometime around the middle of the sixth century, the scholar and bureaucrat Procopius of Caesarea was finishing the eighth and final book of his greatest work, <i>The Histories</i>, narrating the closing stages of the Gothic War in Italy. Around the middle of that book, however, in a somewhat unexpected detour, he decided to tell a story that he had heard about a war between the Varni (a people) and the soldiers who live on the island of <i>Brittia</i>. In this tale he locates the Varni beyond the Ister (the river Danube) with their territory reaching as far as the Ocean, along the other side of the Rhine from the Franks, the people who by this time ruled what had been Roman Gaul (and who obviously gave their name to modern France). Procopius says that peoples like the Franks, the Varni and others all had their own tribal names but really they were all <i>Germanoi </i>(‘Germans’). This is intriguing in its own right but when Procopius turns to the island of <i>Brittia </i>things get stranger. <i>Brittia</i>, he says, lies opposite the mouth of the Rhine. We could be forgiven for thinking, on those grounds, that Procopius means Britain but he confounds that expectation. <i>Brittia</i>, he tells us, lies between Britain (<i>Brettania</i>) and Thule, which in his geography appears to be Scandinavia. Procopius says that <i>Brittia</i> is inhabited by three peoples: the <i>Angiloi</i>, the <i>Frissones</i>, and the <i>Brittones </i>– the Angles (eventually the English), the Frisians and the Britons. Later, Procopius mentions a great wall built in ancient times, which divides this island into two. The replacement of the Saxons by the Frisians in the list of peoples we might expect to encounter in sixth-century Britain is interesting and the account of Hadrian’s wall is garbled but nonetheless <i>Brittia </i>seems, in spite of Procopius’ earlier comment, to be Britain after all. What is this <i>Brittia </i>that is not <i>Britannia</i>, this Britain that is not Britain? </p><p style="text-align: justify;">There are plausible-looking elements of sixth-century history in Procopius’ story but they are embedded in what looks like a fairy tale. In his account, the Varni were ruled by a king called Hermegiscel who allied with Theudebert, king of the Austrasian Franks, and married his sister. Hermegiscel had a son called Radegis by a previous, deceased wife, whom he had betrothed to a princess, born in Brittia and sister of the king of the <i>Angiloi</i>. After allegedly predicting his own death from something he heard in the croak of a bird in a tree, Hermegiscel advised his son to discard his betrothed and instead marry his stepmother, on the grounds that the Franks were a more dangerous neighbour than the Angiloi. After his father died (as predicted), Radegis did as he had been advised and married his father’s widow. Although he compensated his fiancée, the latter was not satisfied and, when diplomacy failed to make a difference, she led an expedition of 100,000 men in 400 ships to the land of the Varni, alongside one of her other brothers. After describing the sail-less vessels of the <i>Angiloi </i>and how neither they nor the Varni have any mounted warriors (in the case of the <i>Angiloi </i>because no horse has, according to Procopius, ever been seen in <i>Brittia</i>) Procopius tells how the Angiloi defeated the Varni. Radegis, hiding in a wood, was captured but the spurned princess, far from killing or injuring him, berated him for his fickleness and compelled him to make good his promise of marriage. So Radegis returned his step-mother to the Franks and married the young woman from <i>Brittia</i>. This is one of those stories that present a puzzle to historians of Late Antiquity. Some of its elements admittedly look interesting and plausible but can we justifiably sift them from a context that is obviously mired in the mythic? A garbled – but genuine – historical event or an old folktale with modern names inserted to increase its plausibility? The remainder of the chapter does not reduce the problem, for Procopius goes on to tell us about the ancient wall that divides the island. Unlike Hadrian’s Wall, this divides the island east from west. More than that, according to Procopius, whereas all the land east of the wall is fertile and prosperous, the land to the west is so fetid and toxic that no man can live once he has entered it. As if that is not strange enough, Procopius rounds off the chapter with a story that even he admits sounds like mythology. However, says he, since many other people have written about the story or claim to be first-hand witnesses of it, he will record it because, although he thinks people must just have dreamed it, it would look as though he was ignorant of the nature of this island if he left it out. On the coast of the kingdom of the Franks, says Procopius, live fishermen who pay no tribute to the Franks in return for performing the service of transporting the souls of the dead to the island of <i>Brittia</i>. At night they hear a mysterious voice summoning them to this task and are drawn to crew boats which appear on the shore. Although no one can be seen in them, they feel heavy and sink low in the water. The fishermen row these boats across to the island of <i>Brittia </i>where they hear a voice which calls out the names, careers and fathers’ names of the men or the names of the husbands of the women, feminism evidently not really being a thing on the Isle of the Dead. After this, the boats seem quite empty and skip lightly over the water back to the land of the Franks. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">What is going on here? The wall is clearly a bizarre rendition of Hadrian’s Wall, and the story of <i>Brittia </i>as the Isle of the Dead is possibly a play on the similarity between <i>Thanatos </i>– death – and Thanet, the eastern tip of Kent, and an island in antiquity. That misunderstanding, or possibly pun, was known in late antiquity. In the early seventh century, Isidore of Seville repeated information from Julius Solinus’ third-century <i>Wonders of the World</i>, which said that the name of the island of Thanet came from the Greek word for death but (possibly confusing it with Ireland) that this was because snakes could not live there and that soil from the island would kill them. Something like this might lie behind Procopius’ story but two points should be made. One is that the text itself does not name the island as <i>Tanatos </i>(Thanet), rather than <i>Brittia</i>, or speak of death or the dead; it talks rather of souls (<i>psyche</i>). The other is that a Thanet/<i>Thanatos </i>wordplay could only have originated among native Greek-speakers in Procopius’ own world or the much reduced and rapidly declining number of educated westerners who, like Isidore, knew Greek. The fruitfulness of the east of the island possibly came from a source like Solinus, who says that Thanet is bounteous and fertile, but if so it had been badly mangled by the time it reached Procopius, for Solinus clearly gives the name of the island as Thanet; there is no <i>Brittia </i>in his account. In any case Procopius’ story of the isle of the dead contains not the faintest echo of anything in Solinus’ account, in which Thanet is simply the most prosperous of the many islands off Britain. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">Wherever he obtained his information, the strange reports about <i>Brittia </i>seem to have been a problem to Procopius, who made clear his scepticism about at least some of them. The difference between the islands of <i>Britannia</i> and <i>Brittia</i>, which Procopius expressed as geographical, is probably historical. Until the end of the fourth century, Britain had been part of the Roman world, close to its administrative centre and frequently involved in high-level politics, as Procopius was aware. He knew from various written sources that early in the fifth century it had raised the usurper Constantine against Emperor Honorius and that, after Constantine’s suppression, it had not been recovered by the Empire but had been ruled by tyrants. In his own day, the stories that reached him from Britain were of a quite different order; Procopius himself thought they were only marginally credible. They were more akin to the tales told in classical ethnography about the isles of remote north-western <i>Barbaricum</i>, at the end of the world. How could a Roman province, even one now ruled by ‘tyrants’, be the source of such mad tales? Procopius appears to have refused to accept that it could be; the stories must have originated in Barbaricum and so he invented the additional North Sea island of <i>Brittia</i>. The opposition between civilised <i>Bretannia</i> and weird, barbarous <i>Brittia </i>illustrates how, between the beginning of the fifth and the middle of the sixth century, the former north-western provinces of the Roman Empire had, for educated inhabitants of the Mediterranean, simply dropped off the edge of the known world. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">Procopius’ ignorance about Britain is nonetheless not surprising. When Procopius was finishing his Histories, Georgius Florentius was a young boy growing up in the Auvergne, the heart of the Massif Central in the centre of the southern Gaul. Thirty years later, as Bishop Gregory of Tours, he would be composing his own <i>Histories</i>, moved to write by the profound changes of the later sixth-century whose analysis lies at the heart of the present book. Gregory was fairly well-informed about the Mediterranean world and had a reasonable knowledge of political events in the Eastern Roman Empire. But of Britain, he knew, or at least said, next to nothing in spite of it lying considerably closer to his world than to that of Procopius; indeed, it was geographically much closer to his world than the Mediterranean regions he tells us so much more about. He twice mentions the marriage of a Frankish princess to a Kentish notable, variously described as a ‘man’ and as a ‘son of a king’, and that is it. His gaze, as is well-known, firmly faced the south and the east. When one remembers that, during this period, it produced no historians of its own to make up for mainland European writers’ lack of interest in its affairs, it is no surprise that Britain effectively falls out of recorded history between c.410 and c.597. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">Procopius’ ignorance did not start at the Channel, though. His knowledge even of Gallic history and geography was tenuous and littered with strange stories and misunderstandings. Here, the contrast with his fourth-century precursor Ammianus Marcellinus, another Greek-speaker from the Levantine coast, is if anything even clearer. Ammianus finished his <i>Res Gestae</i> (loosely ‘Deeds Done’) a little over 150 years before Procopius completed the first seven books of his Histories but it is inconceivable that he could have been as confused about Gallic geography as Procopius was. It would be wrong to say that the western provinces had been central to fourth- and fifth-century works composed in the Eastern Empire but they had featured nevertheless. How could they not? An Emperor resided in northern Gaul for much of that period; Gallic bishops like Hilary of Poitiers had played important roles in imperial theological controversies. Within two or three generations of Procopius, however, Eastern Roman historians barely mentioned Gaul, let alone Britain. Italy mattered of course; some of it remained imperial territory and the home of the Pope. The Iberian peninsula, however, was drifting beyond their consciousness. By contrast, western writers, especially in Spain and Italy, continued to write about events in the East. The mid-seventh-century Burgundian chronicler known as Fredegar knew of some political and military happenings in the Eastern Empire and its neighbours, even if his accounts were sometimes confused. This interest was, however, barely reciprocated by writers in the eastern Mediterranean or beyond. East of the Adriatic, among even educated people, by the seventh century the western tip of the Eurasian land-mass had, for whatever reason, simply ceased to matter.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Nonetheless, as will be discussed in more detail later in this volume, maritime trade continued to connect the eastern and western Mediterranean until well into the last quarter of the sixth century and beyond. When Procopius was writing, such seaborne networks continued to reach around the Iberian Peninsula, up the west coast of Gaul and thence to the eastern shores, especially, of the Irish Sea. In fact, in the fifth and earlier sixth centuries the western regions of what had been Roman Britain had more extensive and important contacts with the Mediterranean world than they had during the four centuries of imperial rule. One reason for that was that the longer-distance seaborne routes between the formerly Roman parts of mainland Europe and lowland Britain – now becoming ‘Anglo-Saxon’ kingdoms – appear generally to have atrophied in the fifth century. Stories could have reached Procopius from the Romanised magnates of Western Britain suggesting that Britannia was still recognisably a former Roman province. Whatever stories arrived from the eastern side of the island came via another route and seemed to represent a very different world resembling the mythical islands described by classical authors. By the end of the period that concerns this book these commercial networks too had largely vanished, replaced by rather different webs of interaction.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">This disjuncture between the trading links and the seeming disconnection of the written sources is important. Historians and archaeologists have become ever more interested in recreating past networks, an interest boosted by the development of statistical tools and ‘network theory’. Yet, although we can plot lines on maps that ultimately connect places like Tintagel in Cornwall with Carthage in North Africa or Phocaea in the Levant, what did that mean to the people who lived their lives at each end of such a connection? In the last third of the sixth century there were sailors who knew of certain products, such as tin, that could be obtained from formerly Roman Britain. They knew that there was a market there for Mediterranean wine, oil and high-quality table-ware. The people from whom they bought, or perhaps for whom they sold, their wares and to whom they brought back, and possibly sold, other goods and materials seem, however, to have had no more interest in these far western lands than they had had, in previous centuries, in the lands whence came the amber in their jewellery. Britain, it seems, even lost its rhetorical function as the northern limit of civilisation. Meanwhile, for those in the former western Roman provinces, the east was fast becoming a land of Christian legend and infrequent pilgrimage. Once, a network had radiated from the Mediterranean in all directions, joining up with similar webs spun from China and India; by c.600 the capes and archipelagos of far western Eurasia had largely fallen out of that network of connections.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">What are the implications of this isolation? In traditional grand narratives, from Henri Pirenne through to Perry Anderson, these shifts forced western Europe to turn in on itself. For Pirenne the closure of the Mediterranean, which he ascribed to the Arab invasions of the later seventh century, compelled a shift of the western European centre of gravity from the Mediterranean northwards to the Rhineland, and an increased focus on North Sea commerce. Hence Pirenne’s famous dictum that ‘without Mohammed, Charlemagne is inconceivable’. Things did not end there, though. This was only the first chapter in a narrative of the rise of the great European trading cities which in time became the foundation for Western European capitalism and Empire. In Anderson’s Marxist vision, the ‘inward turn’ of Europe after Rome produced feudalism which, in turn, provided the dynamics for urban rebirth, technological advancement and, again, eventually capitalism and the domination of the West. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">The isolation of the far western edges of Eurasia from the great cultural and economic networks of the Early Middle Ages has somehow become part of a triumphalist European grand narrative, explaining how those peripheral western peninsulas and the archipelago just off its shore became the centres of world-exploiting colonial empires. It is, however, worth shedding a different light on this period. It is perhaps helpful to remember that this was a period when what became western Europe (not a geographical term of the time) was peripheral in a global sense; when, as continued to be the case for a millennium afterwards, it had little to offer the great trading networks, when the Empires at the heart of the Eurasian landmass had little to no interest in it.</p>Historian on the Edgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14069934072719158780noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7207265794297747910.post-27801247718850550822021-07-19T09:36:00.006-07:002021-07-19T10:36:34.695-07:00A Difficult Decade; an Apology<p style="text-align: justify;">Readers of this blog will know that I have long suffered with mental health issues, especially depression. I haven't made any secret of this, largely because I felt it was one small way of confronting the stigma which continues to be associated with mental illness.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">It's been a difficult decade or so for me, including a minor 'breakdown' (as it would have been called) in late 2015 and several spectacular screw-ups which have been linked one way or another to my mental health. It was, however, only around the end of 2019 that I began to realise that the depression might be more of a symptom of something else than the whole problem in itself. Reassessing some of my own problematic behaviour led to reading some online articles about Autism Spectrum Disorder, then some books, and taking some fairly well-respected tests(<span style="color: red;">1</span>). The results seemed pretty clear; I am 'on the spectrum'; neurodivergent. Now, this may not come as a surprise to a lot of you, but it did to me. Like a lot of so-called 'high-functioning' (problematic term) adults, I had managed to conceal my neurodiversity even from myself.(<span style="color: red;">2</span>) It was also a case of me having the usual caricature preconceptions of autism. I can't draw the Houses of Parliament from memory after having looked at them for a few seconds; I can't remember 80-digit strings of numbers; whatever. Indeed, for a lot of my lifetime, nobody really was aware of quite how broad the spectrum is or of how it can present over time, at different stages of life. I still don't have a formal diagnosis; the NHS has an 18-month-to-two-year waiting list and obviously (as it should) prioritises people who need more basic support in negotiating everyday life. Private organisations have 6-month waiting lists and a diagnosis can cost £2-3k. Fortunately I am in a position to set some wheels in motion on that front. I do have an opinion from a qualified professional (a specialist counsellor), though, and for now that's good enough for me.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">What has become very clear to me is that most of my 'masking' strategies were age-related or even age-appropriate. I masked my uneasiness in social situations and not 'getting' the rules either by making a joke, being a clown or otherwise being consciously unconventional. We autistic (or likely autistic) folk tend to prefer straight talking and - as is well known - don't really 'get' meanings that are wrapped up in diplomatic-speak (this is possibly even more a problem in the UK)(<span style="color: red;">3</span>); my default setting to asking a question after a paper, if there was something I didn't agree with or wanted to discuss, was just to come out and say so; if someone asked me if X might be the case rather than Y, as I had suggested, my natural response is to say 'no - it's not'. You asked a question; I answered. What's the problem? If someone gave a bad paper or wrote a bad book, you say so, right? I never 'got' the idea that you'd be really complimentary about a piece of work and trash it in private conversation. To be honest, I still don't really get that, even if I have learned - slowly and painfully - not just to 'have a go' like I used to. It took me 20 years to learn to say 'thank you for your paper [etc]' before asking a question and to say 'thank you for your question; it's a good question...' before answering and it still seems unnatural, as though I am stiltedly reciting a script and that everyone must notice.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">All of this was exacerbated by being of my generation. Most, if not all, of us have role models; we try to teach like the people who we respected as teachers, to write like the people whose writing we admire, and so on. This is especially important, though, to those of us on (or likely on) the spectrum. We learn to cope in social situations by copying the behaviour of people who seem to be good at it.(<span style="color: red;">4</span>) Now, when I was young what we'd now see as aggressive, 'macho' - even really unnecessarily dismissive - behaviour seemed to be the mark of the 'fearsome intellectual' (of whatever sex/sexuality). I remember an interview for a Junior Research Fellowship at Oxford when, after a well-known historian of Anglo-Saxon England really laid into me and this really knocked me over, I was told that the correct response was 'to come right back at them'. My PhD viva consisted of 3 hours of another well-known Oxford historian/archaeologist basically being rude about my work (after having told me at the beginning that I had passed, so that was OK). None of this was especially easy to deal with, especially when your default reaction when confronted by people who have the sort of cast-iron self-confidence that comes with a certain British socio-educational background, is to assume they must be right. In those days, spectacularly critical book reviews - often downright rude - were frequently shared with awe and admiration. Dorothy Parker/Margot Asquith-style put-downs seemed to be prized. Not by everyone, obviously (there were some people who were forward thinking), but it was a very common attitude, and some of the forward-thinkers seemed to be just as capable of being vicious in other ways. My first head of department (who once threw a set of keys at me and, on another occasion, shouted at me and told me I didn't do any work, in front of the whole department) was someone who shouldered their way to the very top of the profession. These things make a big impression when you have no instinctive idea of how to manage social situations. Although we have difficulty with unwritten social conventions, we autistics can simultaneously rigidly observe more obvious hierarchies/rules, so I tended to look up to senior folk that behaved like this. I still find it difficult <i>not</i> to treat the 'great and good' with probably excessive intellectual deference. They may not realise this! </p><p style="text-align: justify;">Anyway, all of this was OK when I was a young/er academic. You can be a clown, a joker, and also a bit brash - a bit of a fire-eater - when you're a young <i>man</i> in academia.(<span style="color: red;">5</span>) There were some of the great and good that took against me in c.1991 and have never accepted me since; I always assumed this was a class thing (and to some extent I still think it was) but I now realise this was probably mostly because of my social difficulties. But generally you can get on pretty well as an 'enfant terrible' - up to a point. If you work hard and you are a good teacher, being unconventional, a joker, etc., is 'cool' and you can get away with being a bit of a hard task-master on occasion; it was all part of the package that was 'Guy'.(<span style="color: red;">6</span>) But - for obvious reasons - none of this still works when you're in your late 40s/50s and a 'senior professor'. Well, the reasons are obvious if you have some sort of natural understanding of social situations and how they work. If you don't, well, not so much. My masking strategies have serially failed and left me very exposed. And unhappy. In consequence I have done a number of silly things, some of which I regret for reasons other than that they made me look like a twat.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Part of the problem has also been that I treat most people in pretty much the same way (this is classic ASD behaviour) but, having that possibly excessive deference to my elders, I have expected the respect due to the status I have earned, not in obvious deference, but just in respect that I might know what I am talking about and am good at what I do. I think that was what I saw as the pay-off for me generally being informal with people of whatever status (I am not saying that any of this is logically consistent or 'correct'). I have often, as a result, got really angry when I have thought people were talking down to me (of course they may very well not have been). It's symptomatic of a classic ASD obsession with fairness and justice. Unfortunately I have often not realised how what I say has different effects on different people. To be basic, when I say 'oh don't be a dick' to an old friend and (now) fellow-prof, it has very different effects to when I say the same thing to a post-grad, although I mean it no differently. This may seem obvious to you... That's the point. I have had to learn all this and it has taken too long.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">The discovery that I am very likely on the spectrum has been a <i>lot </i>to take in. A considerable amount of that has been like turning a light on all sorts of my life; why I am the way I am. Some of it has been regret; if only I had known this when I was [whatever age], either I maybe wouldn't have behaved like that or I would have known how to explain it, or how to get support.(<span style="color: red;">7</span>) Sometimes it makes me retrospectively angry (or yet angrier): so <i>that's</i> why those people bullied me, marked my card in career terms. I have essentially taken partial retirement because of the ongoing failure of my employer to take account of mental illness. It's really not been a retrospective 'get out of jail free card' for my bad behaviour, though; quite the opposite. Previously if I had a melt-down with someone, although I might have wished, for myself, that I hadn't done it I comforted myself with the idea that at least I was in the right. Now, quite apart from realising that the effect of my words might have been much more hurtful than I supposed (see above) or intended, I also realise that there was also a very high chance that I had the wrong end of the stick and that I had not understood the situation at all.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">So, with that in mind I would like, here and now, to make a public apology to the following, all of whom I have lost my rag with either in person or online in a way that - regardless of anything else - was inappropriate, offensive and possibly hurtful:</p><div style="text-align: center;">Mr Jack Wiegand<br />Dr Jen Edwards<br />Dr Jon Jarrett<br />Dr John Jenkins<br />Dr Rachel Stone.</div><p style="text-align: justify;">Regardless of any other rights and wrongs, I shouldn't have said what I said in the way I said or in the context in which I did so. There are doubtless others who deserve such an apology; I may therefore add to the list above. There are certainly other people I have had rows with in public and have gone about things the wrong way; let's just say that either, for one reason or another, I don't feel as bad about them or I have publicly apologised before..</p><p style="text-align: justify;">It's possible that I will blog more about my experience of neurodiversity in academia, or possibly set up a new blog for that. In the meantime, thanks for reading.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><b>Notes</b></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: red;">1</span>: The common tests are problematic, as is fairly well known, but the problems seem to concern subjects who aren't white males. Funnily enough, my own demographic appears to have been the default setting (hardly anything surprising about that, and far more widespread in medicine than just in issues of psychology/psychiatry). More socially disadvantaged or marginalised groups tend to 'mask' in more extensive and different ways. As far as I can tell, though, these tests are OK for white males.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: red;">2</span>: To the extent that when I went through the tests with my partner I would be reading out symptoms and saying 'well, that's not really me is it?' and she'd reply 'er, hello? What about x, y and z?'