Books

I have uploaded pdf files of the texts of a couple of my more obscure books to my Academia.edu page here* and (for Professor Grumpy's grumpiest tome) here.

* Please note the disclaimer.

Graves and Sexuality: Multiple readings

[I was inspired by a critical discussion by Karl Steel here, of an attempt to project same-sex marriage into the past, to post my (I think only) discussion of sexuality and queer readings of archaeology, for your thoughts/comments, especially form those of you who are more literate in theory than I am.  The quote comes from pp.347-9 of Cemeteries and Society in Merovingian Gaul, in a chapter (9) which contains other thoughts about archaeologists' and historians' fear of including same-sex love/emotional attraction within their range of interpretive options.]

Ennery (Lorraine) 'Graves' 6 and 8

Finally in this section I should like to draw attention to the double burials of young males that are known in Merovingian archaeology.  In the cemeteries in Lorraine which I studied the best examples were ‘graves’ 6 and 8 at Ennery (dating to the sixth century), and grave 103 at Audun-le-Tiche, from about a century later.  Logically, the subjects of the graves must have succumbed close in time.  What seem at first sight to be linked arms are on closer inspection no such thing; the arms of the subjects of the Ennery double grave simply lie on top of each other.  This might have been deliberate or it might not.[1]  There is a wide range of possibilities behind these double graves.  They might be those of relatives, perhaps most plausibly those of brothers.  There were a number of other social ties in Merovingian society that might equally have led the community to join two young males in death.  For instance, the male child of the foster father or god-parent of another young man would be regarded as that young man’s brother.  The son of one family, serving as an apprentice in another might have been regarded as, effectively, kin – a surrogate brother – to the sons of that household.  Two young men serving together in a household could have been regarded as sharing a bond.  In all such cases the families of the deceased and perhaps that of the head of the household might, following the interpretation of furnished burial proposed above, have come together in funerary ritual to ease the rupture in relations between the families produced by the deaths in question.  Alternatively, as will be discussed below, young males might have bonded in age groups.  The deaths of two such men might have united their families in grief and led them to create links between them through involvement in a joint funeral.  Lastly it is possible that a joint interment might have been a means of smoothing over tensions created by killing and vengeance.  Nevertheless, we probably ought not to apply a single explanation to all of the instances of such burials.  Double graves might well represent different aspects of society from those manifested by occasional triple burials, such as at Niederstotzingen.[2]

My purpose in mentioning these graves in this chapter is simply to consider a further issue raised by the possibility that the occupants of such graves were united other than by close kinship.  The close homosocial bonds between young men serving together in various contexts (from the monastic to the military) are well known throughout history, as is the frequency with which these bonds encompass homosexual love and sex.  In spite of this, as in other periods of history, accusations of anal sex with men were nevertheless regarded as serious slurs on a man’s standing or honour.  Interestingly, the other bases for insult were cowardice and unreliability in battle.[3]  As has been long debated, such homosexual love is usually not commensurate with a self-consciously gay identity, seen as different from or antagonistic to normative heterosexuality: this seems to be the product of more modern sexual classifications.  It is nevertheless surely a mistake either to deny that such emotional and sexual relations existed (in the latter case – sexual relations – the concern of monastic regulators and authors of penitentials with sodomy ought to be proof enough to the contrary[4]) or that the classifications of sexual behaviour and the views of male homosexual relationships held by medieval people were automatically similar to those of modern observers.  This matters because it presents two possibilities (they are not more than that) to the reading of double burials like Ennery 6 and 8 or Audun-le-Tiche 103.  One is that such emotional bonds were given sufficient recognition to result in shared inhumation.  The other, possibly the more interesting, perhaps the more likely, takes us to the issue of the polysemy of burial display.[5]  The ‘dominant’ reading intended by the creators of a funerary monument like this might to have been to stress the social relations between the two families, or to have valorised the comradeship, trust and fidelity of shared military service, traditionally ‘honourable’ within masculine culture.  Other readings open to contemporaries at the graveside, however, might have dwelt on different issues, such as real or suspected sexual or emotional relationships between the two men.  These might have involved no particular value judgement, simply being alternative.  They might also have been subversive, and they might have been derogatory (as in the insults referred to above).  The latter could be open to members of rival families or to those men barred from participation in what was becoming the normative, military form of masculinity, as discussed in the next chapter.

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[1] See below, pp.357-60

[2] R. Christlein, Die Alamannen: Archäologie eines lebendigen Volkes (3^rd edition, Stuttgart, 1991), p.89.

[3] PLS [Pactus Legis Salicae] 30, using the translation I proposed in W&S [Warfare and Society], p.11.

[4] Although what, precisely, was meant by the term sodomy is usually vague; many non-procreative forms of sexual encounter could be bracketed under the heading.  Nevertheless, in the context of penitentials I assume it means some form of sexual, physical contact between males.

[5] BW ['Burial Writes'], pp.64-65 (above, pp.219-20).

Officers or Gentlemen? The Frankish Aristocracy in the Sixth Century: Part 2

[In this second chunk of the article, I look at the dynamics of royal-aristocratic relations and how the maintenance of patronage could work to undermine the local status of aristocrats.  Archaeological evidence is then adduced to show a further weakening of local aristocratic power by the middle quarters of the sixth century.]