</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: red;">3</span>: Once, when I was about to something that turned out to do me a fair amount of harm, a senior colleague told me that I needed to 'think carefully' before doing it. So I thought carefully about it. And did it. Afterwards he said 'obviously I meant you shouldn't do it; you should have realised that'. </p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: red;">4</span>: Check out my writings about social theory. This all seems to take on a new significance now.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: red;">5</span>: This again points up all of the everyday sexism in academia, as well as in the diagnosis of autism.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: red;">6</span>: I had a colleague over a decade ago now who told me how impressed he was that all the students just refer to me as 'Guy'. I was pretty cool in those days, even if I say so myself, but that was then. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">7: Obviously, for someone my age, the frustration is only increased by the fact that awareness of many relevant aspects of ASD simply didn't exist back then. </p>Historian on the Edgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14069934072719158780noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7207265794297747910.post-23094543257184246122021-04-06T08:16:00.002-07:002021-04-06T08:16:20.225-07:00History: The True Story Uncovered (Part 2)<p> <span style="text-align: justify;">[</span><span style="color: #2b00fe; text-align: justify;"><i>In this second part of the chapter I develop the argument that history has the same features as language in general. It is incapable of being pinned down to a single factual original simply because we retell history in language. The way history is written - even at the most basic level - is mired in linguistic and other choices that have nothing to do with fact. Again, that is just how history is and the alternative is practically inconceivable anyway. 'Facts' and 'events' in history also have the same features as other units of language aimed at conveying information; they all have their signifieds, and are all capable of infinite repetition so that, again, there is no fixed originary meaning. In conclusion I repeat that none of this renders history detached from the importance of empirical accuracy, and is no licence to make things up or to deny that things happen. It is simply the way that history is, but we need to emrace the possibilities that that presents - which is what the second half of </i>Why History<i> Doesn't </i>Matter <i>is about.</i></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="color: #2b00fe;">The same caveats apply as for part one and, for the same reasons, the notes start at 'iv.'..</span></i>]</div><h2><span style="text-align: justify;">Historical narrative is “structured like a language”</span></h2><div style="text-align: justify;">Words matter. It is of crucial importance, if we are to explore how History can create a role for itself separate from simple chronicling and antiquarianism, to develop the point about the literary or rather linguistic nature not just of historical writing but of historical narrative itself. Even the dullest chronicle is trapped in a linguistic net that makes it much more than a simple description. The vocabulary we use to describe past events never bears a simple or direct to the historical object being discussed. Let us take as an example a seemingly uncontroversial description of a well-known event: The Battle of Waterloo (18 June 1815). To name it the Battle of Waterloo is already a decision to accept the name given to the encounter by the victors, rather than the (now much less common) French name of La Belle Alliance. To call it “a British victory” (let alone an <i>English</i> victory!) is to make several more decisions. First, one has ascribed the victory to the British, rather than “the Allies”; although the army might have been commanded by the Duke of Wellington, his Dutch and German allies made up 60% of the army.<a ch.01="" edn4="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[iv]</a> Even to label the battle an allied victory would be controversial to those who see the intervention of the Prussians as the decisive element. That, since 1815, convention in anglophone history has passed from referring to the battle as an English victory, through ascribing the success to the British, to acknowledging that the battle was won by allies drawn from numerous nations – leaving aside those who wish to call it a Prussian, or even “the German”,<a ch.01="" edn5="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[v]</a> victory – is proof enough of the baggage that even seemingly straightforward descriptions can carry. More importantly, though, all those options still use the word “victory”, implicitly therefore categorising the event from the perspective of the winners, be they British, allied or Prussian. It is a meaningful difference from the choice to describe the engagement as a French defeat. None of these various permutations of vocabulary – and we have left aside more obviously contentious language, such as describing it as a triumph or a catastrophe<a ch.01="" edn6="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[vi]</a> – is entirely neutral. Apart from the description of the victory as “English”, each can be argued to work perfectly well as a description of the events of 18 June 1815. On the other hand, those events themselves impose no specific vocabulary on the historian. Even a phrase as banal as “on 18 June 1815 the Allied army won the Battle of Waterloo” is thus already tangled up in a network of linguistic choices that take it away from bearing an unmediated relationship to the object described. To escape the latter, one would have to describe the day in something like the following manner:</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote>On the date identified in conventional calendars as 18 June 1815, several hours of heavy fighting took place around various farms and hamlets to the south of Brussels, at the end of which the army comprising troops from Britain, the southern and northern Netherlands, Prussia and various other German states moved forward towards the south and the army largely but not entirely composed of French soldiers fighting for Napoleon Bonaparte moved back away from them and towards Paris after losing more men killed and wounded.</blockquote></div><div style="text-align: justify;">No one can seriously envisage any kind of history of the Napoleonic Wars being written in that kind of laborious prose! To the purveyor and consumer of writing that chronicles history’s many interesting tales, this sort of issue is of no more than stylistic importance<a ch.01="" edn7="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[vii]</a> or interest at best, and rightly so. However, minor though it may seem, this point lies at the heart of what I will suggest are the potential reasons why historical research could matter. The choices that I described above are in some ways all the more important for being barely conscious ones relating to a comparatively banal piece of labelling. Even they have political or other connotations; the decisions are those of the writer; they are not empirically imposed by the evidence itself. As we move further into the nature of historical writing, the results of such decisions become more significant still.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Here we must consider some philosophy, which will be expanded, and its implications developed, later. This might look like a detour from the subject of this chapter but it will be vital for my argument and it needs to be introduced here for reasons which will become apparent. In elementary linguistic theory, the letters D-O-G are obviously enough not actually, in and of themselves, a dog; what linguists call the sign (e.g. the word “dog”) is a fusion of the signifier (in our example, the letters D-O-G) and the signified (here the concept of a barking, tail-wagging quadruped). That speakers of a language agree on that sign is something that has developed over centuries and which continues to evolve. That raises the absolutely crucial point that to carry meaning the sign must be “iterable” (that is to say repeatable in any situation involving speakers of a language and the idea of a dog). This applies to any system of communication, even if devised as a private language between two siblings and no one else. If I tell you that I saw a mnyargle going past the window, you won’t have the faintest idea what I am on about, because I just made the word up. If I explain that a mnyargle is a furry, tail-wagging, barking quadruped, however, you will understand. Now that you understand, though, I can go on talking about mnyargles to my heart’s content, albeit at the expense of you thinking that I have lost my mind. More importantly, though, you can pass this book to someone else, who can read this passage and thereby also know what a mnyargle is, or you can leave the book on the bus, it can be picked up by someone else and they too can understand the meaning of mnyargle, even though neither of us is present. Someone can find a copy of this book decades after my death and yours, discover what the word means and use it correctly. This issue does not only, as was once generally assumed, apply only to writing but to speech too (substitute “recording” for “book” in the example above and the point remains the same). Indeed, all signifying systems, whether spoken and written or not, share these same features. If I see a dog I understand what it is because of an iterable concept or category of what a dog is.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Because of all that, there is no point where a particular word or term relates to a specific object in a pure, unadulterated form. Even in a hypothetical situation where I live alone on an island and have never spoken to anyone else (how that is possible need not concern us; it’s like Tarzan), the first time I see a dog, and understand it as member of the category “dog” (rather than as “friendly animal” or “threatening animal” or “Mr Woofy”<a ch.01="" edn8="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[viii]</a>), logically that category must already be in my mind and does not exclusively refer to that specific beast in that particular encounter. Logically (if not temporally) the concept precedes its first use. This is because all words convey their meaning by virtue of their difference from all the other words or categories in the language. So, it is not simply the case that D-O-G = furry, barking, tail-wagging quadruped, but also that D-O-G ≠ Cat (or pig, or iguana, or hat, or…). The preceding discussion, and especially the points about the radical separability of signifying systems and their particular users, summarises, as some readers will have noticed, the ideas of the still unjustly-maligned and calumniated French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). Invoking Derrida’s name can act as something of a shibboleth, which is why I have held off from mentioning it until after I have described the key points of his theory.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Returning to the latter, in sum the meaning of a word is perpetually deferred – you can never get back to its pure, originary meaning – and stuck in equally endless chains of difference.<a ch.01="" edn9="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[ix]</a> For this reason, Derrida coined the word différance<a ch.01="" edn10="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[x]</a> to combine these features and describe this essential feature of language. Again, the point applies to every sign in every signifying system. They all function, in Derrida’s terms, “textually”, in that they share the essential features of text, with meaning conveyed by spacing, juxtaposition, différance and so on. Thus, when Derrida said that there is nothing outside text this was what he meant; you can never get outside différance; you can never get access to some sort of “beyond-text” (hors-texte) where meaning is pure and absolute.<a ch.01="" edn11="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[xi]</a> This in some ways is acknowledged in the famous beginning of Saint John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the word [Gk <i>logos</i>; Latin <i>uerbum</i>]. And the word was God and the word was with God.”<a ch.01="" edn12="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[xii]</a> The point where meaning is absolute and outside différance can only be the divine. Outside the sphere of the theological, though, there is always the potential for slippage. In this fact lie the linguistic resources for irony, sarcasm and pun. After all, the word ‘d-o-g’, with which I began can also be a verb, but let us leave that there. I would not want dogged discussion of dogs to dog our steps through the rest of this chapter.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">More importantly still, there are always points where writers make jumps, in their choice of words or concepts, that are not governed, empirically, by the nature of the thing they are discussing. In the Waterloo example above, these would be in the decision to refer to the engagement as a victory or a defeat. Where we can identify those points, which Derrida called “aporias”, we can open up points of decision that allow us to look at the writer’s assumptions and at alternative meanings or readings. Again, this is not an issue that is important to the consumer of public chronicling or antiquarianism, and that is fine. I will gradually present an argument, however, about why it is essential to making history matter.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">For now, though, I would stress that this throws the problems with the idea that there are “true stories” that students can be taught into yet starker relief. The sorts of problems I have just briefly outlined saturate any narration, not only in the choice of words but also in the choice of content. The points that Derrida made about “text” can be seen to apply equally well to events. After all, within a historical narrative it is not only the case that “the Battle of Marston Moor” = “the events that took place on 2 July 1644 between the villages of Tockwith and Long Marston, north of York”, but also that “the Battle of Marston Moor” ≠ “the Battle of Naseby” (or “the battle of Edgehill”, or “the Battle of Lostwithiel”, etc.). The “does not equal” sign in the previous sentence encompasses the relative chronology, the differing preceding campaigns, subsequent consequences and military contexts, different tactical outcomes and so on. All those differences help constitute the things that identify Marston Moor and thus, within historical narration, make up the “signified” of the “signifier” “Battle of Marston Moor”. Even the notion of “the battle of X” is iterable. After all, staying within the mid-seventeenth century, there were two “Battles of Breitenfeld”, two “Battles of Nördlingen” and, returning to England, two “Battles of Newbury”. The point is perhaps driven home by the fact that there were also two “Battles of Lützen”: one in 1632 during the Thirty Years’ War and one in 1813 during the Napoleonic Wars. Unlike the battles listed earlier, which all took place during the same war and thus at least get numbered by historians for convenience, these are both simply called “the” Battle of Lützen. If I were to tell you that one of my ancestors was killed at the battle of Lützen, you might go away impressed that I could trace my ancestry back to the 1630s, when I was only talking about 1813. Within a narrative, then, events take on a function similar to those of words within a sentence or passage. They are chosen and placed to convey meaning according to positioning and juxtaposition with other events. We have seen this in the example of the “Northumbrian feud” and the sacked diarist discussed earlier, as well as in the events chosen for depiction in the films about the Zulu War. Just as aporias are encountered in authors’ choice of words, they exist equally in the choices of the events that make up a narrative. Those structural or functional similarities also permit the same kinds of slippage or miscommunication, so that a story can be taken quite a different way from that intended, as was seen earlier.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As well as the implicit spaces in historical language between words (or signs) and meaning, and between what is said overtly and what could just as easily have been said, there are other gaps that can be opened. These are the ones closed in the processes of selection and narrative. As was shown in the example of the “Northumbrian Feud” events are linked by juxtaposition. Placing one episode directly after another, a causal link is suggested even without necessarily using overt vocabulary like “as a result”, “consequently” or “therefore”. The time between the events, and everything that happened during that time, are closed up or covered over in such juxtaposition. The Durham Anonymous closed up spaces of about ten, at least seven and thirty-six years by placing one after another the events that he wished to link in a chain of cause and effect. This juxtaposition and the closing up of time that it involves are vital in giving events their precise significance and signification. When Cy Endfield opened <i>Zulu </i>with shots of the devastation of the British army’s camp at iSandlwana, replete with dead redcoats, he was building a particular story. Endfield and John Prebble, who co-authored the screenplay, also – shamefully – made out that the Zulus launched their attack on the British while pretending to discuss peace (the diametrical opposite of the events of late 1878 and early 1879). So, having swept aside the main British army in their attack, the Zulus were storming on towards Rorke’s Drift, where only 100 British soldiers stood in their way. Keep watching to see what happened… Fifteen years later, in <i>Zulu Dawn</i>, Hickox worked from a screen-play by Endfield, who perhaps wanted to make up for the distortions of his earlier film. The prequel opens the temporal space closed by <i>Zulu</i>, to recount how the British troops at iSandlwana came to find themselves being slaughtered and their camp destroyed. Telling a story of British imperial and aristocratic arrogance, the immediate background to Rorke’s Drift, and thus the battle itself, take on quite another appearance. Watch <i>Zulu </i>directly after watching <i>Zulu Dawn</i> and you are likely to “read” it rather differently from the way intended by its writer and director. Again, it must be said that this does not only apply to screenplays or fiction. ‘[T]he narrative of the barbarian invasion and settlements can be said to have begun’ in 376, says Ian Wood.<a ch.01="" edn13="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[xiii]</a> Indeed it can, but for not any particularly decisive reason. Historians all have to choose starting- and end-points for their work, almost always out of convenience. Without wanting to embroil the reader in a technical discussion of late Roman History, the narrative of the barbarian migrations could as easily start in any number of dates other than 376. People (including me)<a ch.01="" edn14="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[xiv]</a> have tended to start in 376 for several reasons including simple historiographical custom. One reason for that traditional starting date, however, is the assumption that the Goths who sacked in Rome in 410 and went on to settle in the south-east of what is now France in 418/19 were the same people who had crossed into the Roman Empire in 376 and defeated the Eastern Roman army at the battle of Adrianople (378). It is assumed that they remained an effectively unsubdued “people” within the Empire, who eventually rebelled again under Alaric in the 390s and the rest, as they say, “is history”. But the traditional narrative, like the story of the Northumbrian Feud, closes up time, in this case a decade or so between the end (in 382) of the Gothic crisis that erupted in 376 and the outbreak of the Gothic rebellion under Alaric in the mid-390s. If that closed space is recognised and opened it is possible to argue that the resolution of that crisis, in fact marked the end of any meaningful story of the Goths who crossed the Danube in 376 as a distinct group of people.<a ch.01="" edn15="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[xv]</a> On the other hand, opening the space closed by starting the narrative in 376 can, in the same way that <i>Zulu Dawn</i> does for <i>Zulu</i>, find a prequel that casts the later story in quite a different light. In this case we could see the origins of the Gothic crisis not in the appearance out of the blue of the Huns, a historical <i>deus ex machina</i>, but in the destabilising of the region north of the Danube by Emperor Valens’ Gothic War of 367-9.<a ch.01="" edn16="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[xvi]</a> We could even take the story right back to a treaty between the Goths and Emperor Constantine I in 332.<a ch.01="" edn17="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[xvii]</a> In some ways one critical task of the historian is to create innumerable ‘prequels’ to other historical narratives.#</div><div><h2>Conclusion</h2><div style="text-align: justify;">In this chapter, I have attempted to illustrate the relationship between time, experience, record and the creation of history and to suggest the literary and, especially, linguistic features that saturate the latter. Any meaning that events have depends upon their place in a retrospectively constructed narrative. It depends on their juxtaposition with the other events selected within the narrative and upon the type of narrative that is told. All that depends entirely upon the contingent attitude of the historian/narrator/rememberer. None of that affects the relative historicity or the facticity of the events recorded in the sources. Let’s be clear: what I have said is not a license to deny that things occurred. The past, as the unity of all time, thought and action up until this very moment, here, now, happened and cannot be changed. But, as I have shown, it is absolutely meaningless in and of itself. It only takes on meaning through the way its contents are selected and arranged in the present. That history is something that can be and is changed. Regularly. To uncover the true story of history is to discover that no single “true story” ever happened and that none of history’s myriad stories is, in itself, “true”. And any account that demands to be accepted as the true story or the national narrative is almost certainly myth.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">_________________________________</div><h3 style="text-align: justify;"><b>Notes</b></h3></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a ch.01="" ednref4="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[iv]</a> See above, p.000 and p.000, n.000</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a ch.01="" ednref5="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[v]</a> Peter Hofschröer, <i>Waterloo: The German Victory</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a ch.01="" ednref6="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[vi]</a> Note that at the start of this chapter I deliberately described iSandlwana as a “disastrous British defeat” rather than as a “triumphal Zulu victory”. The latter would have made no sense given the point of the <i>story</i> that I wanted to tell.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a ch.01="" ednref7="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[vii]</a> As for instance in the way I have used “battle”, “encounter” and “engagement” as descriptions of Waterloo to avoid repetition of the same word.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a ch.01="" ednref8="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[viii]</a> Jacques Derrida argued, correctly, that even personal names are ultimately subject to the movements of différance. Derrida, <i>De la grammatologie</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a ch.01="" ednref9="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[ix]</a> The best analogy is that dictionary definitions only really point you at other definitions and so on, <i>ad infinitum</i>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a ch.01="" ednref10="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[x]</a> Pronounced exactly the same as différence. The fact that the difference between the two words is only detectable in the written form but nevertheless conveyable in speech is deliberate, to underscore Derrida’s point about the fundamental equivalences of writing and spoken language.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a ch.01="" ednref11="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[xi]</a> Derrida <i>De la grammatologi</i>e p.227 (<i>Of Grammatology</i> p.158): Il n’y a pas de hors-texte (there is no “beyond- (outer-, or outside-) text”. Typically, rather than make any attempt to engage with this point, Derrida’s “analytic” detractors have generally just retreated into their usual lazy, ill-informed traduction and mockery. If there’s nothing outside text how can you be hit by a bus? S. Blackburn, <i>Truth. A guide for the Perplexed</i> (London, 2004), p.170. Ho ho. The response of course is that if the bus exists outside a network of meaning and différance, how would you know to get out of the way? Blackburn, another of the self-appointed policemen of analytical rigour, had never actually read Derrida, much less tried to understand his point. If he had, he would have known that “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” did (and does) not mean “there is nothing outside the text” as he claims.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a ch.01="" ednref12="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[xii]</a> John 1.1</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a ch.01="" ednref13="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[xiii]</a> I.N. Wood, ‘The barbarian invasions and first settlements’, in <i>The Cambridge Ancient History, vol.13: The Late Empire, A.D. 337-425</i> ed. Cameron, A.M., & Garnsey, P., (Cambridge, 1998), pp.516-37, at p.517.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a ch.01="" ednref14="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[xiv]</a> G. Halsall, <i>Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376-568</i> (Cambridge, 2007),</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a ch.01="" ednref15="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[xv]</a> Halsall, <i>Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West</i>, 180-185.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a ch.01="" ednref16="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[xvi]</a> Halsall, <i>Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West</i>, 170-75</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a ch.01="" ednref17="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[xvii]</a> As, e.g., P. Heather, <i>Goths and Romans, 332-489</i> (Oxford, 1991).</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>Historian on the Edgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14069934072719158780noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7207265794297747910.post-24802107604593804792021-04-06T08:15:00.001-07:002021-04-06T08:15:09.883-07:00History: The True Story Uncovered (Part 1)<p> <span style="text-align: justify;">[</span><i style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">As some of you know, I have for the last decade been trying to put together my ideas on a philosophy of history that attempts to do two things: first returning academic history to a place (if it ever had one) where it is taken seriously as an intellectual discipline rather than a bourgeois pastime or a service industry for popular entertainment; and second where it has a coherent ethical/political framework for those who, like me, think that the writing of history is inescapably political and that the politics of history should be emancipatory. The first part of this book (</span></i><span style="color: #2b00fe; text-align: justify;">Why History <i>Doesn't</i> Matter<i>) essays a deconstruction of the current practice of history by setting what seem to be uncontroversial ideas about the practice of history against the most frequent statements about its <u>purpose</u> and <u>value</u>, and finding them contradictory and incoherent.</i></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><i style="color: #2b00fe;">This is the current draft of the projected chapter 1 ('The True Story Uncovered') </i><i style="color: #2b00fe;">of that book</i><i style="color: #2b00fe;">, which I want to share because discussions of the teaching of history (especially with regard to the British Empire) have come round again. I am fairly sure I have posted at least some of it before but if nothing else, this is an updated version. Here I have split it into two parts for ease of reading. In this first part, I set out why history is inescapably - always - about the writing of stories. I set out how histories are always shaped by various choices about where and when to start and end and about how they can always be read in any number of different ways, regardless of the writer's intention. They can't be pinned down. Then I use a medieval story to show how, as a narrative rather than an atomised collection of facts, history (as opposed to 'the past) never happens - that </i><span style="color: #2b00fe;">narratives </span><i style="color: #2b00fe;">are not in themselves </i><span style="color: #2b00fe;">facts</span><i style="color: #2b00fe;">. They are conected by imaginative, narrative, argumentative links which can be more or less plausible but are never empirical. None of this means that facts aren't important. Nor does any of this render history impossible; </i><i style="color: #2b00fe;">it is just how history is</i><i style="color: #2b00fe;"> Indeed it is History's very condition of possibility. Think about it, if all this weren't the case, if explanations and narratives could be </i><span style="color: #2b00fe;">proved,<i> the whole historical project would be finite. </i></span><i style="color: #2b00fe;">Finally in this part I try to demonstrate how the past cannot even be conceived of effectively without turning it into a story.</i></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><i style="color: #2b00fe;">Note that this is still a draft and that the footnotes are neither complete nor consistent. Note also that for reasons to do with cutting, pasting and rearranging this text from it's original word document, the notes start again from i in the last section.</i>]<i style="color: #2b00fe;"> </i></p><blockquote>But let us be wise enough to learn the true history so that we can recognise a myth when we see one.<br />- Dee Brown<a ch.01="" edn1="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[i]</a></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">In a newspaper piece setting out his vision of how history should be taught in British schools, Simon Schama enjoined educators to “[t]ell a classroom of 12-year-olds the story of the British (for they took place across our [sic] nations) civil wars of the 17th century…”<a ch.01="" edn2="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[ii]</a> It is difficult to disagree with many of the points Schama makes along the way but overall his argument is profoundly incoherent. My response to Schama’s injunction that we tell a classroom of 12-year-olds “the story of the British civil wars” is simple enough: which story? Let me explain.</div><h2 style="text-align: justify;">Zulus and Redcoats</h2><div style="text-align: justify;">When I was young, my family habitually spent Christmas with my paternal grandparents in Blackpool. One Christmas I forewent a last-minute shopping trip into town to watch the TV première of the film <i>Zulu Dawn</i> about the disastrous British defeat at the battle of iSandlwana (1879).<a ch.01="" edn3="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[iii]</a> When my family got back later, my father, aware of the movie’s subject-matter, asked drily if it had “had a happy ending”: we laughed. A few years later, I read an article in a wargaming magazine which described <i>Zulu Dawn</i> as “very good historically” but “less satisfying [than the 1964 classic <i>Zulu</i>] as a piece of cinema”.<a ch.01="" edn4="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[iv]</a> I imagine, of course, that it has a happier ending and is less unsatisfying as a movie if you don’t view the story from the British side. Indeed, I once read a reminiscence by someone who had seen <i>Zulu</i> in a Jamaican cinema, where the audience greeted each shooting or skewering of a redcoat with rapturous cheers. [<b><i><span style="color: #2b00fe;">n.b. </span></i></b><i><span style="color: #2b00fe;">I cannot for the life of me track down this story, but I haven't made it up. I have discussed it in correspondence with Ian Knight who also remembered reading it but could not identify it either. If anyone can help, please get in touch.</span></i>]</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Among aficionados at least, it is well-known that <i>Zulu </i>barely comes within waving distance of being an accurate portrayal of the battle of Rorke’s Drift and that even <i>Zulu Dawn</i> makes some inexplicable departures from fact.<a ch.01="" edn5="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[v]</a> To an extent of course, this is understandable in the process of rendering a historical event into an entertaining cinematic experience lasting a couple of hours. <i>Zulu Dawn</i> – one can legitimately argue – has little choice but to telescope the events between Chelmsford’s crossing of the Mzinyathi/Buffalo River and the battle itself, fusing discrete episodes into single actions. Nonetheless, even if both movies stuck rigidly to historically-attestable fact or academically defensible interpretations thereof,<a ch.01="" edn6="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[vi]</a> several points would remain unchanged and would apply just as well to historians.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Some things, naturally, differ profoundly between composing the screenplay for a “historical” drama and writing actual history. Historians get things wrong for all sorts of reasons. Mistakes are made in the reading of sources whether through carelessness, a lack of scholarly sophistication or simple human error. Sometimes historians get things wrong for reasons beyond their control: new evidence is discovered that renders earlier accounts obsolete;<a ch.01="" edn7="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[vii]</a> new scholarship reveals that what had hitherto been regarded as solid evidence is anything but reliable. But one of the very few things that all historians would agree on would be that writers who knowingly distorted the empirical picture given in the surviving evidence would be committing gross professional malpractice. Nonetheless, important similarities with screenplay-writing remain. One is the element of selection to which we will return; even if it wanted to, no history (or film) can tell everything, even if it is aware of everything (which inevitably it is not).<a ch.01="" edn8="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[viii]</a> All historians decide which events are important to the story they want to tell. Most importantly they decide the beginning- and end-points of the story. That itself shapes a “narrative arc” and the flavour or form of the story told. To return to our cinematic examples, the choice to start<i> Zulu Dawn </i>in the discussions immediately preceding the invasion of Zululand and to end with Chelmsford’s return to the wreckage of his camp governs the tone of the narrative, of hubris and tragedy. On the other hand, <i>Zulu</i>’s opening with the aftermath of iSandlwana and closure with the relief of the post at Rorke’s Drift frames a story of heroism and triumph over the odds. The same points apply to historical writing. A history that starts with the rise to power of Napoleon and ends with Waterloo, for example, tells one type of story. One that begins with Waterloo and ends with the accession to power of Napoleon III tells quite another. The “facts”, in and of themselves, whether disputed or not, determine neither the content nor the shape of history.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Historical narrative is also much more than a string of events placed in chronological order. Schama thought schoolteachers should tell their classes the story of the seventeenth-century British Civil Wars, but he knows that the story is not composed simply of a sequence of events of indisputable facticity. In the same article, he further instructs schoolteachers to “reinvent the art and science of storytelling in the classroom”. Once you recognise that history is about storytelling, arguments about the value of knowing historical facts begin to empty out their content. Schama wants children to learn “the history of how we [<i>sic</i>] came to execute our [<i>sic</i>] king”. Leaving aside the use of the first person plural,<a ch.01="" edn9="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[ix]</a> several important points arise. First, history lies in the “how people came to execute their king”. That “how they came to” cannot be not encompassed in any selection and sequence of events but in the story that the events are chosen to support. Some historians might see that story as reaching right back into the reign of Elizabeth I and composed of a serious of constitutional steps (or mis-steps) leading inevitably to crisis; others might see the story as having a much shorter arc and as being characterised by the failure by various parliamentarians, even Cromwell, to get an obdurate Charles to accept any number of compromises that would have kept his bum on his throne and his head on his shoulders after the end of the First Civil War. What sort of end-point does Charles’ execution represent? Was it a dramatic constitutional (as well as personal) moment, altering the nature of monarchy, or had monarchy already been irrevocably changed with the Elizabethan settlement? In other words, were the parliamentarians, in killing Charles, doing any more than – metaphorically – beheading a corpse?<a ch.01="" edn10="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[x]</a> There is still more to it than that. Do children learn of Charles I’s beheading as some sort of whiggish<a ch.01="" edn11="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[xi]</a> step on the road to modern constitutional monarchy and representative parliamentary democracy, or as the martyrdom of “Saint Charles”? Are Cromwell, Ireton and the rest champions of democracy or regicides, king-killers? Does 1649 represent triumph or tragedy? All of these stories are equally possible; none of them is empirically wrong. Which one does Schama want “all schoolchildren” to learn? Arguments like Schama’s<a ch.01="" edn12="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[xii]</a> that all schoolchildren must learn certain things about “our” history and that the story of the British Civil Wars would be one of them, clearly imply that someone, somewhere, must decide which story they learn, from all the permutations just mentioned. I do not think that that would serve children well and it certainly restricts history to a form of fact-learning, no matter how lively the story is that you put those facts into.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">One might suggest getting schoolchildren to discuss whether the events of January 1649 were the inevitable outcome of eighty years of political events or a historical accident, contingent on the personalities of 1646-48, which no one had really wanted to bring about. You could ask them whether they thought it was a triumph in the rise of parliament or a tragedy of the demise of kingship.<a ch.01="" edn13="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[xiii]</a> I would suggest that both of those would be educationally more valuable than telling them a predetermined story that everyone learnt. However, if you accept that those activities, interpretations and debates are, educationally, the bit that matters, that undermines the argument about having to know certain stories. The choice of which story to use becomes incidental.<a ch.01="" edn14="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[xiv]</a> The educational value of that sort of unpicking of narrative could equally well be served by a study of the Ming dynasty or indeed the downfall of the Zulu kingdom.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">One vital lesson to emerge from the very brief discussion of cinematic history with which I began is that the producer of history (whether the latter be on celluloid or in scholarly monograph) has no control over how it is received. The story arc of <i>Zulu Dawn</i> may have been conceived as the tale of how Victorian imperial hubris and injustice led to a disaster and the slaughter of over 1,000 men, a rather clunky but well-intentioned critique of imperialism and the British class system, but it might as easily be consumed as the story of how the arrogant white man picked a fight with the Zulu and how the whole might of the British Empire was humbled by brave African warriors as a result: a happy ending indeed. Then again, even this might be too simplistic. King Cetshwayo and many other Zulus regarded the battle and the heavy losses as anything but a triumph. <i>Zulu </i>was intended to tell the tale of how brave, heroic British soldiers fought off 4,000 Zulus.<a ch.01="" edn15="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[xv]</a> The plot clearly aims to create a sort of “will they be able to hold out?” tension, especially as casualties mount and the Zulus take the hospital, the British being gradually forced back.<a ch.01="" edn16="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[xvi]</a> Yet the Jamaican audience cheered when the Zulus speared a soldier, seemingly urging the warriors to press on heroically and finish the job in the teeth of the white man’s murderous modern rifle-fire. Ian Knight, furthermore, estimates that perhaps as many as one in three of the Zulus who attacked the British post became casualties, and most of those were killed. It’s worth noting that these were for the most part not young men but they pressed their attacks for four hours.<a ch.01="" edn17="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[xvii]</a> That would make for a quite different narrative (or reading) of bravery and determination without any of the “facts” changing at all. Tell the story of how the English executed their king in 1649 as a triumphal step on the road to modern democracy and students may still consume it as the tragic downfall of Renaissance monarchy. The facts of the matter remain the same, be they the events of recorded history or the actions depicted on the screen, but the stories and their reading take on lives of their own. History is about the writing and reading of stories and, as we have seen, stories or narratives are compositions, not “facts”.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It is important to stress this because some historians have been wont to dismiss the idea that history is a “literary fiction” on the basis that the historian is chained to the immovable rocks of things that did or did not happen – or at least which are (or are not) recorded as happening in our surviving evidence. The recorded events are indeed immovable rocks for the historian but the argument that this renders historical writing other than a literary creation is flimsy. History flows lightly over and around the rocks that it chooses and it takes its shape from the spaces in between. This by no means reduces history’s power to do what it does (or has always done); it is simply enough how history is. If we want to restore to the historical discipline some power to matter intellectually, we need to recognise that and embrace its possibilities.</div><h2 style="text-align: justify;">Thurbrand and Uhtred: History never happened</h2><div style="text-align: justify;">The implication of what I have been saying is that, if you conceive of it as stories, as more than simple collections of fact, then “history” never happened. To explain, I will employ a tale written in twelfth-century northern England.<a ch.01="" edn18="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[xviii]</a> It goes like this: Once upon a time there was a powerful and energetic earl called Uhtred who saved Durham from the Scots. Uhtred was married three times. His second marriage was to the daughter of one Styr Ulfsson and was contracted on condition that Uhtred would kill Styr’s enemy, Thurbrand. Alas, when Uhtred came to swear allegiance to King Cnut, his new ruler (and old enemy), in around 1018-20, Thurbrand and the king’s soldiers ambushed him and forty other chief men and killed them all. Uhtred’s brother Eadwulf succeeded him in the earldom but when he died Ealdred, Uhtred’s son by his first wife, became earl and killed Thurbrand. Thurbrand’s son, Carl, then campaigned against Ealdred until the two were prevailed upon to become sworn brothers and go on pilgrimage together to Rome. Unfortunately, the ship upon which they were to sail was delayed by bad weather so whilst they waited, Carl entertained Ealdred at his home in Holderness in the Yorkshire East Riding. One day, whilst showing Ealdred around his estate Carl killed Ealdred in (to quote the source)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote>a wood called Risewood and still today the place of his murder is marked by a small stone cross. Sometime later, the grandson of Earl Ealdred, Earl Waltheof, who was the son of his daughter, sent a large band of young men and avenged the killing of his grandfather with the utmost slaughter. For when the sons of Carl were feasting together at their elder brother’s house at Settrington, not far from York, the men who had been sent caught them unawares and savagely killed them together, except for Cnut whose life they spared because of his innate goodness. Sumerled, who was not there, survives to this day. Having massacred the sons and grandsons of Carl, they returned home bringing with them much booty of various kinds.</blockquote></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This is a fascinating story for many reasons; what makes it relevant to my argument is how historians have read it as the tale of a “feud”: a vendetta with each murder justified by the last and justifying the next.<a ch.01="" edn19="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[xix]</a> But let us look at this story more closely. It illustrates beautifully the fact that history is only constructed after the event. It is written as a story; English is perhaps the only western European language where the word for “history” is not also the usual word for “a story”.<a ch.01="" edn20="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[xx]</a> The account also confirms that, as suggested earlier, how we choose to tell that story is crucial. This point is often associated with the “post-modern” turn in historiography<a ch.01="" edn21="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[xxi]</a> but it has actually been made since the very earliest days of what we might think of as modern history-writing.<a ch.01="" edn22="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[xxii]</a> People like the author of this story (known to scholars as “the Durham Anonymous”) select episodes from the past and link them together to make a single strand of narrative. In this case, it was the story of a feud. But did it really happen like that or were the events simply written up in that way?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As related by the anonymous author, the story of the Northumbrian “feud” sounds unproblematic, united by a straightforward thread of cause and effect unfolding through time. In fact, though, long gaps separated the acts of violence and cut that thread. It took ten years for any violence to erupt as a result of Styr’s alleged injunction to Uhtred to kill Thurbrand. Styr’s daughter had died and Uhtred had remarried in the interim, surely freeing him from Styr’s demand. Furthermore, it was actually Thurbrand who did the only recorded attacking. A further seven years or more must have elapsed before Ealdred exacted his revenge on Thurbrand. The episode after that is interesting. Thurbrand’s son Carl is not described as trying to find an occasion to carry out his vengeance killing. Instead, he and Ealdred tried to do away with <i>each other</i>. This period was another long one. Carl’s killing of Ealdred dates to 1038, twenty-three years after his father had killed Ealdred’s father (the first event in the “feud”), and at least ten after Thurbrand’s murder (the second event). The anonymous narrator proceeds from Ealdred’s death to say simply that “sometime later, the grandson of Earl Ealdred, Earl Waltheof, … avenged the killing of his grandfather with the utmost slaughter.” Sometime later … In fact, the Settrington massacre, the fourth and final episode of the Northumbrian “feud”, took place in 1073/4, thirty-six years after Ealdred’s murder. Carl killed Ealdred four years before Waltheof was even born. A lot of selection is going on here, from a background of violence and killing, in order to create this long, unilinear saga of murder and revenge.<a ch.01="" edn23="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[xxiii]</a> Like all historians, the “Durham Anonymous” chose which story to tell and how to tell it. The history of eleventh-century Northumbria has thus come to be that of the “feud” between the families of Uhtred and Thurbrand. However, the events were not experienced like that that as they occurred, as the complex mass of events unfolded. The hi/story of the Northumbrian feud was made after the event. There’s no reason to doubt that the different events described happened; the “story”, however, never did.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Selection and narrative composition are inevitable; they are not things that “bad historians” do. The past includes everything that happened between the Big Bang and a second ago: innumerable doings, sayings, thoughts. The past is incapable even of being comprehended as such, except in the most abstract temporal sense of “stuff that has happened”. Before it can properly be envisaged, it must be converted into a narrative, a hi/story. I will return to this. In an important sense, therefore, history comes before the past! To be comprehended, the past must be given a plot with a beginning, a middle and an end (even if that end is not really an end but simply the present – a deferred ending).</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><h2 style="text-align: left;">Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away</h2><div>A simple thought experiment illustrates this further. At any given time, we can conceive of yesterday in general abstract terms as “the day before today” but before we can have any real grasp of it, for example in writing up a diary, we have to decide upon what things happened that give shape to that general concept, in other words the things that turn it into a narrative. It may be that one simply selects the main structuring events of the day: got up; had breakfast; went to work; came home; watched TV; went to bed. It might be that, as here, these things have no especially marked “plot” to them; they are just the things that happened: a sort of bare chronicle.<a ch.01="" edn1="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[i]</a> But even here the meaning of the events takes shape not just from their naming (“breakfast”, “work”) but from their sequence and juxtaposition. That record gives shape and meaning to the abstract twenty-four hours of “yesterday” and turns it into the narrative of an ordinary day. There has still been selection. This is hardly a record, even a chronicle, of the whole day. A selection of what, at the time, we thought mattered has been made. All the conversations at work and at home, the details of the trip to and from work, what was on the telly, what was eaten for breakfast (and lunch and dinner have even been omitted) and many other things have been left out.</div><div><br /></div><div>Now suppose that, having written our diary for the previous day, we have breakfast, go to work and are summoned to see the boss. We are then told that we’re to be made redundant. Now yesterday goes from being a dull day, its hours frittered and wasted in an off-hand way, to being “my last day in the job”. From being just another day those twenty-four little hours now acquire an added, perhaps even a certain tragic, quality. The diary could be amended accordingly. Certainly, how our diarist saw that day would change importantly.</div><div><br /></div><div>Let us continue the experiment. Suppose that the person who asked you the time at the bus stop yesterday, and with whom you had a brief exchange of pleasantries, began to be a regular at the bus stop, someone you got to know, and who in time became your husband/wife/partner. Something that didn’t even seem worth recording on the day it happened and possibly for some time afterwards becomes a major shaping event of your life. The dull day has become the day you met your partner, possibly one of the most important days of your life – one would like to think so. Yet, when that event happened, at the time that that “history” was made, you didn’t even notice it. Only later did it become part of a history that made you who you are. Any number of variations on this basic scenario are possible, turning a bland unit of time into a key structuring element of the history of a life. The occurrences that matter have been chosen and placed in order (sometimes, of course, they are moved out of chronological sequence, whether deliberately or otherwise<a ch.01="" edn2="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[ii]</a>).</div><div><br /></div><div>Note, though, that – underlining the point made earlier – the events, the elements themselves, do not change; only how one characterises them, how one selects them and positions them within the narrative, and how one casts that narrative. Events rarely carry an inherent meaning – those that do are often the really traumatic ones. If we return to the diarist, losing her job that day may have been the beginning of a long period of unemployment and of being treated, in spite of one’s best efforts, as an idle scrounger by tabloid editors, journalists and their readers and by populist Conservative (and Labour) governments. Every moment of that conversation with the boss, every vain attempt to keep the job, to talk the boss out of her decision might become etched on the memory; the last day at work becomes a poignant twenty-four hours. Alternatively, though, the diarist might have gone home and applied for another job, been successful, risen to the top of the company, met her partner and lived a very happy period of her life. In that case, one doubts that any especial elements of the redundancy conversation are remembered and the event itself becomes something of a happy moment of transition to something better. And didn’t I show <i>her</i> in the end? That “last day at work” remains just as it was remembered at the start of the following day, as a boring, barely-remembered twenty-four hours. But in all the different scenarios just set out it happened just the same, in just the same way.</div><div><br /></div><div>In the tale of Thurbrand and Uhtred, the “Northumbrian feud”, the same procedures were followed. A selection was made (whether by the anonymous writer or his informants) from a vast number of different events and this was then arranged in a sequence to form the story of a feud, culminating in the tale of how Earl Waltheof avenged his grandfather. Had the author or his sources been more inclined to support Carl’s family, one imagines that it would have been constructed in a very different way, probably from a different selection of past happenings.<a ch.01="" edn3="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[iii]</a> This compels us to think more closely about storytelling and especially about its linguistic and literary aspects.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div><div style="mso-element: endnote-list;">_____________________________________________</div><div style="mso-element: endnote-list;"><h3>Notes</h3><!--[endif]--><div id="edn1" style="mso-element: endnote;"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn't%20matter/Version%203.0/v.3.0%20Ch.01%20The%20True%20Story%20Uncovered.docx#_ednref1" name="_edn1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> D. Brown, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The American West</i> (London 2004), p.26.</p></div><div id="edn2" style="mso-element: endnote;"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn't%20matter/Version%203.0/v.3.0%20Ch.01%20The%20True%20Story%20Uncovered.docx#_ednref2" name="_edn2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[ii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Simon Schama, ‘My Vision for History in Schools’. <i>The Guardian</i>, 9 November 2010 (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/nov/09/future-history-schools">https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/nov/09/future-history-schools</a> accessed 8 July, 2017). Schama was educated at a public school (Habadashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School) and Cambridge: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Schama#Early_life_and_education">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Schama#Early_life_and_education</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Schama is an exceptional historian by anyone’s definition but it takes that particular (and peculiarly British; as discussed below, p.000-n.000) kind of socio-cultural capital to take to the national newspapers to instruct teachers how to do their jobs, without having held any kind of educational post in the UK since 1980.