Part 1 is here

The exception to this rule, just mentioned, was the aristocracy of the Triererland.  This serves as an instructive case study of the problems that the Frankish kings might have faced, and how they dealt with them.  The aristocracy of the middle Moselle Valley had been closely connected with the imperial Roman presence in the region, when the western Empire’s main capital was located at Trier (western Emperors residing regularly at Trier between the 280s and 388). As well as holding large estates and lavish villas, which might have survived the early fifth-century crises better than those in other regions, it had a powerful sense of its own Roman identity.  References to the senators of Trier are known – uniquely for Merovingian Gaul north of the Loire.  Indeed, the rapacious aristocracy of northern Gaul, so long (probably mistakenly) employed as a paradigm for the late Roman aristocracy, may be specifically located to this region.  Their senatorial identity is represented not only in the statements of the evidence but also in its form.  Trier has produced about a quarter of all the late antique epigraphy from Gaul, and almost all such data found north of the Loire.  In regional context, this Roman means of commemoration stands out like a sore thumb.  As well as a self-confident Roman aristocracy, Trier also possessed an episcopate with an awkward tradition of speaking out against secular rulers, actively maintained during the first half of the sixth century by Saint Nicetius.  With all this in mind it is perhaps unsurprising that the attempts by the Merovingian kings of Austrasia to establish themselves at Trier failed.  By the middle of the sixth century they had abandoned the former imperial capital and moved up-river to Metz.  Against the physical backdrop of the old imperial buildings (in one of which, the cathedral, Nicetius staged one of his confrontations with King Theudebert of Austrasia) and against the ideological background of Justinian’s attempted reconquest, accompanied as it was by the proclamation of the West’s loss to barbarians, any early Merovingian efforts (like Theudebert’s) to present themselves simply as legitimate successors to the Roman Emperors – as emperors in new guise – was surely doomed to failure.  When the audience for such attempts was composed of a noble stratum far more confident about its traditional Roman credentials, their failure was assured.  

The Merovingians therefore, like most other post-imperial rulers, betook themselves to lesser Roman centres, like Paris and Metz.  Metz was a Roman city which offered all the elements of an ‘imperial complex’ like that at Trier or Constantinople: a cathedral, and audience chamber and an amphitheatre.  These however had not been unified into such a complex by the emperors.  Metz thus presented a suitably Roman ‘canvass’ upon which the Merovingians could nevertheless inscribe their own political identity.  Here, moreover, the Merovingians could appoint their own men to the episcopate, largely removing the threat of awkward confrontations with bishops.  As a result of this attention, Metz had, by the middle of the eighth century, largely eclipsed Trier.  Used to having their rulers living amongst them, the Trier aristocracy now had to travel up the Moselle to Metz to obtain the patronage of the Merovingian kings.  Once there, of course, they found themselves in competition with the kings’ own servants and with aristocrats from across the rest of Gaul.  Their local wealth and pre-eminence availed them little in this context.

This relationship between the royal court and local aristocrats is paradigmatic for understanding early Merovingian northern Gallic social structures.  Royal patronage was even more important to the aristocrats of the other parts of the region, whose wealth and familial standing were less secure than those of the Trier ‘senators’.  Reduced to precarious authority even within their own localities, the best means of cementing this leadership and of involvement in politics on a wider stage (such as had been possible to their fourth-century ancestors) was to obtain the patronage of the Merovingian rulers.  This dynamic is important as, as already noted, it removes the need to assume a widespread programme of political assassination or purges.
    

By the opening of the second quarter of the sixth century, which this paper takes as its rough chronological starting point, other developments had further strengthened the Merovingians’ hand.  In addition to the removal of rival branches of the Frankish royalty, already mentioned, which (as is less widely appreciated) continued into the reigns of Clovis’ sons, the defeat of the Visigothic kingdom and the acquisition of Aquitaine from 507 onwards was a decisive moment.  Although the conquest of southern Gaul was a more complex and drawn-out process than is often imagined, with much territory retaken by the Goths under Theudis and thus having to be conquered again (perhaps as late as the 530s), by 535 Burgundy and Provence had also been added to the Frankish kingdom.  These conquests massively increased the Merovingians’ store of patronage.  Northern aristocrats could be rewarded with offices (such as those of count or duke) south of the Loire.  This may not have happened on a large scale but it did not have to do so to have crucial effects.  The imposition of northerners as local civil and military governors, with royally-bestowed rights to collect taxes, hear court cases and levy the army, will have made a considerable difference to a southern Gallic nobility, used to having a powerful Gothic ruler living amongst them for the best part of a century.  Now they had to compete with Frankish royal officers for the favour of a monarch who dwelt to the north, rapidly becoming Francia.  While this dynamic enabled the Merovingian realms to secure their control over Aquitaine, Burgundy and Provence, to a greater degree than their Carolingian and later successors, it similarly maintained the kings’ ability to play off the northern aristocrats against each other in the contest for royal patronage.  This competition for patronage could be played out in various formal settings.  Gatherings of the army, the chief political assembly of the kingdom, and of the Franks especially, were occasions for the kings to reward and punish, as the famous story of the Vase of Soissons makes clear.  Gregory calls this a meeting on the campus martius.  Whether this was named for a place, on the model of the campus martius in Rome, or for a date (1 March) is not clear.  Certainly an annual assembly on 1 March (the Marchfield) seems to have been in existence by the 590s, when Childebert II issued all three of his edicts on that date.  It is possible that by the 590s a fusion of the date and the location had occurred.  Some adaptation of Roman practice is probable.