</p></div><div id="edn3" style="mso-element: endnote;"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn't%20matter/Version%203.0/v.3.0%20Ch.01%20The%20True%20Story%20Uncovered.docx#_ednref3" name="_edn3" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[iii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Dir.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>D. Hickox (1979).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The movie culminates in a slaughter of Britain’s favourite character and TV actors (including – as well as token Hollywood star Burt Lancaster – Christopher Cazenove, Phil Daniels, Denholm Elliot, Bob Hoskins, Peter Vaughan, Simon Ward “and many more”) on a scale unsurpassed before the Great Celebrity Mortality of 2016.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In other cinematic trivia, <i>Zulu Dawn</i> may have occasioned the first use of the term “prequel”, a film telling the back-story to an earlier movie (in this case <i>Zulu,</i> dir C. Endfield, 1964), though another 1979 move, the banal and unnecessary <i>Butch and Sundance: The Early Years</i> (dir. R. Lester), also has a claim to that title.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ll have more to say about prequels.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></p></div><div id="edn4" style="mso-element: endnote;"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn't%20matter/Version%203.0/v.3.0%20Ch.01%20The%20True%20Story%20Uncovered.docx#_ednref4" name="_edn4" style="mso-endnote-id: edn4;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[iv]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> I. Knight, ‘The Zulu Wars Part 3: 1879’, <i>Miniature Wargames</i> 18 (November 1984), pp.39-43, at p.43.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Knight went on to be the pre-eminent authority on the Anglo-Zulu War (see p.000, n.000, above).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Knight’s cinematic judgment was certainly not based on pro-British/Imperial sympathies.</p></div><div id="edn5" style="mso-element: endnote;"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn't%20matter/Version%203.0/v.3.0%20Ch.01%20The%20True%20Story%20Uncovered.docx#_ednref5" name="_edn5" style="mso-endnote-id: edn5;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[v]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <i>Zulu Dawn</i> made focused its story on Lt the Hon Standish Vereker, whom it depicts escaping the battle and, with his (presumably) dying shot, killing the Zulu making off with the captured British flag.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Vereker played a minor and little-documented role in the battle before being killed in the camp, shortly after having gallantly given a horse to an African soldier to escape on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ironically, and somewhat cruelly to Vereker’s memory, this episode is obviously not depicted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Boy” Pullen, played as a callow and nervous recruit by then twenty-year-old Phil Daniels was based on Quartermaster James Pullen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pullen, though, enlisted in 1851 and thus, at iSandlwana, must have been well over twenty years older than Daniels’ character.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Conversely, <i>Zulu </i>featured thirty-nine-year-old Nigel Green (a commanding 1.85m [6ft, 1”] tall) as a phlegmatic Colour Sergeant-Major Frank Bourne, who was actually only twenty-four at the time of Rorke’s Drift, only 1.6m (5ft, 4”) tall and nicknamed “the kid”!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The decision by <i>Zulu</i>’s script-writers to portray the upright teetotaller Private Alfred Henry Hook VC as a dissolute, malingering drunk raises rather different ethical questions, even if it did provide James Booth with his career-defining role. Knight, <i>Zulu Rising</i>.</p></div><div id="edn6" style="mso-element: endnote;"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn't%20matter/Version%203.0/v.3.0%20Ch.01%20The%20True%20Story%20Uncovered.docx#_ednref6" name="_edn6" style="mso-endnote-id: edn6;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[vi]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And, in so doing, doubtless condemned themselves to never getting beyond a screen-play.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rigorously historically-accurate portrayals of battles rarely make great cinema.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>See, e.g., <i>Gettysburg</i> (dir. R.F. Maxwell, 1993), which, while sometimes visually spectacular, doubtless represents <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">four hours</span> (244 minutes) irretrievably lost from the lives of viewers not interested in Civil War minutiae or typologies of mid-19<sup>th</sup>-century facial hair.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I loved it.</p></div><div id="edn7" style="mso-element: endnote;"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn't%20matter/Version%203.0/v.3.0%20Ch.01%20The%20True%20Story%20Uncovered.docx#_ednref7" name="_edn7" style="mso-endnote-id: edn7;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[vii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> This is especially true in periods like late antiquity and the Early Middle Ages which are heavily reliant upon archaeology for much of the “big picture”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is not because of the “dramatic discoveries” beloved of the media but because the gradual assembly of information from excavations permits, in kaleidoscopic fashion, quite different pictures to emerge.</p></div><div id="edn8" style="mso-element: endnote;"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn't%20matter/Version%203.0/v.3.0%20Ch.01%20The%20True%20Story%20Uncovered.docx#_ednref8" name="_edn8" style="mso-endnote-id: edn8;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[viii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> The point is nicely made satirically by <i>The Onion</i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">’s</span> review of <i>Captain America: Civil War</i> (<a href="https://www.theonion.com/the-onion-reviews-captain-america-civil-war-1819595940%20accessed%2017%20November%202017">https://www.theonion.com/the-onion-reviews-captain-america-civil-war-1819595940 accessed 17 November 2017</a>) which notes that while some characters are known to viewers from earlier films, the directors had failed to make the other 2,500 films necessary to explain the back-stories and motivations of all the other people who appear in the movie, thus (allegedly) rendering the latter entirely confusing.</p></div><div id="edn9" style="mso-element: endnote;"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn't%20matter/Version%203.0/v.3.0%20Ch.01%20The%20True%20Story%20Uncovered.docx#_ednref9" name="_edn9" style="mso-endnote-id: edn9;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[ix]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> See below, ch.2</p></div><div id="edn10" style="mso-element: endnote;"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn't%20matter/Version%203.0/v.3.0%20Ch.01%20The%20True%20Story%20Uncovered.docx#_ednref10" name="_edn10" style="mso-endnote-id: edn10;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[x]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> To adapt Jacques Rancière’s account of Furet’s view of the significance of Louis XVI’s execution. J. Rancière, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Names of History</i>, trans. H. Melehy (Minneapolis, 1994), p.39. On Rancière and history, see O. Davis, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jacques Ranciere</i> (Cambridge, 2010), pp.36-73</p></div><div id="edn11" style="mso-element: endnote;"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn't%20matter/Version%203.0/v.3.0%20Ch.01%20The%20True%20Story%20Uncovered.docx#_ednref11" name="_edn11" style="mso-endnote-id: edn11;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[xi]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Explain Whig history</p></div><div id="edn12" style="mso-element: endnote;"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn't%20matter/Version%203.0/v.3.0%20Ch.01%20The%20True%20Story%20Uncovered.docx#_ednref12" name="_edn12" style="mso-endnote-id: edn12;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[xii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Above, pp.000-000.</p></div><div id="edn13" style="mso-element: endnote;"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn't%20matter/Version%203.0/v.3.0%20Ch.01%20The%20True%20Story%20Uncovered.docx#_ednref13" name="_edn13" style="mso-endnote-id: edn13;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[xiii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> I have no idea whether or to what extent this would be feasible; I’m not a schoolteacher.</p></div><div id="edn14" style="mso-element: endnote;"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn't%20matter/Version%203.0/v.3.0%20Ch.01%20The%20True%20Story%20Uncovered.docx#_ednref14" name="_edn14" style="mso-endnote-id: edn14;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[xiv]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> It seems to me that most arguments for the value of “cultural literacy” have in any case been undermined by the existence of Google.com and 4G wifi technology</p></div><div id="edn15" style="mso-element: endnote;"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn't%20matter/Version%203.0/v.3.0%20Ch.01%20The%20True%20Story%20Uncovered.docx#_ednref15" name="_edn15" style="mso-endnote-id: edn15;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[xv]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Probably nearer 3,000 for what it’s worth; it still left the defenders facing odds of nearly 30:1.</p></div><div id="edn16" style="mso-element: endnote;"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn't%20matter/Version%203.0/v.3.0%20Ch.01%20The%20True%20Story%20Uncovered.docx#_ednref16" name="_edn16" style="mso-endnote-id: edn16;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[xvi]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> One episode in the film that, broadly, conforms to the accounts of what happened.</p></div><div id="edn17" style="mso-element: endnote;"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn't%20matter/Version%203.0/v.3.0%20Ch.01%20The%20True%20Story%20Uncovered.docx#_ednref17" name="_edn17" style="mso-endnote-id: edn17;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[xvii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Three Zulu <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">amabutho</i> (loosely, regiments) at Rorke’s Drift – the uThulwana, the nDloko, and the iNdlondlo – were formed of men born between c.1830 and c.1835, so in their mid- to late forties.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The other <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">imbutho</i>, the iNdluyengwe were comparative youngsters in their early thirties. I. Knight, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Anatomy of the Zulu Army from Shaka to Cetshwayo 1818-1879</i> (London, 1995), pp.265-7.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Before launching their attacks, these men had walked and (mostly) run 18km and crossed a flooded river, on an empty stomach. Knight, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Zulu Rising</i>, p.594.</p></div><div id="edn18" style="mso-element: endnote;"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn't%20matter/Version%203.0/v.3.0%20Ch.01%20The%20True%20Story%20Uncovered.docx#_ednref18" name="_edn18" style="mso-endnote-id: edn18;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[xviii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> The story comes from an anonymous source called the <i>De Obsessio Dunelmi</i> – <i>Concerning the Siege of Durham</i> (a misleading title as the siege of Durham hardly features in this short but interesting tract). Refs</p></div><div id="edn19" style="mso-element: endnote;"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn't%20matter/Version%203.0/v.3.0%20Ch.01%20The%20True%20Story%20Uncovered.docx#_ednref19" name="_edn19" style="mso-endnote-id: edn19;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[xix]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> See further, below, ch.5.</p></div><div id="edn20" style="mso-element: endnote;"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn't%20matter/Version%203.0/v.3.0%20Ch.01%20The%20True%20Story%20Uncovered.docx#_ednref20" name="_edn20" style="mso-endnote-id: edn20;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[xx]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Compare Geschichte, histoire, storia, historía, história, etc.</p></div><div id="edn21" style="mso-element: endnote;"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn't%20matter/Version%203.0/v.3.0%20Ch.01%20The%20True%20Story%20Uncovered.docx#_ednref21" name="_edn21" style="mso-endnote-id: edn21;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[xxi]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> See above, p.000, n.000.</p></div><div id="edn22" style="mso-element: endnote;"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn't%20matter/Version%203.0/v.3.0%20Ch.01%20The%20True%20Story%20Uncovered.docx#_ednref22" name="_edn22" style="mso-endnote-id: edn22;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[xxii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> References</p></div><div id="edn23" style="mso-element: endnote;"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn't%20matter/Version%203.0/v.3.0%20Ch.01%20The%20True%20Story%20Uncovered.docx#_ednref23" name="_edn23" style="mso-endnote-id: edn23;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[xxiii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> See, further, below, pp.000-000</p><div style="text-align: justify;"><a ch.01="" ednref1="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[i]</a> See above, p.000,</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a ch.01="" ednref2="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[ii]</a> Modern scholars don’t do this, intentionally at least, but it happens regularly, alongside the confusion and conflation of events, in the sources upon which they base their analyses and it is frequently impossible to know if or when this has happened. In Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages this is a particular problem even at the level of high politics, but it is hardly confined to periods where documentary evidence is comparatively restricted. Exactly the same issues occur when looking at accounts of modern events. To return to the Zulu War example with which I started, the point is more than adequately illustrated throughout Knight’s examination of the surviving accounts of iSandlwana and Rorke’s Drift: Knight, <i>Zulu Rising</i>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a ch.01="" ednref3="" href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/Why%20history%20doesn" matter="" story="" t="" the="" true="" uncovered.docx="" v.3.0="" version="">[iii]</a> See chapter 5, below</div></div></div>Historian on the Edgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14069934072719158780noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7207265794297747910.post-40312350834351431442021-03-12T04:11:00.000-08:002021-03-12T04:11:19.436-08:00The Theory of the State<p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">[<i style="color: #2b00fe;">As anyone who has followed this blog since its inception (</i><span style="color: #2b00fe;">has </span><i style="color: #2b00fe;">anyone?) will know, I have long been interested in the issue of the post-imperial state in the West, and indeed whether or not the polities that existed in c.650 can be considered to be states. Having wrestled with this issue for a decade, I have finally come up with a discussion and definition with which, provisionally at least, I am pretty happy and which I can use to gove focus to the chapters (some of which I have written) on administration, taxation, military service, the law and so on. So far it is under-referenced and the text itself doubtless needs revision and more depth and detail - it is very much a first draft, even if - I hope - a first draftof the final version, but I hope it might be of interest and possibly provide a basis of discussion. My plan is that Part 2 of the book (</i><span style="color: #2b00fe;">The End of Western Antiquity: The Transformationsof the Year 600</span><i style="color: #2b00fe;">) will pick up on some of these points to reconsider a more idealist explanation, that will stress the elements of the performative, and subjectification more heavily, and so revise the materialist explanation provisonally set out at the end of part 1.</i>]</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The first part of this book
concerns the changing relationships between those who held political power at
the centre – kings and their senior palatine officials – and people in the
myriad local and regional communities, often nested within each other, that
made up post-imperial western polities. This is a dynamic relationship that
must be looked at from the perspective, or perhaps cluster of perspectives, of
both core and periphery. On the one hand a polity needs to be able to make its
writ run throughout its territory, at least to some extent, if it is to have
any claim to a real existence as something more than a convenient geographical
description. On the other hand, the local communities cannot be held in place
within a polity by force alone. The consent of those communities to their
incorporation in the state is at least as important. The relationships between
central and local society can be seen as a tension between the ‘top-down’ – the
government’s ability to, in Jan Glete’s words, ‘penetrate local society from
above’ – and the ‘bottom-up’ – the desire, or even need, of local communities
to be incorporated in the polity.<a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/TY600/Ch.03%20State%20Theory.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
We will see that fairly profound changes in these relationships occurred in
western Europe between the mid-sixth and mid-seventh centuries. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The existence, or otherwise, of
states in the early medieval West was much debated around the turn of the
second millennium. That debate now seems generally to have subsided, having
resulted in its seeming settlement in favour of the proposition: there <i>were</i>
states in the west. This book argues against this consensus. The idea that
early medieval polities can be classed as states seems to result from some
rather muddled thinking and unhelpful basic assumptions, and frequently
contradicts the definitions of a state offered, where they have been proposed.
It seems reasonable to suspect that a principal reason for the popularity of
the notion that early medieval Europe was a region of states is to be sought in
justifiable opposition to the persistent idea that the early middle ages were a
period of backwardness, lawlessness and anarchy: the Dark Ages. On the
contrary, runs the argument, early medieval kingdoms were often complex and cohesive
political units. There will be no dissent from that proposition here. However,
political complexity and cohesion are neither the exclusive preserve nor the
sufficient definition of a state. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">As we will see, it is easy to
overemphasise the role of coercion and force in the creation of a state.
Indeed, a government’s reliance upon coercion and military action to prevent
the break-up of its territorial jurisdiction is usually held to be symptomatic
of its failure. As Cicero had said, many centuries earlier, ‘nor is there any
military power so great that it can last for long under the weight of fear’.<a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/TY600/Ch.03%20State%20Theory.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
However, more recent scholarship has in some regards gone to the other extreme
and laid too heavy an emphasis upon the ‘bottom-up’ aspect mentioned: the
willingness of local elites and others to ‘buy into’ incorporation within a
realm. As mentioned, such consensus is essential and as Braddick has argued in
a discussion of the early modern English state, emphasis on the ‘top-down’, on
state institutions, on coercion and imposition masks much of the historical
reality or lived experience of states.<a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/TY600/Ch.03%20State%20Theory.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">The success of early medieval regimes
in ensuring that local holders of power bought into their legitimacy surely
produced politically coherent kingdoms or polities (to use more descriptively
neutral terminology) but – as mentioned – a politically coherent polity is not
necessarily a state. Nor is the eternal retreat of the term down the political
chain of command – to lordships<a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/TY600/Ch.03%20State%20Theory.docx#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> – a
solution; logically we could retreat yet further, ultimately to Germanic
Hausherrschaft or Roman <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">patria potestas</i>.
</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<h1><a name="_Toc66440752"><span color="windowtext">Defining and debating
the State</span></a><o:p></o:p></h1>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Obviously, this discussion hangs
on the issue of what one means by the term ‘state’. Why does it matter if a
late antique polity was or was not a state? After all, the concept of the
state, in a recognisably modern sense, did not exist in late antiquity. This is
not in itself a strong argument; after all most of our modern analytical
concepts – gender being the most obvious example – would be alien to systems of
thought in the period under discussion, without them thus being rendered
analytically worthless. The question nevertheless remains as to whether the
concept of the state has similar analytical value. My contention is that, if
rigorously defined, the term does allow us to distinguish some polities of a
particular type – of a certain governmental complexity – from others. This in
turn helps in thinking about change over time. Use of the term ‘the state’ has
semantic baggage, which cannot be avoided. Whether one likes it or not, the
term is haunted by the concepts encapsulated in its usual definition, and this
makes it difficult to use in situations where the images it conjures are
incongruous. The term ‘state’ also implies the concept of ‘not-a-state’. This
is a problem for those who have wanted early medieval kingdoms to be classified
as states for in most cases it is difficult to imagine what sort of polity
would not count as a state if western European realms after 600 <i>do</i> generally
qualify as such.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">My concern is not to create a
typology of different types of political organisation, or sub-types of
generally-used terms. Past discussions have created such sub-categories as
stages in political development – tribe, chiefdom, state – through which
societies have moved. Others have proposed essentially teleological
sub-categories such as ‘proto-state’ or ‘early state’. I wish simply to delineate
a broad category of ‘the state’, into which states of all types might be
grouped, in distinction from an equally broad, if not broader, set of polities
that are not states. I will then use the category as a means of describing
what, in my understanding, happened to western European government between
c.550 and c.650. It should not be imagined that I invest the term with ethical
or moral significance.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Such an agenda brings us to the
problem of definition. Within the voluminous scholarly literature on the nature
of the state, most definitions converge on a number of issues. Michael Mann
defined a state thus: <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 1.0cm; margin-right: 26.05pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 26.05pt 10pt 1cm; text-align: justify;">The state is a differentiated set
of institutions and personnel embodying centrality, in the sense that political
relations radiate outwards to cover a territorially demarcated area, over which
it claims a monopoly of binding and permanent rule-making, backed up by
physical violence.<a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/TY600/Ch.03%20State%20Theory.docx#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Mann also argued that a state had
to control all four of his sources of social power: ideological, economic,
military, and political. He also, interestingly, completely skipped over the
period that concerns this volume. Nevertheless, he does say that some
post-imperial states existed but that they were small and short-lived.<a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/TY600/Ch.03%20State%20Theory.docx#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">By comparison, at the heart of John
Haldon’s definition, taken from a work written at least in part explicitly to
counter Mann’s modified Weberianism from a Marxist perspective, is:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 1.0cm; margin-right: 26.05pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 26.05pt 10pt 1cm; text-align: justify;">[A state is] ‘a set of
institutions and personnel concentrated spatially at a single point and
exerting authority over a territorially distinct area.<a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/TY600/Ch.03%20State%20Theory.docx#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">To take a third definition, Chris
Wickham’s definition of the state turns on five things:<span class="MsoFootnoteReference"> <a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/TY600/Ch.03%20State%20Theory.docx#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8;" title=""><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[8]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-left: 82.35pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-align: justify; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">1.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->The centralization of legitimate enforceable
authority (justice and the army)<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 82.35pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-align: justify; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">2.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->The specialisation of governmental roles with an
official hierarchy which outlasted the people who held official position at any
one time;<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 82.35pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-align: justify; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">3.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->The concept of public power …;<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 82.35pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-align: justify; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">4.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->Independent and stable resources for rulers;<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin-left: 82.35pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-align: justify; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">5.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->A class-based system of surplus-extraction and
stratification<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">This definition tallies
reasonably well with those of other thinkers, including those who work on the
middle ages, such as Susan Reynolds. It is broad enough to encompass a range of
state forms, but also strict enough to rule out other forms of complex
political organisation. Yet, if the definitions given by Mann, Haldon and
Wickham are uncontroversial, they apply badly to western Europe after c.600, as
will be seen in the succeeding chapters. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">However, rather than employ a
single definition based on a series of attributes, in a ‘check-box’ fashion, I will
use some of the issues around which discussions of the state tend to converge
as what one might call ‘discursive spaces’. Partly this is to avoid the
problems involved in all ‘criterion-bundle’ types of definition, of whether all
or, if not, how many of the criteria need to be satisfied for a polity to
qualify as a state, or of whether all are of equal weight, and so on. It evades
a potentially Manichaean dualism between states and non-states. Partly, too,
this is because these areas of discourse were, insofar as I can determine,
spaces of the political in late antiquity as in other periods and did not stop
being such when a polity reached a particular level of governmental complexity.