Thus the kings had, by the second quarter of the sixth century, established themselves in a position of more or less unassailable authority within their realms.  There were other policies that helped to underline this position.  One was their well-known practice of avoiding marriage with the daughters of their aristocrats, preferring low-born women and foreign princesses.  This ensured that no Frank could claim membership of the family without the recognition of a reigning king.  Royal daughters, too, appear to have been kept out of the marriage market, except for alliances with neighbouring kingdoms.  Though decried by some contemporaries, and whether or not it was designed to do so, the division of the realm in fact also helped to bolster the Merovingian supremacy.  Opposition to one king only crystallised around his brother or cousin in another of the Teilreiche.  More probably based upon the pragmatic division of the Roman Empire than upon any kind of ‘Germanic’ inheritance custom, the provision of more than one court facilitated admittance to royal presence.  This further enabled the tight control over the distribution of patronage mentioned earlier.  While this was to the kings’ advantage, the ease of access and the prevention of a monopoly of the court by any particular faction were doubtless seen as aspects of good governance by many aristocrats.

The kings’ dominance and their evident reduction of local leaders to the level of a service aristocracy can be seen further in social and economic developments of the second and third quarters of the sixth century.  This can be traced archaeologically in two or three areas.  The first is the further deterioration of the late Roman fine-ware tradition.  By 540, Argonne Ware production, which had hit a critical point in the mid-fifth century, entered a final phase of decline.  Between that point and its final disappearance from the record around 600, only a limited range of undecorated forms were produced.    A similar trend might also be manifest in the fact that artefacts of Böhner’s Stufe II (c.525-c.575/600) manifest much less craft-specialisation than was visible in, for example, the polychrome garnet-inlaid objects of the late fifth-century Flonheim-Gültlingen Horizon.    Although the belt seemingly remained a key item of masculine costume, the belt-buckles of the middle quarters of the sixth century are for the most part plain, unadorned ring-and-tongue designs, sometimes with a simple incised decoration on the loop or tongue, occasionally on the ‘scutiform’ terminal of the latter.  Where plaques are attached these too are often undecorated.  Most of the decoration that we see is invested in female apparel such as brooches but here too the objects are, for the most part, simply cast.

One reason for this must be that the security of local leadership was now even less than it had been in the preceding 100 years.  Surplus was now spent on a cycle of rituals that involved the display and consumption of resources, the bestowal of food, weaponry and other movables or parcels of land in return for alliances and support.  Such rituals clustered around the life-cycle, particularly the processes of socialisation (evidently a long, many-staged procedure for males), betrothal and marriage. Death and burial were the other key focus for such activity and it is from the practices associate with this that we have our most plentiful evidence in the form of archaeological cemetery data.  Between c.475 and c.500, in the Flonheim-Gültlingen Horizon proper, most furnished burials were of adult males.  In the subsequent quarter of a century, children and females became more common, giving the phase some similarities with the archaeological horizon of the so-called Föderatengräber in the late fourth and earlier fifth centuries.  We appear to have some locally prominent families marking their status within the community through the use of elaborate ritual. The increase in numbers of such graves seems to reveal a growing number of such kin-groups using material culture linked with the Franks to symbolise a claim for local authority.  The gradual use of the burials of women and children as foci for display suggests that the competition for local authority was becoming more severe, as deaths of all sorts of family-members could bring status into question and require smoothing over with ritual activity.  This activity not only displayed claims for legitimate authority to an audience assembled for the funeral, via appropriate material cultural symbols and emblems; it appears to have been accompanied by feasting and the bestowal of other gifts, maintaining or strengthening ties with other kindreds within the community.  A burial appears to have been an occasion to show that a family could inter one of its members with the appropriate obsequies to the best of its ability.  Within this, there was – obviously – a competitive element.  It is important, therefore, to underline that the ‘wealth’, or otherwise, of a burial is not a passive index of the formal rank or status of the deceased or his/her family, but an active claim to local standing.

By the second quarter of the sixth century, however, this practice had become very much more widespread.  For example, at the cemetery of Lavoye (dép. Meuse), there were only a dozen graves in its first phase (c.475-c.525) but about two hundred in the phase spanning the remainder of the sixth century.  Of these, at least three quarters were buried with grave-goods.  Rather than being clustered with particular families, though, grave-goods were now very clearly distributed according to the age and gender of the deceased.  Community norms appear to govern the forms of material deemed appropriate for individuals of particular ages and gender, as well as the overall lay-out of the cemetery itself.   Clearly the extent of competition for authority had increased with the participation of a wider range of families in the rituals that served to augment as well as cement local relationships.  Burials which are marked out from their contemporaries have to be sought more subtly than in previous phases, usually marked by having more of the correct forms of artefact – and especially gender-related artefacts – for a person of that age and sex.  More obviously unusual burials are nevertheless known, and on some sites distinction is created through the breach of the cemetery’s usual norms.

Thus we can propose from a variety of archaeological sources that authority within a community was now much less secure than had earlier been the case.  In these circumstances a connection with the royal court and its patronage was one of the best means of securing such pre-eminence independently of local political allegiances.


Part 3 is here

The (Ab)Use of DNA in the Study of Early Medieval Cemeteries

[Much attention has recently been given, especially in popular news sources, to the use of DNA evidence in elucidating the 'Barbarian Migrations', whether in looking at the DNA of modern populations or in the use of ancient DNA from archaeological samples.  It is argued here that such approaches are potentially far more dangerous than helpful.  They risk returning us to ideas of ethnicity as a simple, inherited genetic entity, something akin to those on which the 19th-century idea of the Nation State was based.  The unpleasant uses to which such misleading ideas can be put do not require much imagination to envisage.  Ethnicity is multi-layered, flexible and about ideas.  The genetic approach ignores such things or even individuals' knowledge of their geographical origins.  A worked example or thought experiment argues that even with - from a migrationist perspective - a perfect data-set the explanatory possibilities of DNA are severely circumscribed.  Other questions need to be asked which this potentially valuable source of evidence is capable of contributing meaningfully to answering.]

When I was giving the paper posted below (as ‘Ethnicity and Early Medieval Cemeteries’: http://600transformer.blogspot.com/2010/12/ethnicity-and-early-medieval-cemeteries.html) in Vitoria, one of the questions I was asked concerned the use of DNA as a means of establishing the ethnicity of the deceased and its role in the community. The way the question was phrased was more interesting than usual, in that the argument was that if population elements from outside the area were identified in the skeletal remains, then that would be a means of explaining tension, stress and archaeologically-visible responses to them. As I said, this is more interesting than the usual approach, but I still had to respond fairly negatively, stressing that – when applied to the question of ethnic identity – the potential to distort and mislead hugely outweighed the possibilities offered to advance our knowledge and understanding.

As a convenient (if lazy) means of starting my discussion, here is the relevant section on the topic from my Barbarian Invasions and the Roman West (pp.451-2):

‘Most famous, however, has been the intrusion of the study of DNA into the investigation of the migrations, especially in England. It has, for example, been suggested that DNA can ‘prove’ that there was mass migration and dramatic population change in lowland Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries. The potential of DNA to show significant, precisely-datable, movement within the human population of Europe since the Neolithic can, however, be seriously questioned. Migration is a constant of European history; not something that occurred in specific, discrete episodes. More to the point, the samples used in these (and other physical anthropological analyses) have generally been selected in accordance with a particular view of history (specifically that of migration from northern Germany to Britain). Any similarities that emerge might thus be deemed simply to reaffirm a preconception. No controls are sought from such ‘unlikely’ areas as Italy, France or Spain, let alone Africa. That samples from the much more mixed modern populations of the cities of England and northern Germany show greater variation than those from the highlands of North Wales or Norway might also be unsurprising. Catherine Hills has said that, just as ‘historians hoped archaeologists would answer their questions, now archaeologists look to genetics … [as a] solution to all problems.’ In truth, the geneticists do not often seem to be answering archaeologists’ questions at all, but those of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians.

‘Most importantly, however, none of these analyses, even if possibly yielding information on geographical origins, tells us anything about what people thought they were, and ethnicity is a matter of belief. People who crossed the North Sea to Roman Britain in the third century and served in the Roman army adopted Roman culture and ethnicity. Any of their fifth-century relatives who did the same proclaimed their non-Roman identity, and may even have made different choices of which ethnicities based around their place of origin (Frisian, Angle, Saxon, Jute) they did stress. Yet their physical remains, DNA, stable isotopes in their tooth enamel, and so on, would all presumably be extremely similar. The fortuitous discovery of Stilicho’s body, conveniently wrapped and labelled, in a Ravennate grave, would tell us nothing of his own complex identity; what he thought he was, or what other people considered him to be – let alone the way in which his non-Roman antecedents were principally brought out once he had fallen from favour with the western court.

‘We know that people moved in the fifth and sixth centuries. The discovery of people of northern German origin in lowland Britain ought not to be a revelation to any sane scholar of this period. And, again, the absence of physical change does not imply a lack of population movement. What differentiated migration in the post-imperial world from that at other periods of history were the complex shifts in political and social identity of which it became one component, and which are studied in the next chapter. This cannot (and indeed can never) be examined through bones or teeth. The current vogue for forcing modern archaeological science to yield answers to old-fashioned and crudely-formulated historical questions runs the risk of returning us to a primordialist view of ethnicity and identity, such as was popular 150 years ago. These scientific techniques may yet yield interesting details about the personal histories of individuals. However, as far as the question of movement from barbaricum into the Roman Empire is concerned, without considerable refinement and greater sophistication, the study of the physical anthropology of the fifth- and sixth-century dead has no capacity to tell us anything that we did not already know, and every potential to set back the understanding of this period by a century or more.’

This – overall – would still represent my position. Here (with apologies for a degree of repetition) are some passages from a forthcoming (I hope) book I am writing at the moment, about post-imperial Britain (Jon Jarrett should note another mention of the King’s German Legion – information, by the way, which I owe to Alex Woolf…):

‘The employment of the DNA of modern populations to study the Anglo-Saxon migration is a deeply problematic and indeed – I would argue – dangerous line of argument. The problems lie in the methods used, not so much in the scientific analysis of the DNA itself but in the movement from such analysis to interpretative conclusions about the early Middle Ages, where the approach becomes decidedly unscientific. European DNA has been inextricably mixed since prehistoric times and the distribution of particular DNA traits reveal very broad areas with these similarities, so that the self-same maps have been argued to reveal the spread of Indo-European language and the movement of the Anglo-Saxons some millennia later. This in turn reveals a further problem: the date at which these patterns became similar cannot convincingly be dated. If, for example, a DNA pattern very similar to that modern inhabitants of Saxony was reported for the inhabitants of a southern English town, need that result from a fifth- or sixth-century migration, or from sexual encounters with a unit of the King’s German Legion (largely from Hanover) stationed there during the Napoleonic Wars? Or from sexual encounters between troops from that town and the women of northern Germany after 1945? A DNA similarity will not tell you the direction of population movement. A Saxon soldier could return home from the Roman army with his British wife and have a family there; Saxon raiders could take British slaves and sire children on them. And so on. We have seen that movement around the North Sea was an important feature of late Roman history.