In other words, the state is always in tension. They do not <i>define</i> a
state but they are the conditions of its possibility. The state is – to some
extent at least – in perpetual renegotiation and constituted by that
renegotiation. A polity might be counted as a state as and when the various
areas of discourse tend towards acceptance of, or acquiescence in, government
and administration of a particular sort.<o:p></o:p></p>
<h1><a name="_Toc66440753"><span color="windowtext">Subjectification: circuits
of the political</span></a><span color="windowtext"><o:p></o:p></span></h1>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">This feature will be dealt with
in more depth in the second half of the present book but it needs some
preliminary introductory discussion here. Most crucial in defining the
existence of the state is the way in which, the regularity <i>with</i> which, and
how far down into society, people are called into being – or interpellated – as
subjects of a particular government. What interpellation means is the process
by which a person is identified as occupying, and compelled to take up or speak
from, a particular subject position, in our case as a member of a polity. Such
interpellations are inevitably political, whether the person in question is
summoned before a court, called upon to pay imposts to, or to perform services
for, the state or required to enact the state’s justice, collect dues, or
organise requisitions of goods or labour. When communities assemble – or are
assembled – in the course of a polity’s governance, their members are
interpellated into a specific political position. In all such situations, we
are confronted with the negotiation of the relationships between the polity’s
citizens (constituted as such) or between the government and officers of the
polity and those citizens.<a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/TY600/Ch.03%20State%20Theory.docx#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[9]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The different ways in which these
subject positions are created, called forth, or interact can be called circuits
of the political: they are the conduits through which political power flows. They
are the means by which communication and negotiation take place; they are the
arenas within which political acts take place. They can run ‘vertically’ down
from the central government, via its officers to the ordinary citizens in its
different regions or localities, or they may operate in a more ‘horizontal’
fashion within the communities of various types and levels within a polity. A
rural community within which taxes or other dues are paid and perhaps organised
– which might, indeed, be defined by its fiscal obligations – could form such a
circuit. The wealthier land-owners or aristocracy of a region might form
another, as might the community of state officers. Other circuits might be
configured slightly differently, such as between the local representatives of
the government and the people they govern (envisaged here as all being part of
a particular political community), or between wealthy patrons and their
clients, or between a polity’s officers and the aristocracy of an area. The key
issue is the way in which their position as the member of a polity determines
the subject position taken by the individuals involved in these circuits. One
might suggest that such circuits are most extensive and are activated most
frequently in polities that we might categorise unproblematically as states. We
might, furthermore, propose that in those circumstances, while the legitimacy
of state power is constantly negotiated, it is generally accepted.<o:p></o:p></p>
<h1><a name="_Toc66440754"><span color="windowtext">Office-holding and
local government</span></a><span color="windowtext"><o:p></o:p></span></h1>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Though often seen as less
important than the control of force or legitimate violence, the issue of the
role of office-holding in the establishment of legitimate local authority is
possibly more central to the definition of statehood. On what basis is
legitimate power exerted in the localities? In some ways the basis of the
authority is more important here than its effectiveness. It is really in this
area of local government that the intersection of different circuits of power
is located. It would not be controversial to argue that, in a state, legitimate
authority belongs to the office and not to its holder, and that the deployment
of the power invested in such an office for an official’s personal ends is
frequently decried as an abuse. In practice, this might be tolerated to a
certain degree; indeed the opportunity to benefit personally from
office-holding is frequently what draws people to seek such positions in the
first place and can thus be the glue that holds a state together. Nonetheless, the
more important point is that when this behaviour appears in political
discourse, the rhetorical vocabulary employed is that of malpractice and
corruption. It is in this area of the political that the importance of the
existence of a public sphere, separate from the private,<a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/TY600/Ch.03%20State%20Theory.docx#_ftn10" name="_ftnref10" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[10]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
is made manifest. In this context, the tenure of these positions and the
systems whereby appointments to posts are made are of crucial significance.
Ideally, tenure of office and the personnel involved should be determined by
the state. Where an officer cannot in practice be removed from a position or
where the central government in effect has no say over who is appointed to
specific posts in its administration, the extent to which that polity can be
considered as a state would seem to be limited. In those situations the ability
of the government, not simply to have its writ run into the localities but also
to involve the inhabitants in political discourse, would be seriously curtailed.
To use electronic circuitry as a metaphor, important resistors have been placed
in certain points of the political wiring. The flow of political power into
certain parts of the circuitry is controlled or even terminated at the level of
the administration. <o:p></o:p></p>
<h1><a name="_Toc66440755"><span color="windowtext">Force and violence</span></a><span color="windowtext"><o:p></o:p></span></h1>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Many discussions of the state,
like Mann’s and Wickham’s, rest in part upon the Weberian notion of a monopoly
of legitimate violence and the capability of backing up its jurisdiction with
force. A polity within which the central government did not ultimately have the
sole power to determine which acts of violence were legitimate and which were not,
or which lacked the capacity to punish actions which fell into the latter
category, would have difficulty qualifying as a state by anyone’s definition.
It would also seem perverse to regard as a state a political unit which had no legitimate
access to an armed force with which to pursue its goals in foreign policy or
combat rebellion at home. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Nevertheless, too much weight has
been laid on these issues. The imposition of governmental writ can only ever be
a small part of the definition of a state. After all, a government whose
presence is felt in the localities primarily through the mechanisms of
punishment or repression would today be classed as ‘failing’. Certainly, it
would seem to be losing the consent vital to its cohesion. At the same time, though,
the presence of such coercive force does not in and of itself guarantee the
ability to use it. If an army stands aside in the face of a political coup, or
sides with the rebels, we may witness the failure of a r<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">egime – even of a type of regime – but not necessarily the end of a
state, unless the institutions that govern the existence of the army collapse
with it. The latter point has been central to numerous analyses, such as
Althusser’s,<a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/TY600/Ch.03%20State%20Theory.docx#_ftn11" name="_ftnref11" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn11;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[11]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
and is one reason for my rejection of definitions based upon the possession of
particular attributes in favour of a discursive definition. Taken together,
these two points highlight the importance of the acceptance of the government’s
legitimacy by its constituent communities, and thus of the discursive approach
to the definition of a state. Nonetheless the <i>potential</i> for the use of
such force is surely a vital area in distinguishing polities that might be
classified as states from those which might not. Even where the subjects of a
realm restrain themselves from certain actions out of fear of the retribution
that the state might (though rarely, if ever, does) visit on them, that
self-governance cannot long exist where the possibility of such punitive action
is absent. Consequently, military service and the raising of armies will be the
subject of one of the following chapters.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Perhaps more importantly than those of legitimate force and coercion,
however, the issues that surround the raising of an army are very significant
in making the existence of the state felt in the localities. This is so whether
we are talking about the levying of manpower by way of conscription, or in the
exaction of military service from those who are held liable to perform it, or
in the extraction of surplus to provision or equip armed forces. In all of
those areas we can see the involvement of the officers of the state in local
communities, making demands upon their manpower and produce. Whether such
processes ran smoothly or not – and perhaps at least as much in the latter case
than the former – they were the focus not simply for the exercise of power by
the state’s officials but for the renegotiation of that power. They could be an
opportunity for officials to exploit their power through ‘bribery and
corruption’ but could equally be occasions when they could act as spokesmen or
intermediaries for the people placed under their jurisdiction and thus extend
their patronage and personal prestige in other ways. In all such situations and
especially when local contingents assembled or when supplies were gathered at a
particular point, the state made itself felt in the lives of its constituents. Such
processes are essential to the flow of power through the ‘circuits of the
political’ discussed earlier.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<h1><a name="_Toc66440756"><span color="windowtext">Taxation and justice</span></a><span color="windowtext"><o:p></o:p></span></h1>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The same points can be made at
least as strongly in relationship to the levying of taxation in its various
forms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The precise nature of the revenue
of the state, whether from taxation or from other, more directly controlled
fiscal resources, seems to me to be less important than the fact that a concept
exists of the state having its own revenues, separate from the private
resources of those that hold power in its name. Where systems of imposts exist,
however, it might be argued that their importance to the definition of a state
consists less in the value or quantity of resources raised than in the process
of their levying. As we shall see in chapter 5, a case can be made that in many
ways the systems of taxation that persisted after the disintegration of the
Western Empire were valued precisely as mechanisms for maintaining the circuits
that connected the centres of power with local communities and that this might
have been important than their role in the collection of revenue. As will be
argued, the raising of taxes opened channels of communication between
government and the governed. It presented opportunities for the renegotiation
of obligations and privileges, for the demonstration of the ability to
intercede with a kingdom’s officers on behalf of a community, or for the
manifestation of political grievance, as well as for the simple operation of
legitimate authority. Frequently, as with the summoning of those liable to
military service, in the collection of fiscal imposts royal government was
performative; state power existed in the process of exaction rather than in the
sums produced.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Perhaps more than anything,
though, the operation of the law and justice are crucial points in the working
of the state as envisaged here and illustrate the importance of the
performative<a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/TY600/Ch.03%20State%20Theory.docx#_ftn12" name="_ftnref12" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn12;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[12]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
aspect of state power which I am stressing. The assembly of the law-court is a
classic instance of interpellation. Everyone there occupies a particular subject
position: judge, plaintiff, defendant, third parties, witnesses, or
oath-helpers: even the people who have come merely to watch. Ultimately those
subject positions are defined with reference to the law, manifest in the person
of the judge, and the sources of the judge’s legitimacy: the power vested –
clothed in the person of – the presiding figure. These are the moments of the formal
activation of particular legally-recognised identities and of all sorts of
social relationships – not least kindred relations – that might otherwise remain
dormant. The lawcourts and the administration of justice are, then, possibly the
best laboratory within which to study the operation of our ‘circuits of the
political’ and the extent to which public, state power reaches into local
communities.<o:p></o:p></p>
<h1><a name="_Toc66440757"><span color="windowtext">Knowledge and state power</span></a><span color="windowtext"><o:p></o:p></span></h1>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The issue of knowledge might at
first sight seem like a strange category with which to think about pre-modern
state power. The flows of knowledge and information are, however, a crucial element
within, to continue my electrical metaphor, the currents of power that run in
both directions around the circuits of the political. State governments are,
however, very often concerned with the collection of information about persons
and communities within their bounds and this can be seen in antique and
medieval contexts, around the globe, as well as in more recent periods. Under
the heading of knowledge, however, I want to include more than simply the
collection of census data or similar. What sorts of knowledge – if any – does a
government require of its officers, and how, if at all, does this a direct
bearing on government? It also matters to consider the uses to which such
knowledge is put. In this regard I cast the net fairly wide: food-provision
during famine; water-supply; emergency relief; feeding the poor; caring for the
needy; the provision of entertainments; and so on.<a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/TY600/Ch.03%20State%20Theory.docx#_ftn13" name="_ftnref13" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn13;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[13]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
The other key aspect of this, clearly correlated with the others, is that of what
we might think of as publicity, openness, and access, on the one hand, and
secrecy on the other. What are the limits to the government’s knowledge of its
people, or the people’s of its government? This has become one of the key
aspects of the state in the contemporary world;<a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/TY600/Ch.03%20State%20Theory.docx#_ftn14" name="_ftnref14" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn14;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[14]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
does it help us think about pre-modern state governments?<o:p></o:p></p>
<h1><a name="_Toc66440758"><span color="windowtext">The Agenda</span></a><span color="windowtext"> of Part 1<o:p></o:p></span></h1>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The first part of this book
explores the issue of whether the polities that existed during our period can
be considered as states and the extent to which change over time, as well as
variety across space, can be detected in this sphere. It does this first of all
by considering the ways in which the circuits of the political can be detected
in the areas discussed: administration, taxation and the fisc, military service
and the law. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After a discussion of the
arenas within which political events might take place the attention moves to
consider other circuits of the political by considering the arenas within which
social exchange took place and a wide range of social relationships and
practices. The focus then moves to religion and the circuits of power that ran through
the church. In the end an image ill be presented of an important period of
change in which, to continue our metaphor, the wiring of western European
polities was crucially altered so that the flows of power that had connected some
areas with the central government were now crucially interrupted or even broken
altogether. Finally provisional explanation will be offered in terms of.
competition for the material resources upon which local and regional power
depended.<o:p></o:p></p>
<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/TY600/Ch.03%20State%20Theory.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
J. Glete, ref.<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/TY600/Ch.03%20State%20Theory.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <i><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">On Duties</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">, 2.26.</span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/TY600/Ch.03%20State%20Theory.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
M.J. <span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Braddick, <i>State
Formation in Early Modern England, 1550-1700</i> (Cambridge, 2000). My great
thanks to my former student Laura Salvage who drew my attention to this, in the
course of an undergraduate essay that was a far more hard-hitting critique of
my ideas on the state (as they were at that point) than anything I had received
from established scholars!</span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn4" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/TY600/Ch.03%20State%20Theory.docx#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Reference<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn5" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/TY600/Ch.03%20State%20Theory.docx#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> M.
Mann, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The Sources of Social Power</span></i><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">, vol.1,
p.37.</span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn6" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/TY600/Ch.03%20State%20Theory.docx#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Mann, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sources of Social Power</i>, vol.1,
p.390.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn7" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/TY600/Ch.03%20State%20Theory.docx#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> J.
Haldon, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The State and the Tributary Mode
of Production</i>, pp.32-33</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn8" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/TY600/Ch.03%20State%20Theory.docx#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[8]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>C.J. Wickham, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Framing the Early Middle Ages</i></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn9" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/TY600/Ch.03%20State%20Theory.docx#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[9]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
I use citizen here in a loose sense to mean all subjects of the state.<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn10" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/TY600/Ch.03%20State%20Theory.docx#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[10]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
As in Wickham’s definition.<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn11" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/TY600/Ch.03%20State%20Theory.docx#_ftnref11" name="_ftn11" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn11;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[11]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
L. Althusser, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">On Ideology</i> </p>
</div>
<div id="ftn12" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/TY600/Ch.03%20State%20Theory.docx#_ftnref12" name="_ftn12" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn12;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[12]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Explain performativity. Ref Loxley.<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn13" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/TY600/Ch.03%20State%20Theory.docx#_ftnref13" name="_ftn13" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn13;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[13]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
This aspect of my project is influenced by James C. Scott’s <i>Seeing Like a
State</i>, and also G.R. Trumbull IV, <i>An Empire of Facts</i>.<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn14" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/User/Dropbox/Books/TY600/Ch.03%20State%20Theory.docx#_ftnref14" name="_ftn14" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn14;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[14]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
In this regard I have been strongly influenced by C. Barbour’s <i>Derrida’s
Secret: Perjury, Testimony, Oath</i>.<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
</div><br /><p></p>Historian on the Edgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14069934072719158780noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7207265794297747910.post-30791021431920787312021-02-05T10:04:00.004-08:002021-02-05T10:04:44.565-08:00Organising the Late Antique World (6): The End<p> <span style="text-align: justify;">There was of course an important reason for such calculation. Could you calculate when the world would end? Many theologians said no. Mankind couldn’t try to second-guess the Almighty’s divine plan. St Augustine was one who forcefully said that you should stop your counting. Some people thought that the world would last 6,000 years, so when 6,000 years since Creation were up the world would end. Or maybe 600 years since Christ’s passion. This, as various writers said, was all theologically dubious but it didn’t stop people thinking that way.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Indeed, as long as the Roman Empire was standing and secure then there was no reason to worry that the 6th age was ending. Of course in the 5th century some people did start to worry. The chronicler Hydatius, writing in north-west Iberia in the 460s, was sure the world was ending. But not everyone thought like that and by the end of the fifth century such apocalyptic thinking had faded. The world hadn’t ended just because there was no western Emperor.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As ever, what really made a difference was Justinian declaring the western Empire to have been lost. People in the West now were living after the Roman Empire. Had, therefore, the 6th age ended? For a short period in the late sixth century it does seem that people thought the end of times was near: the fact that, as Gregory of Tours calculated, it was about 6,000 years since creation (and also about 600 years since Christ’s birth or passion) didn’t help matters. Apocalyptic thinking is very common in late 6th-century western thought. You can see it very clearly in the writings of the two Gregories: Gregory of Tours and Gregory the Great (more or less exact contemporaries). With the Great Persian War and then the Arabs this sort of idea, of living after the Empire, became common in the East as well. It is very likely that these ideas played a big part in the ascetic invasion mentioned in [<span style="color: #073763;">a previous packge of lectures</span>].</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">What if you were living at a moment beyond linear time, after the end of the last of the 6 ages of the world, when the last days were about to begin? One effect of this was probably the increase in ‘typological’ thinking. Typological thinking saw everything in the world as a ‘type’ of something from the Bible or Christian history. A prince who rebelled against his father – a new Absalom. A wise king: a new Solomon. A sinful man? A new Herod. And so on. This went beyond mere simile. It meant that particular actions or sets of actions could be expected to bring a particular outcome, based upon biblical precedent. Causation no longer worked horizontally, as the sequence of causes and effects of mankind’s actions. It came vertically, direct from God, according to the type of situation. You can see this very clearly in Gregory of Tours’ <i>Histories</i>, which, infamously, are a jumble of short stories with little attempt to follow a narrative thread. Gregory sees things as self-contained units where people do something and there is a consequence in terms of reward or punishment – miracles and anti-miracles if you like – and then moves on to the next story, all for the education and instruction of his readers. The moment passed, of course. These worries are not so clear in the next generation, but nonetheless the fact that one was living after the end of Rome was in place. One was now living in a time when, even if you couldn’t calculate the timing of its arrival, the apocalypse <i>could </i>come at any time, maybe soon but maybe not. This remained a fixture for the rest of the Middle Ages.</div>Historian on the Edgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14069934072719158780noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7207265794297747910.post-19746705647280070762021-02-05T10:03:00.006-08:002021-02-05T10:03:51.483-08:00Organising the Late Antique World (5): The Measurement of Time<p> </p><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote>What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.</blockquote></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Augustine of Hippo’s famous comment on time from Book 11 of his <i>Confessions</i>. The nature of time has remained the subject of philosophical and scientific discussion ever since. How do with think of time? As a sequence with a beginning, middle and end? Or as a cycle, with things coming around again and again – as with the seasons? Augustine was concerned with these questions and more: could time really meaningfully exist if, as he put it the past was gone, the present fleeting and the future not yet arrived?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Obviously, how you measure time and how you see yourself in it is crucial to world views. Think of the French Revolution and its complete reinvention of the calendar, days and months, and its restarting the clock with L’An Un (Year I) in 1792, or even more bloodily – if less logically – the Khmer Rouge resetting the clock at Year Zero in 1975. During the Paris Commune of 1871 there were moves to rename the Year L’An 80 – year 80 of the Revolutionary Era. Nothing came of it; it was yet another tragi-comic aspect of the Commune. Why do Young Earth Creationists find the Darwinian revolution and the 20th advances in scientific chronology so upsetting? Not because of their belief in God – it’s perfectly possible to be a devout Christian and believe in divine creation without believing that the earth is only 8,000 years old. It’s because it takes man away from being at the centre of history and moves mankind effectively to a recent, fleeting moment, and that unpicks the hierarchical creationism that underpins their whole world-view. Time can be central to identity.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">These ideas were not alien to the Roman world. Various Roman provinces had their own provincial chronology. There was, for example, the Spanish Era which continued be used throughout our period. It began in the year we think of as 38BC and appears to have been considered to represent the foundation of the Roman Provinces of <i>Hispania</i>. Nothing significant in that regard appears to have happened in that year, which to me at least makes it more likely that the system was set up in that year rather than retrospectively. In North Africa there was a similar Mauretanian era, which started in the year we count as 39AD. In the same part of the world the Vandals established their era, beginning in 439, in other words counting from the date of their capture of Carthage and conveniently permitting the correction of Mauretanian Era dates simply by erasing the initial CD (400). Some Romans counted the years since the Foundation of the City (<i>Ab Urbe Condita</i>) in 753 BC, a system popularised by Livy whose <i>History</i>, written up to 9BC, had that title. In the 6th century, the Gallic cities of Lyon and Vienne had competing ways of counting the years, starting with a different consul.