‘Moving beyond the methodology used, yet further problems arise concerning the analyses’ assumptions. One is that migration is something that happened in discrete periods, so that, for example, the fifth and sixth centuries are often known as the period of the migrations (an appellation long criticised). Thus, in this view, demonstrable population-mixing can be dated to such specific blocks of time. Yet migration is a constant of human existence. We’ve already seen that people were moving from barbaricum east of the Rhine into the Roman Empire for centuries before 400. People moved, within the Empire, on a large scale too. And of course people have continued to move and to marry the inhabitants of other areas ever since. The similarities between the DNA of England and Germany might result from migration from Germany in the late antique period but, as intimated, it might stem from such movement at many other times and, indeed, from movement in the opposite direction. Once again, movement from the Empire to barbaricum, amply demonstrated in the archaeological record, is excluded from reasoning because it does not fit a model derived from problematic written sources. Thus this use (or misuse) of DNA is driven by a particular, and a particularly crude, reading of history and its results chosen to fit this story rather than to examine it.

‘Another, perhaps even more serious problem concerns the movement from DNA to conclusions about ethnic or political identity. As we have seen, ethnic identity is multi-layered. It is deployed (or not) in particular situations as the occasion demands, and it can be changed. A person’s DNA will not give you a sense of all of the layers of that person’s ethnicity, or of which s/he thought the most important or even if s/he generally used a completely different one, or of when and where such identities were stressed or concealed. Let me illustrate this. A male Saxon immigrant into the Empire in, say, the fourth century, would – one assumes – have DNA revealing the area where he grew up, but he would probably increasingly see himself, and act, as a Roman. His Saxon origins would have no part in his social, cultural or political life, and even less for his children, if he stayed in the Empire. If he returned home with all the cachet of his imperial service, even then it might have been his Roman identity that gave him local status. However, if a distant male relative of his moved into Britain a hundred and fifty years later, his DNA might be very similar but, in complete distinction, this man might make a very big deal of his Saxon origins for they would, or could, propel him to the upper echelons of society. DNA tells us nothing about any of this. What is pernicious about this use of genetic data is that it is essentialist. That is to say that it views a person’s identity as one-dimensional and unchanging, and it sees that dimension as entirely derived from that person’s biological and geographical origins. It is, in short, a view that reduces identity to something very similar to nineteenth-century nationalist ideas of race. Everyone sane knows that people moved from northern Germany to Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries. In that sense, these expensive analyses tell us nothing that we did not know already. In their implicit reduction of identity to a form of race, and by masking all the other contingent and interesting aspects of cultural interaction and identity-change, they not only risk setting back the understanding of this period by more than a century but provide pseudo-historical and pseudo-scientific ammunition for present-day nationalists, xenophobes and racists. Before leaving the topic of recent DNA analyses, the last thing to flag up is that the historical sources cited to show racial segregation are used very uncritically and rarely say what they are claimed to. ’

These extracts are, however, as stated, largely concerned with the attempts to draw conclusions about the extent of migration from the DNA of modern populations. When that section of Barbarian Migrations was written (around summer 2005), my understanding of the scientific situation at that time was that there was profound scepticism about the possibility of extracting usable DNA from ancient skeletal samples because of the dangers of contamination. As I understand things now, developments in science have reduced those dangers and there is apparently now the possibility even of using old skeletal data from excavations conducted years ago, to extract usable samples.

If so, these developments, to be sure, present us with much greater possibilities. But we must be sure that we are asking the right questions. The problem with the use of modern genetic data (quite apart from the fact that it seems to me to be principally aimed at getting the researcher in question into the headlines) is that it is (as I said in Barbarian Migrations, as quoted above) framed around questions aimed at a view of post-imperial history from over a century ago. The genetic evidence (assuming that the claims newly made for it are sound) must be used on its own terms, and historians of the period should be involved in framing sophisticated questions. Here is a potential area where I think that DNA analyses could be hugely valuable in the study of furnished inhumation (grave-goods) cemeteries:

Identifying family groups: Results could be compared with the detailed rites used in the burials of the deceased to see whether assumptions about preferred familial burial practices are well-founded, whether assumptions (made by me, for one) about similar rites possibly indicating kinship are soundly based. Where are the burials of genetically related burials found within a cemetery? I have suggested, for example, that the sixth-century phases of Frankish ‘row-grave’ cemeteries were laid out according to community rules, rather than organised by family. That said, I still originally interpreted clusters of similar graves (within the rows) as representing families. Subsequently I mooted the idea that clusters of similar burials were to be explained more plausibly according to their closeness in time rather than the nearness of kinship between the deceased. DNA would be the only way of deciding between these options – as also perhaps in investigating things like the double burial, ‘graves’ 6 and 8, at Ennery (Moselle); were they brothers? Are the seventh-century clusters of burials indeed, as I and others have always assumed, family plots. Etc.

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So, what of ethnicity? What if, as my questioner asked, one could show that some people within a cemetery had significantly different DNA profiles from those of the rest of the population? Would that not help us to look at migration and its effects?

In the first instance, of course it would. Yet, there would be some fairly stringent methodological requirements, and some pretty strict limits to what it did tell us, and more importantly some very gave dangers. Let’s start with the methodological requirements.

One would have to know where these people came from, and that would have to mean the accumulation of a huge body of samples from all over Europe, North Africa and the Near East. The problem to date is that the samples have been chosen according to pre-conceived ideas and (given the huge degree of mixing in European genetics) often one geographical area of origin has been chosen from several equally plausible alternatives according to the (usually pre-determined) story that the researcher wants to tell. All the possibilities or variables (however implausible, however much they contradict what we think we know) have to be entered into the equation.

Second, we need to know just how different these genetic samples are and thus, related to that, how recently the ‘newcomers’ came into the community. Obviously, a cemetery founded in, say c.350 AD, with new rites adopted c.450 AD, cannot be explained according to the existence of a genetic ‘out-group’ that arrived in the region say 6 generations before the appearance of the new rite (i.e. in c.300). How fine can the chronologies given by DNA be (I ask because I don’t know, not as a rhetorical question)?

The strict limits on the conclusions would be that they were purely descriptive. Some people moved from A to B at some period between X and Y. As I have been at pains to argue, migration is a constant of human history, and we know perfectly well that significant numbers of people moved around in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries, though whether more or fewer than in, say, the third or seventh is sadly a question rarely asked. We know that some people descended from people who lived around the Danube washed up in Spain in the late fifth and early sixth century. We know perfectly well that people moved from northern Germany to lowland Britain during the fifth and sixth centuries. DNA analyses that show that – after satisfying all the methodological requirements given above – are not telling as anything (at all) that we didn’t already know. Let’s (considering the cost of these analyses – is it $10,000 per sample?) be quite clear about that.

So the possibilities of DNA to tell us much about migration – at least until such time as we have so many (hundreds of thousands of) samples from across Europe and the Mediterranean basin for us to be able to make statistically significant statements about the scale of migration and the extent of intermarriage (this would be very important, but let’s remember the cost of the exercise and the likelihood that it might only confirm what sophisticated analyses of written and archaeological data already suggest…) – are meagre.

Migration happened. It is always going on. The real issue is why, during the fifth and sixth centuries, it became such an important feature of social change, and here DNA and other scientific techniques can tell us nothing. At all.

Let me illustrate with a hypothetical example. Let us suppose that we have a rural cemetery with a significant number (say 600: 200 per century of the site’s use, 50 per generation) of intact burials, founded in the Meseta (Spain) around 350 AD and lasting until 650. A new rite of burial with grave-goods, appears on this site c.450 AD and, of the people of that generation a clear genetic, DNA difference is found between the burials with grave-goods and those without, the latter showing the same profile as the burials in the four generations of the pre-grave-good period. Rigorous comparisons show that it is likely that the newcomers came from the Danube area about 3-5 generations earlier. The newcomers are thus buried in a different fashion from the ‘locals’. Over time, the DNA differences between the furnished (with grave-goods) and the unfurnished (without goods) graves decreases and, while the number of grave-goods burials increases, the range and number of objects decreases. In the last generation or so of the site’s use, the population is more or less genetically homogenous and grave-goods have been more or less abandoned.

This would be a case study that would be pretty much ideal (superficially at least) for the ‘migrationist’ perspective: we’d have a clear example of an out-group moving in from outside and their place of origin would seem to tie in unproblematically with their identification as Goths. They mark themselves out from the locals by the use of a new burial rite but over time they intermarry and eventually create a new community. This would tally with what we see as the historical narrative of the Goths in Spain. Hurrah! Case closed. Or is it? First of all, let’s be quite clear that not only would this be the ideal case for the migrationist view but – and this is especially important to stress for those not au fait with late antique and early medieval cemetery archaeology – the chances of finding such an ‘ideal type’ are slim indeed, for a whole range of reasons concerning each of the variables (the chances of such clear and neat distinctions, the length of use and the dates of foundation and abandonment of the cemetery; the chances of so many intact burials being found; the even spread of burials across the period of use; the ability to date burials with, let alone without, goods to within a generation, etc., etc.). Nevertheless, let us assume that this ‘dream data-set’ has indeed been located and scientifically excavated (and the DNA analysed, at the cost of $6,000,000 or so). What’s wrong with the migrationist interpretation?

First of all, any blurring at all of any of the clear lines I have proposed for this data-set weaken the strength of the hypothesis, even at its most basic descriptive level. Next, for us to explain the change according to the migration, we would need to be certain of two things: that this was the case generally in Spanish cemeteries with grave-goods, across the different regions of the Iberian Peninsula, and, secondly, that Spanish cemeteries without grave-goods, across the rest of Iberia, didn’t contain dead people with this ‘Gothic’ DNA profile (incrementally increasing the cost of the exercise…). Why do we need to know this?

First, because grave-goods burial is not a traditional Gothic rite. No amount of new, ‘ideal’ archaeology can change that fact. For the 80 or so years that the Goths were in Aquitaine, hardly anyone at all was buried in this fashion, during the 30 or so years of their migration from the Danube to the Garonne pretty much no one was, and before that it could hardly be described as a typical Gothic rite either. Thus we need to be sure that this was a new development associated exclusively with ‘being Gothic’.

But, even if the new rite was clearly Gothic, if there are regions of Spain (or other cemeteries in the same area) where, either, there are people with ‘Gothic DNA’ who didn’t get buried with grave-goods at the same time as our Goths on this ‘ideal site’ were being distinctively buried with goods, or, where people with ‘non-Gothic’ DNA were buried with grave-goods in the same generation as (or earlier than) the newcomers appeared and started interment with grave-goods in our ‘dream cemetery’, either alternative fatally weakens the migrationist hypothesis. It does so for the very simple reason that it means that, although we can see that (in this case) the new rite was associated with the intrusion of a new genetic group, it cannot be argued that the rite was in itself a straightforward sign of Gothic identity, because it can be shown that Goths themselves did not always use it and that non-Goths did use it. Therefore, we would have to conclude that, although in our community the Goths did adopt a rite which marked them out from their indigenous neighbours, the simple facts of their ‘Gothic-ness’ and of their migration into the area did not explain their choice and the change in the material cultural record. Immediately the explanation of the change must become much more subtle and complex. (All the more so, in fact, since in fact the new rite isn’t traditionally Gothic.) The grave-goods symbolise something else, or result from another causal factor, meaning that migration is largely if not entirely (in our specific case study) removed from the explanation.