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">These weren’t the only ways in which the reckoning of time was politicised. Obviously the Republican calendar had been repoliticised at the very start of the Roman Empire with the renaming of the fifth and sixth months of the calendar after Julius Caesar and Augustus (July and August). The Romans associated each year with the names of the Ordinary consuls whose tenure began the year: Thus for example the year 428, when Germanus visited Britain as mentioned in the [<span style="color: #073763;">previous post</span>], was the Year of the Consulship of Felix and Taurus. Most late antique Chronicles use this as the means of identifying a year. There is no single numerical system. Otherwise probably the most common means of numbering the years was by regnal year – in other words, the Nth year of the reign of Emperor, or King, so-and-so. Another classical system counted the Olympiads, the cycles of 4 years between the Olympic Games. With all of these and the provincial eras running currently it’s not especially surprising that people often didn’t know how old they were. Regnal years began on the day when a ruler started to reign, which need not be on the day the previous ruler died. To know how old you were, you didn’t just need to know what the current regnal year was, and what the one was when you were born, but how many kings there’d been in between and how long they’d ruled for.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Time was one area where Christianity did make quite a difference. Christianity, like Judaism, believed that time began at the beginning when God created the world. So it had a fixed point at the start. More importantly, though, Christians believed that it would have a fixed point at the end, with the Day of Judgement. That was an idea not much found – or not given the same prominence – in other religions. So Christians very much saw their place in the world as on a very specific time-line, between Creation and the Apocalypse.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Basing themselves on various Old Testament and other texts, Christian thinkers thought in terms of the six ages of the world. These were:</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">• The First Age: Adam to Noah i.e the Antediluvian period</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">• The Second Age: The Flood to Abraham, ‘the father of all nations’</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">• The Third Age: Abraham to King David</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">• The Fourth Age: David to the Babylonian captivity</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">• The Fifth Age: The Babylonian captivity to Christ.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">• The Sixth Age: Christ onwards</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The seventh age would come after the Day of Judgement and would be the eternal Kingdom of God. The schema was mapped on to the Creation, with 6 days followed by the day of rest: six ages followed by the eternal rest. Roman Christians were very keen to note that the birth of Christ had taken place during the reign of the first Emperor, Augustus. Gregory of Tours an avid devotee of the cult of St Martin as we’ve seen, thought it was additionally significant that St Martin was born in the reign of the first Christian Emperor. The interest in synchronicity went back to Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea who, in addition to his <i>Ecclesiastical History</i> also wrote a Universal Chronicle in which the histories of different civilisations: Egypt, Greece, Rome and so on were put in separate columns alongside Judaeo-Christian History so one could see what was happening in the history of Greece and Rome at the same time as events recorded in the Bible – you could see which Old Testament Prophet was active at the time of the Trojan War, for example. This was an important way of inscribing Christian history into the history of the Empire. So there was a common idea that the Sixth Age of the World was coterminous with the Roman Empire.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">At the same time, Christian thinkers were more interested than their predecessors in a single linear chronology, from Creation. From the Old Testament it was possible to calculate the number of years between the Beginning and now. Gregory of Tours thought that when he finished his Ten Books of Histories 6063 years had passed since Creation. There were other systems too. Most common in our period was the <i>Anno Passionis</i>, years since the Passion or Crucifixion of Christ (<i>Anno Domini</i> dating was invented in the early sixth century but not popularised until the eighth, largely by Bede). Unfortunately there were two systems of <i>Anno Passionis</i> (or AP) dating which worked out as four years apart... Sometimes in 5th-century history you get what looks like the same event repeated after a 4-year interval – largely because historians haven’t bothered to check the chronographical system being used by the different chroniclers.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It’s also, if you’re interested in this sort of thing, important to note that Late Antique people calculated things differently from us. If we are asked how many years between 2016 and 2020 we would say 4; late antique people would say five, because you’d count from the beginning of 2016 to the end of 2020. Similarly with days, which is why, as mentioned in [<span style="color: #073763;">a previous lecture</span>], the 4th day before 7 March is 4 March rather than 3 March (you count in this case from the end of the 7th backwards to the start of the 4th). Historians often forget this too.</div>Historian on the Edgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14069934072719158780noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7207265794297747910.post-66302418286782203142021-02-05T10:03:00.001-08:002021-02-05T10:03:01.592-08:00Organising the Late Antique World (4): Theological Correctness gone mad: the 5th-Century World<p> <span style="text-align: justify;">The creation of a new, martial model of masculinity in the fourth century was one way in which the mental world began to be reorganised in the late Roman period but it is very important to note that the Emperor still remained at the centre, legitimising both forms of masculinity. Nor, as I have said, did the new forms of barbarised military identity imply an actual rejection of Roman identity. As I also mentioned, and this is very important, this new martial form of Roman identity relied for its effectiveness on the continuing existence of traditional civic masculinity as the norm against which it was measured. You might, of course, what happened to that norm once the Roman Emperor declared that the whole western Empire had been lost to barbarians and needed reconquering, but we’ll leave that to one side for now.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">What seems to me to be an even more important shift – in both halves of the fifth century Empire – was a radical thinking of how one envisaged the legitimate centre of the world. Even in the fourth century it was implicitly the case that the centre remained where it always had been: in the virtuous civic Roman male, personified in the Emperor, even if the debate about how one judged yourself in relationship to that might have shifted. One of the crucial things about the fourth century, as we have seen, was the increasing role of the Emperor in defining doctrinal correctness, or incorrectness. The fifth century continued to be an age when arguments about heresy dominated politics. Not only that, they became quite important in very local politics and identity. As I mentioned in the video lecture on the fifth-century crisis in week 2, the fifth century is really the period of the Christianisation of politics.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">We can see this in many, many areas. I have already mentioned, more than once, the spatial transformation of the Roman city with the appearance of saints’ shrines in the peripheral cemeterial regions and the move out to those shrines of concentrations of social and political activity. In fact sometimes those peripheral foci began to move themselves towards the centre. The church of St Martin in Tours, built under Bishop Perpetuus in the third quarter of the fifth century was actually built on what had been part of the Roman city, in spite of being the new location for the saint’s tomb. This was quite a significant move, of the city of the dead into the city of the living, even if it was an abandoned part of the latter. The city of Aquileia in north-eastern Italy was sacked by Attila and his Huns in 452 but, when it was rebuilt afterwards, what is interesting is that the old urban centre, around the forum, was left entirely outside the new city walls. The new fortifications essentially protected the cathedral.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Probably more interesting and important still is what happened in Rome in the fifth century. In some ways, 4th-century Rome is paradigmatic of a city where the Christian presence was peripheral. The story of 5th-century Rome, though, is really of the take-over of the old centre by the Christian church, whether in the construction of new churches and monasteries or simply in the donation of lands to the church. The study of the archaeology of 5th-century Rome is in many ways a really good illustration of the historiography of the 5th century overall, and of the power of traditional narratives. In 2010 I attended a conference in Rome marking the anniversary of the Gothic sack of the city in 410. Most of the speakers were archaeologists who had been working on different areas of the city. Overwhelmingly, the papers they presented to the conference discussed the ‘problem’ that wherever one looked one simply could not find archaeological evidence of the barbarian sack of the city, whether in 410 or 455 (when the Vandals captured Rome and sacked it far more seriously than the Goths had). Yet their discussions of what excavations had turned up almost invariably concerned the construction of new church buildings of one sort or another. It was very clear to me that the archaeology of Rome simply could not be fit into the old grand narrative of the fifth-century barbarian invasions, largely because the real narrative of the fifth century was about something else: the Christianisation of Roman society and politics.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This is further illustrated in other aspects of fifth-century archaeology. We have already seen [<span style="color: #073763;">in earier lectures</span>] the abandonment of the villas that took place across the West in the fifth century. What happened on a lot of old villa sites, especially in Italy, Spain and the south of Gaul, was the construction of churches on those sites. For aristocrats it was considered a better use of their wealth and resources – for those who still had such wealth and resources, that is – to build a centre of Christian worship for their community than to keep in a good state of repair the classical locus for the manifestation of the traditional aristocratic culture of otium and paideia.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">What is very interesting is how very little of the evidence from the fifth century wants to tell that story of barbarian invasion, so beloved of historians from Justinian’s time onwards. Whether one looks at archaeological or written sources – even basic chronicle sources – the evidence from the fifth century is much more concerned with Christianity and especially with the issues of heresy and orthodoxy.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I mentioned earlier that these issues had become important even at a very local level. There are a couple of very nice examples of this. One concerns the heresy of Priscillianism in Iberia and neighbouring areas. As I mentioned in [<span style="color: #073763;">a previous lecture</span>], Priscillian has the dubious distinction of being the first person handed over to the secular government to be executed for heresy. But no one really knows what was heretical about Priscillian. Some of his writings survive, largely because they were erroneously attributed to St Augustine of Hippo; no one has been able to find any doctrinally suspect statements in these. The charges levelled against him are reminiscent of those thrown at the Templars nearly a millennium later: of witchcraft, of strange ritual practices – or they are standard late antique accusations such as that he spent too much time with women. The main problem with Priscillian seems to have been the sort of thing that concerned the church about some holy men: that he didn’t do what bishops told him, and that he wandered around Iberia with a crowd of followers. Once Priscillian had been declared a heretic and executed, though, accusations of ‘Priscillianism', whatever that might in practice have been, began to appear in local Spanish politics. What seems to have been happening was that some groups accused their enemies of this in order to undermine their legitimacy.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">My second example concerns Pelagianism in Britain. Pelagius was a Briton but all of the debate over his teachings was conducted in the Mediterranean regions, ending with the 1st Council of Ephesus in 431. After he was declared heretical, from the 2nd decade of the 5th century onwards, we start to find accusations of Pelagianism in Britain. As with Priscillianism in Spain, the origins of the heresiarch seem to have determined where accusations of the heresy were most believable. St Germanus of Auxerre travelled to Britain in 428 after an appeal was sent to the Gallic church asking for someone to resolve the dispute. The account in the <i>Life of Germanus</i> really suggests though that, as with Priscillianism in Spain, this was really a dispute over local authority in Verulamium (St Albans) rather than a serious theological dispute. What these stories illustrate was that a micro level, deviation from correct teaching (orthodoxy) had somehow come to replace deviation from the standards of civic masculinity as the way in which political illegitimacy was determined.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This was true at the highest levels too. If the emperor himself was a heretic, why ought anyone to take any notice of what he said? During the reign of Theodoric the Great, the Ostrogothic ruler of Italy, one reason why Goths and Romans came together, and why even Catholics and Arians seem to have been able to reach a modus vivendi was because the Emperors at the time, first Zeno and then, especially, Anastasius were considered to be miaphysite heretics. Both the Arians and the Catholics agreed that this was heresy. Once the Catholic Justin I came to the throne, the seeming truce between Arians and Catholics in Italy seems to have begun to crumble.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Goths, in Gaul and Iberia, and in Italy, were Arians, as just mentioned. So were the Vandals in Africa. Quite apart from the fact that this heretical belief seems to have been used to create an identity for these groups, the Goths and Vandals appear to have stressed their doctrinal differences precisely when they were in political dispute with Rome – sometimes going as far as to persecute the Catholics – mainly in Vandal Africa. Again, though, the issue seems to have been that it was possible to try to discredit political rivals by portraying them as doctrinally in error.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In the fifth century it seems that claims to representing the legitimate centre in terms of traditional Roman notions of virtue became less and less secure as the century wore on, partly perhaps because of the changes mentioned in the previous lecture, as well as the end of the generally-recognised legitimate dynasty. If claims could not be made on these grounds they perhaps could by reference to more overarching notions of doctrinal, theological correctness. The good Christian replaced the good Roman at the centre of the world.</div>Historian on the Edgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14069934072719158780noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7207265794297747910.post-11782026066878887352021-02-05T10:02:00.001-08:002021-02-05T10:02:07.630-08:00Organising the Late Antique World (3): Fourth-Century Changes<div style="text-align: justify;">In [<span style="color: #073763;">a previous lecture</span>], I mentioned how a new martial model of masculinity appeared in the 4th century. I alluded to it again the first element of the previous lecture package, too. This doesn’t seem to me to have had the recognition it deserves, as this was a development with really profound long-term effects.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I want to go back to this issue and discuss it in a little more detail. The barbarisation of the fourth-century Roman army has a long historiography but it has usually been discussed in terms of the numbers of actual barbarians enrolled into the army. People at the time thought that there were more barbarians in the army and it’s likely that there were. First, the army was bigger than that of the early Empire, though by how much is unknown, but the Empire’s population was not growing, so logically there was probably more need for non-Roman recruitment. Secondly, as we’ve seen, the much enlarged civil service was separated from the military, reducing a pool of 25-35,000 men or more from eligibility for recruitment. Third, the recruitment of barbarians made a lot of sense; barbarians warriors actively wanted to join up, for the rewards of serving in the Roman army and were probably better than unwilling conscripts, and every barbarian in the army was a barbarian not raiding the frontier provinces. Even so, it still seems that the great bulk of the Roman army was not made up of non-Romans.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Nonetheless, the barbarisation of the army – as we can see it in the sources - wasn’t just down to the numbers of barbarians in the ranks. An obvious point, perhaps, is that barbarian recruitment need not necessarily mean the barbarisation of the army, its practices and culture. The large numbers of non-Romans in Republican and early imperial forces had not had that sort of effect. One way forward involves returning to a list that we still have of the units in the late Roman army, called the <i>Notitia Dignitatum</i>. It is a sort of window (even if a rather cloudy one) on to the army at the end of the fourth century and in the early fifth. We can look at the titles of army units.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Numerous such units have ‘ethnic’ names, like Franks, Alamans, Saxons, and so on. However, two points can be made. First, they only make up a fraction of the whole and even then you’d need to ask how many were still recruited from the peoples in question by the time that the <i>Notitia </i>was compiled. Second, more interestingly, the barbarian ethnic names used are not limited to those of the fourth century. As well as <i>Salii </i>(Franks), <i>Vesi</i> and <i>Tervingi </i>(both Goths), there are Celts, Sabines, Parthians, and possibly Arcadians: non-Roman peoples from the remote and even legendary past. If the Legion of <i>Scythae </i>was recruited from barbarians (possibly Danubian Goths, often called Scythians by the Romans) it is interesting that it was nonetheless given a classicising name. Choosing a barbarian ethnonym for a regiment was clearly more than a simple bureaucratic record of its soldiers’ origins.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But these units have other types of name, too. More numerous than the ‘ethnic’ names are what I call ‘boasting names’: <i>Feroces</i>, <i>Victores</i>, <i>Invicti</i>, <i>Felices </i>(the ferocious ones, the victorious ones, the undefeated, the lucky ones – the last especially common), to which one might add units whose titles appear to claim their status in the front rank. Then there are some units with animal names: the <i>Leones </i>(the Lions), the <i>Cornuti </i>(the Horned Beasts). In the prestigious field army, units clearly participated in a competitive culture. Their men were boastful of their fierceness, they were like animals, they were like barbarians, ancient or modern.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This is the context in which the phenomenon of the Roman army’s ‘barbarisation’ should be viewed. The appearance of the late army looked, by classical standards, very barbarian: trousers (above all), thick cloaks, broad belts, and an emphasis on jewellery and adornment. Compare depictions of late imperial soldiers with those of barbarians on early imperial monuments like Trajan’s or Marcus Aurelius’ columns or the arch of Septimius Severus. The workshops that gilded officers’ armour were called <i>barbaricaria</i>, one meaning of the unit name <i>brachiati </i>is ‘the bracelet-wearers’, and we can see torques (barbarian adornment par excellence) in the costume of imperial guardsmen. The army’s weaponry had also shifted and now included weapons, like long slashing swords (<i>spathae</i>), that had traditionally been associated with barbarians. It bore <i>draco </i>(dragon) ‘windsock’ standards, again associated with barbarians in early Roman literature and art. Vegetius adds other supposedly barbarian items to the list, such as whips carried by officers to ‘encourage’ their troops. The Roman army’s war-cry, the <i>barritus </i>(a cheer that started low and swelled to a discordant climax) seems to me more likely to have modelled on the trumpeting of a <i>barrus </i>(elephant), but it is interesting that Roman writers thought it was barbarian in origin. Late Roman soldiers had adopted what I have called ‘barbarian chic’. What is interesting is its mix of elements from the ‘binary’ and the ‘taxonomic’ registers of Roman ethnography.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I don’t really see this as even being authentically ‘barbarian’; it is a hotch-potch of stereotypical features of the ‘non-Roman’ thrown together regardless of context or of historical veracity. One way of thinking of it would be as an equivalent of the Hollywood ‘Red Indian’ of classic westerns of the third quarter of the last century: bits and pieces of native American culture from different peoples thrown together willy-nilly and with an admixture of myth and stereotype: to make a recognisable ‘sign’ with a particular signified. A more recherché military historical example would be the ‘zouave’ regiments of the 19th-century French army. Originally recruited from Algerians they very rapidly were made up of white Frenchmen, wearing a French colonial version of what they thought North African costume was. But the zouaves themselves adopted lots of bits and pieces of North African culture and the whole gave them a very particular esprit de corps and this self-consciously created ‘otherness’ could be deployed competitively with the more traditional elite units of the French army.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Cut off from the civilian branch of service, which valorised the traditional civic masculine virtues, paideia and the aristocratic culture of <i>otium </i>and <i>negotium</i>, late Roman elite regiments (especially) constructed new identities. Braggart, barbarous, ferocious, and animal-like, they were unabashedly masculine and represented the antithesis of the civic masculine ideal with its stress on modesty and moderation. Their costume was designed to underline this. It is difficult, in my view, to underestimate the significance of this development. It created an alternative form of Roman-ness, a sort of anti-Roman-ness – in the sense that it stood in a relationship to traditional Romanitas that is similar to that (in literature) between the anti-hero and the traditional hero. Not opposed to Rome, or non-Roman, it was Roman in an untraditional and possibly jarring way. Thought about as a competing form of masculinity, it needed the original civic form in order to make its point; its rebellious stress on ferocity and martial boastfulness only makes sense against a backdrop where moderation, discipline and so on are the norm. What is valorised and what isn’t constantly flips from one to the other. Again, what we have is a form of deconstruction of the old certainties of Roman life. The space between the two is the space of contested masculinity in late Roman politics. (You could make the same point about the space between traditional civic virtue and Christian asceticism, discussed in the previous [<span style="color: #073763;">package of lectures</span>].)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This shift matters quite a lot. What it meant was that there was a tradition within Roman society by the fifth century of people serving in the Roman army consciously adopting a supposedly non-Roman culture and identity, strutting about in their ‘barbarian’ costume, speaking their army slang, which contained a number of words of Germanic origin, claiming a certain status within society – but without actually ceasing to see themselves as Romans. Consequently in the fifth-century crisis it was possible to navigate what would earlier have been very tricky political decisions – to make common cause with barbarian soldiers, or to serve with them in their forces. In, say, the second or third century, this would have been to turn your back not simply on Romanness but also on your masculinity and any claim to legitimate political authority. The shifts of the fourth century had made things much easier. After all, the barbarian or barbarised soldier still stood in a chain of command and legitimate authority that went up to the Emperor himself who – as we have seen – personified both forms of masculinity. We’ll come back to some of these points next week when we look at ethnicity and ethnic identity in late antiquity. Of course, in the fullness of time, the ‘barbarised’ late Roman martial model of masculinity became the root of the classic medieval form of warrior masculinity.</div>Historian on the Edgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14069934072719158780noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7207265794297747910.post-11204427313546810452021-02-05T10:00:00.005-08:002021-02-05T10:00:54.524-08:00Organising the Late Antique world (2): Classical Ethnography (2) – the taxonomic<p> <span style="text-align: justify;">In the previous [</span><span style="color: #073763; text-align: justify;">post</span><span style="text-align: justify;">]I discussed what I called the binary aspect of Graeco-Roman ethnography, in other words, the distinction between Roman-ness and barbarism. As we saw, this was really a pretty abstract element of thinking about the world and its organisation. In this area of thought the barbarian and the Roman were both ideals, and the barbarian ‘other’ largely existed as a counter to the ideal Roman. As we saw in an earlier lecture Roman men whose behaviour did not live up to the ideals of civic masculinity could be described as barbarous, but also as feminine, or childlike, or as animal, as all of these categories orbited the masculine ideal at the centre and shared various non-Roman traits: ferocity, emotionality, irrationality. As I said in that earlier lecture, the barbarian could be rendered feminine or child-like.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It is worth remembering, however, that because the Roman-Barbarian ethnographic binary operated in a rhetorical field, it could be played with. One of the great rhetorical tropes in writing critically about the Empire was to say that even the barbarians do things better than we do. Because of the historical dimension to the Romans’ own views of their civilisation, the barbarian could be presented as a sort of noble savage, retaining pristine things which perhaps the Romans had lost on their road to the present. It could be used ironically: barbarians can have speeches put into their mouths in which they say things or voice opinions which barbarians shouldn’t have said or held.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">There was, however, another element of Roman ethnographic thinking, which I call the taxonomic. In Graeco-Roman thought the world was a world of peoples: <i>ethne </i>in Greek; <i>gentes </i>in Latin. This patchwork of peoples did not start at the imperial frontier, even if, when the Romans called an emperor a <i>domitor gentium</i> – pacifier of the nations – what they meant was pacifier of the <u>foreign </u>nations. After all, the vast bulk of the Roman Empire was made up of areas that had been inhabited by peoples who had at one point been non-Roman: at one level, the Gauls, the Britons, the Spaniards, the Celtiberians and so on in the West, the Libyans and Egyptians in North Africa, the Greeks, Syrians, Judaeans, Lycians and so on in the East. Such peoples might now be incorporated in the Empire and be counted as Romans but at the same time they could be believed to retain at least some of the other characteristics that had defined them before the Roman conquest.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Here again the frontier was important. For the Romans, the frontier, the <i>limes </i>didn’t mark the end of the Roman world, just the end of the part that the Romans had organised and cultivated. The rest of the world was also part of the Roman world; it was just that they hadn’t got around to sorting it out yet. It was the equivalent of the line between your ploughed and fertilised fields and the bits of your land that were wild forest, pasture, moorland and so on. So the frontier was not something that the Romans felt constrained by. It was like a membrane which they could pass through but which outsiders couldn’t move in the opposite direction. So, historically, the movement of that always provisional frontier had meant that peoples who had once been barbarians were now civilised and that could happen again.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This kind of ethnography was much more descriptive and focused on things such as the physical appearance of people, the colour of eyes and hair, the way they did their hair, their costume, the ways in which they waged war, their favourite weapons and so on. It also addressed political constitutions to some extent, interesting features of diet or cuisine or particular features of family life. Some of this could be mapped onto the binary Roman-barbarian dichotomy, but the great bulk of it couldn’t. It worked in a different register; the bulk of it did not necessarily have any sort of moral content. This sort of ethnography was much more about showing a knowledge of the world.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Perhaps the best illustration of this is the work the <i>Germania </i>which the great early Roman writer Tacitus wrote at the end of the first century AD – so about 200 years before the start of our period. The <i>Germania </i>has two halves. The first half is really all about the Germani (the term ‘German’ is really anachronistic) in abstract terms, as a figure of the barbarian. In much of this, Tacitus uses the barbarian as a sort of noble savage, but really none of it is about real <i>Germani</i>; it is a critique of the Roman Empire using the notion that the barbarians do things better than the Romans. Tacitus was a conservative who didn’t really approve of the Empire and wanted to return to the Republic. So Tacitus says the <i>Germani </i>choose their kings according to their nobility, and their generals according to their virtus or power -the implication is that the Romans don’t. The rulers of the <i>Germani </i>listen to the advice of their council of elders – for which read ‘the senate’ – unlike the Roman Emperors. And so on.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But in the second half of the work Tacitus goes on to catalogue the different peoples who live in <i>Germania</i>, in a way that has barely any points of contact with the first half of his text but seems instead to be making a claim to know loads about these people, but also perhaps to demonstrate that, contrary to what the emperor Domitian had said about having conquered <i>Germania</i>, these people remained very much unsubdued.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Ammianus Marcellinus, the greatest of the fourth-century Roman historians, and a self-proclaimed continuator of Tacitus, has several ethnographic excursuses in his work. Sometimes these concern the peoples beyond the frontiers. Probably his best-known excursus is at the start of the final book of his <i>Res Gestae</i> (a difficult title to translate; basically it means ‘Deeds Done’, ‘Past Happenings’, something like that) where he talks about the people who live beyond the Danube frontier, culminating in his account of the Huns. His account of the Huns is very famous but historians have generally not paid enough attention to the fact that Ammianus places the Huns at the ends of human society and thus they share all of the stock features of extreme barbarians: they have no government, no houses, barely any clothes, and so on. But Ammianus also discusses areas within the Roman Empire in ethnographic terms. A classic instance is where he talks about the Gauls and compares them with the Italians. Much of what Ammianus has to say about the Gauls is ultimately derived from early Roman accounts of the Gauls, say from the days of Caesar. They are fierce and brave and happy to serve in the army. Their women are also brave. All this, in Ammianus’ view, presented the Gauls in a favourable light compared with the Italians, who he saw as idle and cowardly – although largely because Ammianus, himself a Syrian, had journeyed to Rome but hadn’t been able to find the favour he had hoped and indeed had been turfed out of the city during a food shortage even though, as he complained, dancing girls had been allowed to remain.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In the early third century, the Roman historian Cassius Dio described the Emperor Caracalla, whom we’ve met before, and related all of his bad points to the various parts of the Empire that his family hailed from. Ausonius, the Bordeaux professor who was important at the court of Emperor Gratian, - he was a professor of rhetoric, but is best known as a poet – Ausonius mocked a Briton apparently called Silvius Bonus. Bonus is a name but it also means ‘good’ a fact that Ausonius harps on about...:</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"></div><blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">“This is Silvius Bonus.’” “Who is Silvius?” “He is a Briton.” “Either this Silvius is no Briton, or he is Silvius malus [Silvius Bad].’”</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Silvius is called Good and called a Briton: who would believe a good citizen had sunk so low?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">No good man is a Briton. If he should begin to be plain Silvius, let the plain man cease to be good.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This is Silvius Good, but the same Silvius is a Briton: a plainer thing—believe me—is a bad Briton.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Thou Silvius art Good, a Briton: yet ’tis said thou art no good man, nor can a Briton link himself with Good.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"></div></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Hilarious.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">None of this is about Romans and Barbarians, though: it is Gauls being prejudiced against Britons. What’s crucial here is that when a Roman talks about someone as a Briton, say, or an Italian, or a Gaul, that is not necessarily radically different from when a Roman talks about someone as a Vandal or a Goth or a Frank. The latter peoples might currently be regarded as barbarian and the former as groups within the civilised Roman empire, but then that had once been true of Britons Gauls and even some Italians too.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It is really important to remember these two types of Roman ethnography: the binary and the taxonomic. Historians generally don’t and map the attitudes involved in rhetoric about ‘the barbarian’ onto Roman discussions about people described simply as belonging to a particular people. Sometimes that might indeed be implicit; sometimes inter-regional rivalry or chauvinism might be because some regions thought they were inherently more civilised and thus better Romans than others. But in my view it is usually operating in a quite different register. It may indeed be prejudiced, like Ausonius’ side-splittingly funny comments about Silvius the Briton, or it might not; but it’s a different sort of chauvinism or relationship. The confusion of the two types of ethnography really causes a lot of misunderstanding of Roman sources.</div>Historian on the Edgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14069934072719158780noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7207265794297747910.post-89077254615696843232021-02-05T10:00:00.000-08:002021-02-05T10:00:02.086-08:00Organising the Late Antique world (1): Classical Ethnography (1) – the binary<p> <span style="text-align: justify;">In [</span><span style="color: #073763; text-align: justify;">these blog posts</span><span style="text-align: justify;">] I want to talk about cosmologies – how people thought about the world, not so much in terms of geography – or not only in those terms – but more conceptually in terms of cores and peripheries; legitimate centres and illegitimate outliers; and eventually about time and their place within it. What we’ll see, I think, is that things had changed significantly by the close of our ‘short late antiquity’</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;">In this first lecture I want to return, not for the first time, to the concepts I discussed in [<span style="color: #073763;">a previous lecture</span>], on the notions of civic masculinity. There we saw that the virtuous Roman male occupied the centre of the conceptual universe. This was a very gendered structure, as mentioned, but it also mapped onto political geography. In ethnography – writing about peoples (ethne in Greek) the Romans had two ways of thinking about the world. I call the first of these ways the binary. In other words, it was based upon the opposition between civilisation and barbarism.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The notion of the barbarian had a long history, going went right back into classical Greek times. The word has a Greek origin, <i>barbaros</i>, which is actually onomatopoeic: the <i>barbaroi </i>– the barbarians -were people who burbled, people who just went bar bar bar. In other words, people who didn’t speak Greek. The development of the idea of the Barbarian in classical Athens was of course directly related to the idea of what made a good Hellene (Greek). The figure of the barbarian in Greek drama – usually either a Skythian from the steppe lands to the north or a Persian from the east – was there to represent all the things a good Greek was supposed not to be. There was a geographical element to Greek thought about barbarians. The Persians lived in a land, they said, where things were just too easy and as a result got fat and lazy and allowed themselves to become subject to tyrannous governments. What the Greeks thought made them superior was their mixture of opposites: the harsh mountains and the fertile plains, for instance. This meant they could take the best of both worlds: accept hardship but also exploit the fruits of the fertile lands, and so on.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In the Hellenistic period – that of the successors of Alexander the Great – when Greek governments ruled what had been the Persian world, Egypt and even parts of south Asia, these ideas possibly changed somewhat, although since key influential works from this period have been lost it is not easy to trace the details. Italy during the rise of Rome contained a lot of Greek or Greek-influenced states and the political vocabulary of barbarism was important in claims for legitimacy or illegitimacy. Rome, obviously was not Greek-speaking and was still conscious of the fact that that made her barbarian in Greek terms, so there was some subtle re-jigging of the terms of the debate, especially once the Republic had conquered most of the Hellenistic states around the eastern Mediterranean.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In Roman ethnography, language was replaced by conduct, morals and living by the law as the key determinants of civilisation. As we saw in [<span style="color: #073763;">a previous set of lectures</span>], the key definition of the civilised man (and as we saw then, it was essentially a question of men) was moderation, the ability to keep one’s bodily appetites under control (without going to the opposite extreme of complete renunciation), the capacity to keep your emotions in check; to be able to see both sides of things and make a reasoned choice. The issue of self-control was what enabled the law to reign; subscription to the law was an extension of self-control.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In Roman thinking, there were geographical and biological reasons why the Romans had managed to become more civilised than anyone else. The Romans stressed their being in the middle, between extremes, rather than having a mix of both. This extended to their place in the world. Roman writers believed that the ability to behave in a civilised fashion was the result of a happy balance of the body’s humours. If you lived too close to the sun, like the Africans, the moisture of the body was drawn up to the head, which was why Africans were very clever and cunning, but not very brave (as far as the Romans thought, anyway). If, on the other hand, you lived too far away from the sun, to the north, like the pale-skinned barbarians, the moisture of the body was drawn down towards the legs. This made these people very big and strong, and very fertile, but also a bit stupid. Of course, where the Romans lived happened to be just the right distance from the sun and so the Romans had the correct balance of humours, allowing them to be clever and brave. This is how Pliny the Elder (who died during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD) put it in his Natural History:</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote>In the middle of the earth, owing to a healthy blending of both elements [fire and moisture], there are tracts that are fertile for all sorts of produce, and men are of medium bodily stature, with a marked blending even in the matter of complexion; customs are gentle, senses clear, intellects fertile and able to grasp the whole of nature; and they also have governments, which the outer races never have possessed, any more than they have ever been subject to the central races, being quite detached and solitary on account of the savagery of the nature which broods over those regions.</blockquote></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">You can find these ideas in a string of Roman writers, stretching from Pliny through Vitruvius, the writer on architecture, and the medical writer Galen, and on to Vegetius, who wrote about military matters in the fifth century.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The way the Romans saw the whole world was largely coloured by this set of beliefs. If you read the Roman ethnographers and geographers, the further you went from the centre of the world, the more weird and wonderful things became. The people just over the border were barbarians, sure, but nothing compared to the people beyond them, and just wait til you hear about the people who live beyond them. And so on.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The further one progressed from the Mediterranean – the sea ‘in the middle of the earth, remember – the more wildly people didn’t live according to what Romans thought were the correct mores. In whatever direction you went, at the edge of the world of men, you find people who are cannibals, sleep with their mothers, sisters, fathers, pretty much anything with two legs or fewer, don’t bother with proper houses or with cooking stuff and don’t have any kind of government. The Romans thought the Irish were like this; the people in the outer islands off Scotland; people in the north of Germania, on the edges of Scythia to the North-East, and people to the south of the Sahara desert – or some of them anyway.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Beyond that there were people who were half human, half animal; people in Africa called Sciapodes who had one massive foot, under the shadow of which they slept all day, and then hopped about in the night.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As I mentioned in [<span style="color: #073763;">an earlier lecture</span>], though, the Romans also saw a historical dimension to all of this. Earlier Roman writers such as Propertius and Martial thought the Romans had also been barbarians once, but that they had surpassed this stage. What is interesting is that they saw that stage as happening when they discovered the law, and what that involved in particular was the limitation of sex to marriage. Marriage, the family unit, self-control and the law; this was crucial to Roman self-definition. This was the ideal that every Roman male had to set themselves against- which simultaneously meant comparing themselves to the barbarians. Just as with the Christian debate about women, this was not a two-way discussion; it rarely if ever involved any actual barbarians. This was a dialogue between Romans and Romans: we are (or ought to be) like this because they are like that. The ‘they’ are essentially a fiction – an ‘other’ – to set against the ideal ‘us’. In some ways this gave the frontiers of the Roman Empire a very particular form. When you were looking across the Rhine, as in this picture (below), you weren’t as you would be today, simply looking across from Alsace, in France, to the hills of Baden-Württemberg in Germany – you were looking from the world of civilisation – barbaricum – where the wild people were.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uRMnegEluDg/YBr18Dsh1gI/AAAAAAAAA-A/x_KiHhnGeZkRC2ScDNmRWXlOgPuOjcLwgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1164/The%2BRhine%2Bvalley.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Photograph of landscape, looking across the valley of the River Rhine" border="0" data-original-height="418" data-original-width="1164" height="230" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uRMnegEluDg/YBr18Dsh1gI/AAAAAAAAA-A/x_KiHhnGeZkRC2ScDNmRWXlOgPuOjcLwgCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h230/The%2BRhine%2Bvalley.jpg" title="The Rhine Valleyfrom the Vosges" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Rhine Valley in Alsace, looking from the Vosges towards the Schwarzwald</td></tr></tbody></table></div>Historian on the Edgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14069934072719158780noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7207265794297747910.post-74772982106011928212021-02-05T09:58:00.004-08:002021-02-05T09:58:55.351-08:00Organising the Late Antique World: Introduction<p> [<span style="color: #2b00fe;"><i>The following group of posts represents more of my <b>Short Reads on Late Antiquity</b>. As with the others, they originate as the scripts of short, 10-minute video-lectures given to my second-year students last term. As with the others I haveposted, the texts are as read - lightly modified to make them make more sense as blog posts - and are obviously simplified and introductory. If these are of use to anyone in teaching, please do feel free to use them.</i></span>]</p><br /><p style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border: 0px; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: small; margin: 0px 0px 1em; outline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; position: relative; text-align: justify; text-shadow: none;">This [<span style="color: #073763;">group of posts</span>] once again starts from a basis set out in [<span style="color: #073763;">an earlier video lecture</span>] to explores late antique cosmology - how people organised the world, not primarily in terms of geography but in terms of what they regarded as the legitimate centre and the illegitimate outside. It considers shifts in the way in which the Romans thought about the difference between civilisation and barbarism, and (preparing the ground for [<span style="color: #073763;">the lectures on ethnicity and race</span>]) how they saw the world as made up of different peoples. It revisits the ideas of [<span style="color: #073763;">a previous lecture]</span>) and the way in which religious orthodoxy became central to politcs of the 5th century, before closing withy a discussion of the measurement of time and how late antique people saw themselves located within it. </p><p style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border: 0px; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: small; margin: 0px 0px 1em; outline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; position: relative; text-shadow: none;"><strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13px; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-shadow: none;">Part 1:</strong> Classical Ethnography (1): The Binary</p><p style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border: 0px; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: small; margin: 0px 0px 1em; outline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; position: relative; text-shadow: none;">This [<span style="color: #073763;">post</span>] looks at classical Graeco-Roman ethnography and the way it conceived of the difference between civilisation and barbarism. It takes the story from the Greek city states of the 5th-4th centuries BC through to the late Roman period. This 'binary' was something that was really all about Romans and remained at the level of ideals</p><p style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border: 0px; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: small; margin: 0px 0px 1em; outline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; position: relative; text-shadow: none;"><strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13px; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-shadow: none;">Part 2:</strong> Classical Ethnography (2): The Taxonomic</p><p style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border: 0px; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: small; margin: 0px 0px 1em; outline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; position: relative; text-align: justify; text-shadow: none;">There was another element to classical ethnography, however, and that was what I call taxonomic. The world was made up of peoples (<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-shadow: none;">ethne</em> in Greek; <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-shadow: none;">gentes</em> in Latin) and these could be described in ways that didn't necessarily map on to the civilised:barbarian binary dichotomy. This dimension was much more historically situated.</p><p style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border: 0px; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: small; margin: 0px 0px 1em; outline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; position: relative; text-shadow: none;"><strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13px; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-shadow: none;">Part 3:</strong> Fourth-Century Change</p><p style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border: 0px; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: small; margin: 0px 0px 1em; outline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; position: relative; text-align: justify; text-shadow: none;">In this [<span style="color: #073763;">post</span>] I return to the creation of a martial model of masculinity within the late Roman army. This was based around conscious adoption of aspects that were opposed to classical civic masculinity, but it did not mean a rejection of Roman-ness. This new model of masculinity provided an important resource for navigating the dramas of the 5th century and became the basis for medieval warrior masculinity. </p><p style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border: 0px; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: small; margin: 0px 0px 1em; outline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; position: relative; text-shadow: none;"><strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13px; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-shadow: none;">Part 4:</strong> Theological correctness gone mad: The fifth century</p><p style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border: 0px; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: small; margin: 0px 0px 1em; outline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; position: relative; text-align: justify; text-shadow: none;">This [<span style="color: #073763;">post</span>] returns to the them of [<span style="color: #073763;">a previous video lecture</span>] by looking further at the ways in which fifth-century politics at local levels as well as higher political levels turned on issues of orthodoxy and heresy. The fifth-century grand narrative, as we have seen before, is about the Christianisation of politics. The legitimate centre changed from the good Roman to the good Christian. </p><p style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border: 0px; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: small; margin: 0px 0px 1em; outline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; position: relative; text-shadow: none;"><strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13px; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-shadow: none;">Part 5:</strong> The measurement of time</p><p style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border: 0px; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: small; margin: 0px 0px 1em; outline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; position: relative; text-align: justify; text-shadow: none;">In this [<span style="color: #073763;">post</span>] we move from the organisation of the world in terms of legitimate core and illegitimate periphery to the place of people in time. Christianity introduced a significantly different attitude to time, as it saw a linear sequence from Creation to the Last Judgement. After the conversion of Constantine, Christians became very concerned with inserting Christian history into the history of Rome and the Empire and establishing synchronicity between Roman and Christian history. The 6th Age of the World was thought to be coterminous with the Roman Empire.</p><p style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border: 0px; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: small; margin: 0px 0px 1em; outline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; position: relative; text-shadow: none;"><strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13px; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-shadow: none;">Part 6:</strong> The End</p><p style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border: 0px; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: small; margin: 0px 0px 1em; outline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; position: relative; text-align: justify; text-shadow: none;">This final short [<span style="color: #073763;">post</span>] lecture simply rounds off the previous one by looking how Christian measurement of time were linked to apocalyptical thinking. This became especially acute in the West after Justinian's wars and in the East after the Great Persian War and the Arab Conquests. If you were living after the Roman Empire (and thus the 6th Age) surely the end of time must be here. What effect did living after the end of linear time have on writers?</p>Historian on the Edgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14069934072719158780noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7207265794297747910.post-6784566318147900892021-01-24T11:02:00.005-08:002021-01-24T11:02:48.099-08:00The Not-so-natural world of Late Antiquity (5): Queer Late Antiquity?<p></p><div style="text-align: justify;">The final element of this [<span style="color: #073763;">group of posts</span>] takes up the strands of the argument in the previous to underline how sexual categories in late antiquity were very different in late antiquity not only from those of today but also from what one might initially have expected.</div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div style="text-align: justify;">Sex between men (typically, as across many historical periods, sex between women receives very little discussion) is seen in some sources – like some of the penitentials – as something a young man might experiment with. One of the penitentials only starts to penalise such activity (among monks) once a man had turned twenty. In late antiquity men spent a long period of socialisation between legally coming age and being considered fully adult. In Merovingian Gaul, this was a process that might take fifteen years or more. This was quite different from the socialisation of women, which generally came about all at once, at puberty. A woman had her first period, got married (she might well have been betrothed long before – we know that girls could be betrothed as a young as eight) – married to a man probably considerably older than her – and started having sex and having children. Pretty brutal stuff really. There were, of course variations on this pattern across time and space but the general pattern was pretty consistent.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Anyway, during that long period
of socialisation, a man typically spent a great deal of time in the household
of another man and, at least among certain social strata in a retinue or
following, with other young men. There is evidence indeed of gangs of young men
not in the service of an older man. It is well attested across society that in
those contexts, homosociality can blur into homosexuality and same-sex love,
though it’s worth remembering that the latter two categories aren’t necessarily
coextensive. None of that necessarily meant the existence of what we might
recognise as a gay identity. There’s been debate since Foucault’s day about his
suggestion that gay identity was a modern creation; it’s probably a lot more
complex than that – as ever. The point I want to make is that same sex sexual
activity was not always automatically thought of as wrong or deviant. It’s
worth making the point that the term sodomy did not acquire its narrow meaning
of anal sex until much later, in the twelfth century. In our period, the church
described as sodomy any sex, basically that wasn’t between man and wife, for
the purpose of having children, and in the missionary position (hence the name)
– as in Brundage’s diagram. Anyway, it seems to have been accepted that a man
might experiment sexually with male partners but that he ought to grow out of
this. Some thinkers have called this sort of attitude teleological
heterosexuality: ‘normal’ heterosexuality will inevitably be the outcome in the
end.</div><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">At this point I want to mention
what is known as Queer Theory, something to some extent associated with Judith
Butler, whom I mentioned [<span style="color: #073763;">in the last blog post</span>]. Again I am going to have to be brief. What
queer theory is – extremely basically – is a theory that seeks to challenge the
automatic assumptions of heteronormativity in order to flag up instances where
such norms are troubled or subverted, where they don’t fit into the usual
narratives of love, sex, marriage, reproduction and the family. Some thinkers
have pointed out the knots that scholars – especially medievalists – have tied
themselves in to deny that the evidence really suggests same-sex love or
desire. Some people have extended the notion of queerness far beyond that;
others say that that’s not really queer theory. I am going to use it in quite
the narrow sense.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I want now to talk through some
cases, which are all from sixth-century Merovingian Gaul, that might make the
theory just discussed a little more concrete, in a late antique context. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">My first example takes us back to
the issue of young men and concerns graves 6 and 8 of the sixth-century
cemetery of Ennery in modern Lorrain, just north of Metz. This was a
double-burial (in spite of the separate grave numbers) containing one skeleton
accompanied by some weapons and costume accessories – a belt set – and one
without but with some other objects. The two bodies had been placed with the
arm of one resting on the arm of the other. The initial excavator thought it
was a burial of man and wife, but in fact it is the grave of two young men, one
around 20 and one in his late teens. Their different grave goods reflect that;
Frankish men weren’t generally buried with weapons until they were 20.