Making a scientific theory stick does not mean just showing that one possibility fits the data; it also involves showing that all the others don’t fit it as well. Since human behaviour is messy, unpredictable and the rules that govern it are never better than fuzzy, the likelihood of being able to prove that all possibilities except one can (in the current state of knowledge) be ruled out range between slim and non-existent. Therefore explanations have to be more subtle and flexible than migrationist hypotheses invariably are. They must be able to accommodate a number of alternative possibilities.

But let us return to our hypothetical case-study and assume that – amazingly – it could be shown that in the earliest generations of grave-goods burial the rite was always and exclusively associated with ‘Gothic DNA’. Would this at least not prove the migrationist line?

Overall, of course, it would – to some extent. But, as mentioned above, the fact that the rite is, before the Goths’ arrival in Spain, not traditionally Gothic would immediately mean that some contingent variables (explaining the choice of artefacts and their symbolism) had to be incorporated. That would mean that elements to do with the contingencies of local and regional politics and social structure would need to be brought in to explain why the Goths did this. Migration alone would not explain the issue. After all, in other areas where the Goths had settled (such as Aquitaine, where they had lived for 70 years or more) this material cultural response to migration had not ensued.

What, however, if association between grave-goods and ‘genetic Goths’ could not be proven across Iberia (as is much more likely to be the case)? What about our (from a migrationist perspective) ideal, dream data-set? We’ve already had to conclude that ‘although in our community the Goths did adopt a rite which marked them out from their indigenous neighbours, the simple facts of their ‘Gothic-ness’ and of their migration into the area did not explain their choice and the change in the material cultural record.’ This is already a conclusion that would be too subtle for most migrationists to comprehend. The problem with migrationist hypotheses is that they narrow the range of interpretations and prejudge the explanation. If there is an observable material cultural difference between two groups with different genetic make-up, then that genetic difference must explain the material cultural variation. Think about that for a moment and how essentialist it is – as well as how essentially dubious its political implications are.

In our hypothetical case-study, the genetic difference would not tell us what this variation in the presence of grave-goods meant. Were the incomers staking a claim to power? Or was it, by contrast, a sign of the group-solidarity of a group with less social power (after all, generally speaking, groups with securely established authority do not tend to display that power to their local neighbours in grave-goods burial)? Did it proclaim Gothicness? Or (given the non-traditional nature of the rite) a claim to being, within the circumstances of the fifth century, ‘more Roman than the Romans’? Put another way, does such a display mark a ‘strategy of distinction’ (something which historiography has, in my view, been too preoccupied with) or a ‘strategy of identification’ (that is to say of identifying with the other people, already inhabiting the area)? What do I mean by the latter possibility? We can safely assume that the non-grave-goods-burying folk did not walk around naked, but their unhelpful burial practices remove the possibility of studying their costume. If the grave-goods-burying people interred their dead not in a different costume but in a form of ‘Sunday best’ that was actually normal in the region then their practice of depositing their dead in public ritual wearing costume that would be accepted for a person of that gender, age and status might in fact be a way of saying ‘we are just like you’. In other words, their origin as outsiders is being played down rather than played up. (On supposedly barbarian costume I can do no better than refer you to the works of Philipp von Rummel, notably his book, Habitus Barbarus).

If we could not make a link between the genetic out-group and Gothicness or – still more so – if all we had was genetic difference, we would not be able to say for sure whether the material cultural variation resulted from locals trying to look Gothic, incomers into a Gothic community trying to look Gothic, or locals or incomers trying to look Roman. Scientifically, these would all be possible, and the reduction of the range of alternatives in accordance with pre-conceived notions drawn from one old reading of the documentary sources would be neither scientific nor even historical.

Underlying all these points, furthermore, is the fact mentioned in the quotes from my books given above, that the DNA or other genetic information does not (and cannot) tell us what people thought they (or others) were, or what other people thought they were. People with ‘Gothic DNA’ (were we able to identify such a thing) need not have known they were Gothic. By the time they arrived in Spain, as many as six generations can have passed since the immigrant Goths had lived in Gothia. Can we be sure they still thought of themselves as Gothic? If they did, what did they think that that meant? Did any sense of a genetic origin mean anything, compared with claims to social or political status? Did the people in our cemetery even know that they were of such different biological origins? We can’t know. Answering that they must have done because of the material cultural difference yet again prejudges the issue and takes us close to a circular argument.

Further, again as mentioned above, the migrationist interpretation assumes that people only have one form or level of ethnic identity. There were different Roman and there were different Gothic identities, based on civitas, pagus (perhaps) or province for the former, based on different Gothic group, different village, different unit within the Gothic forces (I assume), possibly even differences the Goths brought with them only from Aquitaine (and thus quite Roman in their structure). Which, if any, level of such identities does the material culture represent? In other circumstances, genetic difference might mark difference between Goths of different origins.

And of course, the migrationist argument shares with other interpretations an assumption that these differences relate to identities in what I have called the ‘ethnic arc’ of the spectrum. They might also refer to socio-political function (soldier families for example – in the fifth century military status was associated with ethnic identity, to be sure, but this is a more complex issue than is often assumed, and in the late Roman world, we ought to remember that military service was likewise hereditary), or simple familial/kin-group differences, or social rank, or any number of other things.

Thus, even where we have what might seem to be the perfect data to fit a migrationist hypothesis, the explanatory value of DNA evidence is severely circumscribed. Every incidence or variable where the data fail to live up to the ideal type described above weakens its value yet further. Even in descriptive terms alone, for the foreseeable future it is highly unlikely that DNA evidence will do more than confirm what we already know. More seriously, though, the latching on to one form of (in its employment) pseudo-scientific evidence as a catch all explanation is dangerous in that in reducing ethnicity to a primordialist, monolithic genetically-based reality it runs the risk of taking us right back to nineteenth-century ideas of the nation-state and thus turning the clock back on our understanding of the early middle ages by a century and a half. The horrific political uses to which this sort of argument can lend itself do not require much imagination to envisage.