Artefactually both are masculine, though, nonetheless. So what did the double
burial mean, with the linked arms? There is a huge range of possible answers
and there’s no time to go through them all. Ultimately, we don’t know –
although there are a number of burials like this, of two men known from
Frankish Gaul. The linked arms surely represent some sort of bond, possibly
familial but also very likely emotional. We’ve seen that the bonds between
young men in a household could be very close, emotional, loving, sexual. More
interestingly, perhaps, though, is the possibility that even if this meant
something quite different, it might have nevertheless been read like that by
the people watching at the funeral, opening a different reading, perhaps a
subversive reading, by people excluded from the world of warriors. We’ve seen
that the likelihood of sexual relationships between young men was well known
and apparently generally tolerated. Even if the ritual was meant to say
something quite different, it might be read a different way, and the space
between those readings – the space of deconstruction – would be the space of
discourse about masculinity and male sexuality.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Developing that, we might note
the story of the feud of <a name="_Hlk56526956">Sichar and Chramnesind</a>,
recounted by Gregory of Tours in his <i>Histories</i>. It’s a story well-known
to students of medieval violence but at one point Gregory says that Sichar and
Chramnesind became great friends, so close that they often dined together and
shared a bed. Now there’s a raft of po-faced medieval scholarship that argues
that men sharing beds in the middle ages was perfectly normal and there was
nothing funny going on there. No siree. They were all men. Well ... yes. But at
the same time, maybe no. As we have seen, sexual relations need not define an
identity; there was a huge flexibility in the interactions between sex,
sexuality and gender.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">My second example concerns a holy
woman called Monegund, whose life is also told by Gregory of Tours. Monegund
lived an enclosed life but she had a little garden that she used to attend. One
day while she was there, says Gregory,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a
woman was able to watch her from a neighbouring rooftop: “she gazed upon her
importunely, filled with worldly desires”, and consequently went blind until
Monegund healed her. It was interesting when I discussed this at a conference,
to see how determined people were to dismiss any suggestion that there was
anything Lesbian going on here. Oh no. They didn’t do that sort of thing back
then. Maybe there wasn’t, but also, maybe there was. That reading of the text
was surely as available to Gregory’s readers as it is to us. The other interesting
thing about that story is its implication that women shouldn’t be doing the
looking and desiring. As we’ve seen, the emphasis on female clothing in
Monegund’s day seems to suggest that they were supposed to be the people being <i>looked
at</i>.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Another interesting story, also
from Gregory of Tours’ work, this time from his <i>Histories</i> relates to the
tribunal that was held at the suppression of the Revolt of the Nuns of Poitiers
– an interesting tragicomic story but one which I will have to leave to one
side.<i> </i>Several bishops, including Gregory, tried the leaders of the
rebellious nuns who levelled various charges against their abbess. One was that
she kept a man in the cloister, dressed up as a woman, so she could have sex
with him when she wanted. Then one of the rebels’ leaders says ‘there he is’
whereupon, says Gregory, a man stepped forward, dressed in women’s clothing. He
said, though, that he only wore women’s clothing because he couldn’t do man’s
work, and had never even met the abbess. The bishops accept his story and move
on to the next charge. This is strange story and I have written about in three
articles, because I keep changing my mind about it. What do we make of it?
Bishop Gregory makes no comment on the man’s choices; how significant is that?
What did he mean when he said he couldn’t do manly work? Did he mean that he
was impotent, which is how the modern translator understands it? Or something
more general? The term he uses, <i>opus virile</i>, usually means men’s work in
the fields. But it has to be interesting that a man who thought he couldn’t
live up to some sort of masculine standard – that might very well <i>not</i>
have been sexual, felt he had to dress up as a woman. And people seem to have
been fine with that. And that’s suggested by a burial (no.32) from the Frankish
cemetery of Ennery, of someone in their 40s, with the sorts of grave-goods that
would be typical for a woman in her 40s, but who, according to the skeletal
data, was a man. Again, what do we make of that? The person was buried in the
communal cemetery just like everyone else suggesting that if she had been a
biological male who lived their life as a woman, people were happy enough to
recognise that in her funeral.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">What I hope I have demonstrated
in this [<span style="color: #073763;">blog post</span>], as in the others in this [<span style="color: #073763;">group of posts</span>], is that a lot of what
you might think of as natural categories or ways of categorising didn’t always
apply in late antiquity. The late antique world can be very unexpected.<o:p></o:p></p>Historian on the Edgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14069934072719158780noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7207265794297747910.post-44378497372520716832021-01-24T10:57:00.001-08:002021-01-24T10:57:11.786-08:00The Not-so-Natural World of Late Antiquity (4): Sex and society <p><span style="text-align: justify;">In the remainder of this [<span style="color: #073763;">cluster of posts</span>] I am going to talk about another way in which people divide up the
world, which might seem natural but which isn’t on closer inspection, and that
is sex, gender and sexuality.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">It is still commonly believed
that gender is the social construction placed upon the biological binary of
sex. Indeed this lies at the heart of one of the most current and most heated
political issues. This is much more complicated, however, than the idea of a
natural sexual binary will allow and, as we’ll see, issues that are nowadays
often presented as natural and eternal, often with some sort of vague reference
back to our historical heritage, were actually seen in very different ways in
the past. Again, a closer investigation of how the people of late antiquity
thought about the sexual categories of their world permits a different view on
the modern world.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The first, preliminary point that
must be made concerns gender. It is still often thought that gender history means
the history of women; it doesn’t, even though I have made this week’s
discussion group about women. Women’s history and gender history are quite
different. If you have never had cause yet to read it, then I recommend you
read <a name="_Hlk56526788">Joan Scott’s classic article on ‘gender as a useful
category of historical analysis</a>’, even though it has nothing to say about our
period. Gender history is about the construction of the categories of masculine
and feminine; it’s relational; it allows us to see masculinity, as in the Roman
world, constructed not simply against femininity but also – and sometimes
perhaps more importantly – against lesser forms of masculinity. Sometimes, as
we’ve seen the construction of gender is not a binary, with a separate feminine
and masculine poles, but what one might call monopolar, with a single focus:
the masculine. We can see this in the classical Roman world. The creation of
new models of masculinity in the fourth century – martial and then ascetic
-<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>shook this up in such a way, I have argued,
that in the sixth century, as the classical civic masculine ideal faded, it
left separate feminine and masculine ideals – a more binary system. In turn, I
have suggested, in the seventh century there was a return to something more
like the monopolar Roman system but with the crucial difference that the
dominant form of masculinity was martial – warrior masculinity – rather than
civic. This is manifest in some of the things that I have mentioned already,
such as the shift in the focus of investment in decoration and adornment from
items of female dress to elements of male costume. There were shifts in the
gendering of religious identity too. It’s possible that, as I have argued in an
article that has appeared very recently, that gendered ideals in the Christian
sphere moved in different directions from those in the secular sphere, so that
for example, female and male religious ideals were described in essentially
similar terms in 6<sup>th</sup>-century western hagiography, at a time when
there was more of a binary separation in secular terms, and then separated out
into distinct male and female ideals in the seventh century, as secular gender
norms were returning to a more monopolar set of ideas. There were all sorts of
shifts, and regional variations, in the way that power was gendered.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The most important thinker to
challenge the traditional ideas of the separation of sex and gender as
‘natural’ and ‘social’ respectively, was the American philosopher <a name="_Hlk56526828">Judith Butler, who I think is a really interesting and
important thinker. Her classic works on this topic were <i>Gender Trouble</i></a>,
published in around 1990, followed by <i>Bodies that Matter</i> a few years
later. There’s no time in a ten-minute or so lecture like this to do anything
like justice to this work so I will have to simplify; I do recommend Butler’s
work to you; it’s not easy if you’re not used to reading philosophy (well, it
wasn’t to me when I first read her, when I hadn’t read much if any philosophy)
but it’s a lot easier than some, and she does tend to make the same point
several different ways, so if you just persist it will become clear.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">One of the key points that Butler
made was that while biological sex might, in some ways, be seen as a binary or
at least as having two opposing poles, the ways in which human bodies possess
the physical or genetic features of the male or female sex are very much
messier than that. It’s not the case that all males possess each and every one
of a range of features and that all females possess each and every one of an
entirely discrete set of scientifically-observable features. That is probably
only true in a relative minority of cases. There is a whole gamut of
combinations between those extremes and in the middle things can be very mixed
indeed. There were two points that Butler made to develop this. One was that
the science of sex was sometimes every bit as socially contingent as the
science of race, or that it was enormously influenced by the gendered norms of
the societies in which the scientists worked. This has been shown to be the
case over and over, in all sorts of cases. Sometimes there have been absolutely
horrible cases where people have had intrusive surgery to make them conform to
the sex that they were declared to be at birth. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Butler’s other point was that,
since sex was not – in every single case – something that emerged clearly,
naturally, independently, from the physical body and manifested as the simple
membership of one of two categories, the sexing of people was as much assigned
as anything else. She cites the example of the midwife holding up the new baby
and saying, ‘it’s a boy’ or ‘it’s a girl’, arguing that in a sense this is a
performative: a statement that creates what it describes. After that, we all
experience our bodies via a set of social norms and expectations; there’s no
point where we can go back and experience our lives as pre-sexed. So in that
sense, sex was very much like gender, rather than being the natural, scientific
rock on which the latter was founded. A lot of people still don’t want to
accept this but the case doesn’t seem to me to be contestable.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Sex, sexuality and gender
interact with each other in an enormously wide range of ways, in Late Antiquity
as well as today. We might actually be surprised – given what are regarded as
supposedly ‘medieval’ attitudes, let alone those which we are sometimes told
are normal or natural about the wide breadth of the things which late antique
and early medieval people appear not to have regarded as ‘wrong’, let alone
‘unnatural’. Some of these I will come back to in the next [<span style="color: #073763;">blog post</span>]. For
now I want only to think about sex and sexuality.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The ways in which sexuality, in
the sense of one’s choice of sexual partners, related to other aspects of late
antique identity was quite different from now. As with race, some of the modern
ideas about sexuality, norms and deviations, rather than being age-old, are
quite recent and, in particular, many belong to the modern period’s obsession
with supposedly scientific organising and categorising.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">One of the problems with late
antique and medieval sex is the nature of the evidence. On the one hand there
are Christian treatises on the topic, which as we have seen, by the end of the
fifth century were stressing virginity and abstinence over chastity and
restraint; we’ve also seen that in ascetic thinking, sex was seen as a
temptation but not simply in itself but as part of a wider range of issues of
bodily self-control. We have also seen how by 600 these sorts of ascetic ideas
were coming to be applied to secular society. On the other hand, and this is
truer for the periods before and after late antiquity there is evidence for
dirty jokes, bawdy songs and the rest, or in our period a sort of reverse
interpretation of the penitentials’ obsession with sex which saw it as evidence
that all this was going on all the time. As one scholar has said, one has the
impression on the one hand that ‘medieval people’ were incredibly frustrated
and hung up about sex, or on the other hand that they were obsessed with it;
that everyone was constantly at it. The problem is that it’s like what judging
modern sex would be like if the only evidence we had were the sermons of
southern US fire-and-brimstone evangelists on the one hand and hard-core porn
on the other. I don’t think medieval people were either incredibly frustrated
and sex-starved or that they were incredibly sexed up; boringly perhaps, I
think they had an incredibly average amount of sex.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">One way in which the
post-enlightenment mania for scientific (or pseudo-scientific) categorisation
impacts upon our ways of seeing is in the way that heterosexuality has been
established as a norm and homosexuality as a deviation. In fact heterosexuality
and homosexuality were defined and classified at the same time. Then a whole
set of ideas about psychiatry and identity were built on that. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Things were much more complex in late
antiquity and the early middle ages and I will develop this point in the next
video lecture. In the meantime I will leave you with this diagram from James <a name="_Hlk56526871">Brundage’s <i>Law, Sex and Christian Society</i> </a>which
illustrates the thinking about sex that is manifested by the penitentials.
There are some superficially curious aspects about the penitentials’ attitudes
to sex. It took me many years, as a godless social historian, to figure out why
oral sex earned a higher penitence than sex with, say, a goat. The answer is
that a goat (in early medieval thought) didn’t have an immortal soul that you
could corrupt with your disgusting sexual practices. The penitentials, by the
way, don’t specify what the penalty was for having oral sex with a goat;
perhaps that was considered to be its own punishment. <o:p></o:p></p>Historian on the Edgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14069934072719158780noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7207265794297747910.post-62972554479866325532021-01-24T10:54:00.002-08:002021-01-24T10:58:22.254-08:00The Not-so-natural world of Late Antiquity (3): Late Antiquity was not white<div style="text-align: justify;">The Romans did not assign any paramount importance to obvious bodily – somatic – features in the way they drew up the world. Yet they were every bit as racist and prejudiced, and every bit as murderously nasty, to the people they did define as inferior. What we might identify as their racial schema was very different from that of the modern world. Two things can, I think, emerge from that, which I call hope and vigilance. There is an element of hope, in that it shows that the world is not somehow naturally divided up into races on the basis of skin colour; in other words, there is nothing eternal or essential about modern racial categories, which in turn means there’s absolutely no reason that we have to continue to live with them, or why they can’t be abolished. That’s one half of why I call this [<span style="color: #073763;">group of blog posts</span>] the not-so-natural world of Late Antiquity. But the other point is vigilance. The Romans might not have been especially interested in skin-colour or other somatic ways of dividing the world but they had their own prejudices and racial schemas which could be every bit as bad. In other words, it’s not very much use abolishing one form of prejudice if you’re just going to replace it with another.</div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">This raises an important issue
which we have to discuss. There has been much debate about how the issues of
race, and of racism, are to be confronted in responsible or committed
scholarship. In Europe and North America, the early middle ages in north-west
Europe, and elements of its culture, have been appropriated by Far-Right
nationalists and white supremacists. Indeed they have been for over a
century. Some have suggested that the correct response is to point out
the fact that there were people whom we might now consider as 'black' or as
People of Colour active in places like Britain and elsewhere. This is
certainly true – and it is certainly a valid, pragmatic response in the modern
context – but it is also problematic and, in my view, it isn’t historically or
politically radical enough. It’s been argued that the way to deal with western
racism is to abolish whiteness. This has been wilfully misread as calling for
some sort of race war or extermination of ‘the white race’; it doesn’t mean
that. It means you can only abolish a categorisation by abolishing the notions
that have been placed at its hierarchical centre, against which everything else
is judged. When did the Roman way of organising the world come to an end?
Essentially when the concept of the civic male was removed from its centre, or
abolished if you like.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">It is not difficult to populate
the northern shores of the Roman Mediterranean as far as Hadrian’s Wall or the
Rhine-Danube frontier with what modern people might classify as people of
colour. People from North Africa moved all over the Roman World. What’s now
Tunisia was one of the most important and central parts of the Roman world; it
was rich and productive; North African products like the – to late Romanists at
least – famous <a name="_Hlk56526647">African Red Slip </a>Ware are found all
across the Mediterranean, east to west, round the coasts of Spain and France
and as far as the Irish Sea. The African church was an intellectual
power-house. Saint Augustine of Hippo was a North African. North Africa and
Egypt were the bread-baskets which provided Rome and Constantinople with most
of the grain to feed their huge populations. Carthage and Alexandria were
possibly the next two biggest cities of the Empire. There were contacts with
sub-Saharan Africa, mostly to East Africa via the Nile valley but also in the
West – even if the latter contacts were not as great as later. You can quibble
about minor issues. Were the numerous late Roman regiments of cavalry called <a name="_Hlk56526695"><i>mauri</i> or Moors </a>really recruited from North
African Moors? In my view mostly not, at least by the fourth century, but this doesn’t
affect the main point. Africans were everywhere in the Roman Empire, and
important within it. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">There is no doubt that the
general public ought to be made more aware of this. Not just to stop people
claiming or accepting that the Roman Empire was only made up of ‘white’ people
but as a way of stopping people from thinking that Roman history is only for
white people. Historically, western Europe and Africa have not always stood as
opposed continents divided by a great sea, but have, for centuries, perhaps
millennia, also been part of a shared world <i>linked</i> by the Mediterranean. [<span style="color: #073763;">Indeed before the seventh or eighth century, the Maghreb was much more a part of a shared world with Iberia, Italy and the south of France than part of the same world as sub-Saharan Africa.</span>] This was never truer than during the Roman Empire. This is important.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Nonetheless, were one to do this,
one would still be left – no matter how hard one tried – with the inescapable
fact that the great bulk of the inhabitants of the Empire’s European provinces
were not, by modern European standards, people of colour. They would, in modern
European terms, be white. People of colour would still be a minority. The current
binary – and that sense of majority and minority – would be eternalised<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Now, the Romans themselves <i>didn’t
</i>see the inhabitants of North Africa as different from themselves in any
significant somatic sense. They didn’t see North Africans as <a name="_Hlk56526718"><i>Aethiopes</i> </a>- dark-skinned Africans. When they
commented on the appearance of the North African Moors, the Mauri, the
ancestors of the modern Berbers, it was their curly hair that they commented
on. Some people have tried to argue that North Africans like Augustine were
’black’ and other people (with rather less justification) have tried to deny
this and claim that he was ‘white’. The truth of the matter is that we have no
idea what he looked like; it’s reasonable to suppose that a modern American
would see him as a person of colour. But it’s also reasonable to suppose that a
modern inhabitant of the Mediterranean regions, especially in North Africa,
wouldn’t. Many, maybe most, modern Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians, Libyans and
Egyptians do not regard themselves as 'black' and can react quite angrily to
the suggestion that they might be – even if this attitude can sometimes be
grounded in their own, differently racist, attitudes towards sub-Saharan
Africa/ns. Anyone who has visited North Africa knows that, in terms of actual
skin colour there is a range of skin-tones from very dark to very pale (as
there always has been). That spectrum continues, without a break, on the other
side of the sea. People in Spain, Sicily and Italy might now make what they see
as a colour-based distinction between them and their North African neighbours
but this is entirely cultural.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">This is the heart of the issue.
If one takes a colour chart and defines people within a certain part of that
spectrum as ‘people of colour’ according to modern, especially according to
modern American, categories, you are naturalising, eternalising and
essentialising a categorisation that is social and contingent. Because not
everyone sees the world now – let alone in the past – according to that schema,
you are colonising the past every bit as much as old Europeans did when they
made everyone in antiquity white, and scrubbed statues and so on to prove their
point. You’re still imposing a modern, western view (even if it’s a different
one from before) on the Mediterranean as a whole and North Africa in
particular. This isn’t decolonising the past. We need a more radical solution.
The issue is not about who was white and who was black or ‘of colour’; these
are all modern categories that didn’t apply in the Roman world. I don’t want to
use that point just to sweep the issue under the carpet, though. We can use it
much more creatively.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Here I return to phenomenology
and my critique of materialisms. People don’t engage with other people in their
unmediated materiality, any more than they interact with anything else like
that. People are categorised, as we’ve seen, in all sorts of ways, and
categories work as signs. When a modern racist sees a black person, he sees a
sign with a particular signified; when he sees a white person, he sees a
different one. A Roman presented with people who looked exactly like both of
those people didn’t see either of those things. A Roman saw a pale-skinned
northerner and a North African with, perhaps, a slightly darker skin than his
or her own as signifying <i>very</i> different things. Very different indeed,
and with very different relationships to his or her way of ordering the world,
its cultural capital and its power relations. They saw people differently; in
phenomenological terms, people were presented in entirely different form. Recognising
that the northern half of the Empire contained many people who wouldn’t now be
seen as ‘white’ doesn’t change – in a way – the balance of power or the fact
that people are still implicitly being contrasted with ‘whiteness’. But
‘whiteness’ can safely be abolished from the Roman world. The Romans didn’t see
themselves as white (certainly not as ‘pale-skinned’). How Romans saw self and
other was entirely different: if you went back in time and showed a Roman man a
picture of, say, David Lammy in a toga, or Naga Munchetty in traditional Roman
dress, and me with a top-knot wearing trousers and asked who he thought looked
the most different or ‘other’, compared to himself, he’d say me, and if he said
Naga it would be because she’s a woman. When Hadrian, an African abbot who
lived in southern Italy, accompanied the new Archbishop Theodore (who himself
came from Tarsus in modern Turkey) to Canterbury about a generation after the
close of our period (it was Hadrian’s 3<sup>rd</sup> trip to England, by the
way) no one remarked upon their skin colour. Whatever it might have looked like
to us, they didn’t see it. It was much more a sign of worrying otherness that
Theodore spoke Greek and might introduce Greek church customs!<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Late Antique people didn’t <i>look</i>
like us in either sense – in the way they looked out and saw their fellow
people, or in the way they looked to the people looking at them. We need to
embrace the radical possibilities that this permits. What kinds of modern
people portray the people of late antiquity <i>can’t be</i> a question of
historical accuracy. The past is other. As I said it looked different, and it <i>looked</i>
different<i>ly</i>. If I were casting a film set in the late Antique west I
would like to have all sorts of people play the parts in a way that underlined
the difference, but also the categories that late antique people have – have
Gauls played by south Asians, Spaniards by East Asians, Barbarians by white
people, Italians by African-Caribbean actors. It’d possibly make the Daily Mail
self-combust but that’d only be a side-benefit. It’d bring home the idea that
the late antique European/Mediterranean past doesn’t belong to any modern group
any more than any other. It’s open to everyone. I’d really like to see that one
day.<o:p></o:p></p>Historian on the Edgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14069934072719158780noreply@blogger.com