Ethnicity and Early Medieval Cemeteries

The text, of this paper, which I gave on 29 Nov 2010 at the University of the Basque Country, Vitoria has been removed as it is now published.  You can access a pdf of the publication here.  The points made (and much of the debate) will often seem 'old hat' to British archaeologists, although the implications of these points have in fact not been very thoroughly assimilated or applied with any sophistication in Anglo-Saxon archaeology.  This paper instead relates (as it says in the text) more to a Mainland European (especially German, French and Italian) debate, which has also begun to take place in Spain.  For those historiographical reasons I hope it will also be of some interest to Anglo-Saxonists. 

I have left the illustrations used in the original post, which can perhaps be used as an accompaniment to the puiblished paper.

My thanks to Juan Antonio Quiros Castillo (not Lopez as it inexplicably says in the published version, embarrassingly) for the invitation and to everyone else who came for such an interesting day and such a warm welcome in Vitoria.

***




Distribution map of franciscas



East and West-Germanic
'Tracht' (traditional female
costume)

 


Nouvion en Ponthieu, grave 140















 

(From a paper I published in 1992:
I no longer regard the brooches
and axes as 'of Germanic origin')







 





Allegedly Frisian ('west Germanic')
costume of the 5th century (in the
blue ring)

 

Age and the strength of
the gender-related
significance of grave-goods
assemblages at Ennery
(Lorraine) in the 6th century.

 
 

Supposedly Ostrogothic burials in
Italy

 

 

'Visigothic' Cemeteries in Spain in the
6th century

 




Political divisions of Iberia, c.560





The Woad Less Travelled: the archaeology of earlier Pictish society and politics viewed from Francia

This is the text of the paper delivered to the First Millennia Studies Group at the University of Edinburgh, 5 October, 2010.

Introduction

To someone used to the abundance of Frankish evidence it can seem difficult to see how anyone could ever say anything about the Picts. The Picts stand as a graphic example of the fact that the contours on the distribution-map of surviving written documents tend to match quite closely those of the spread of surviving, easily recognisable archaeological remains. Fortunately, the high quality of archaeological work, uncovering and exploring Pictish society, goes far towards counteracting the Picts’ own apparently steadfast refusal to leave behind any trace of their existence.

This paper brings the fruits of long study of post-imperial Frankish society to bear on some aspects of Pictish cemetery archaeology, in the hope that this might shed some new light on old problems. In particular I will question whether the development of Pictish society and politics followed the neat and linear trajectory that is often supposed. Instead I offer what I hope are some slightly different readings of particular aspects, which might be useful in future research. As John Hunter very nicely expressed it, Pictish archaeology has a tendency to shrug off theories in the manner of a dog shaking water off its coat. I hope this one might cling on a little longer or that, even if not, its rejection might nevertheless help refine future interpretations.

A Frankish model, or two

I will consider Pictish cemeteries in the light of my earlier studies of Merovingian Gaul’s rich funerary archaeology. These have often been concerned with the difference between sites or periods wherein the investment in funerary commemoration was focused upon the transient – grave-goods – and those in which it was concentrated upon more permanent above ground markers. I have also examined the interrelation of the different variables involved: grave-size and shape, or construction; skeletal position; the placement of the grave-goods; the organisation of the cemetery, and so on.

Two different models might usefully be adduced from the Frankish kingdom of Austrasia, the first drawn from the communal, rural grave-goods cemeteries of the regions of Trier and Metz (but which are broadly applicable across northern Francia), the second from the urban burial community represented by the epitaphs from Trier itself.

As I have discussed this on countless other occasions, this description can be brief. In the sixth century, large cemeteries are known, perhaps shared by several communities, organised quite neatly in rows (hence their frequent name: Reihengräberfelder; cimetières par rangées). The families using these grave-yards all seem to participate in the grave-goods custom to some degree. There is little sign of above-ground markers though some surely existed given the regularity of the lay-out. Grave-goods are distributed according to what appear to have been communal norms, structured around age and gender. Investment in funerary display was skewed towards adult males overall and towards adults over children. As this expenditure focused on those individuals, within earlier Merovingian society, whose deaths would have created the greatest tension in social relations, I have interpreted this as indicative of a society wherein local authority and power were maintained with difficulty from one generation to the next and open to serious local competition. This interpretation accords well with the picture drawn from other sources.

In the seventh century, by contrast, the number of grave-goods decreases dramatically. Gender-specific artefacts (especially feminine objects) are greatly reduced in number; there are far less clear relationships between artefact assemblages and the deceased’s age and sex. Instead there is a greater investment in above-ground monuments: sarcophagi with lids visible at surface level, gravestones, walls around burials, reused Roman masonry and sculpture used as markers, and so on. In addition, cemeteries are smaller but more numerous than before and neat organisation into rows often breaks down in favour of smaller, probably familial plots. The investment in funerary commemoration is, if anything, more weighted towards men than women than before, in terms of grave-goods, but the other elements of the tomb, such as the sarcophagi and monuments, show a much more even distribution between different age-groups and genders. The first part of this seventh-century phase is often a phase of ‘separierung’, when locally high-status families distinguish themselves from the remainder of the burial community by less subtle means: above-ground monuments, distributing lavish grave-goods with individuals of ages that would not generally merit such investment in the earlier phase, differential orientation of burials and the physical removal of the graves to a separate part of the cemetery. In other, peripheral regions of the Frankish world this is a period when large ‘aristocratic’ barrows are built; in the region of Metz, churches start being built in the town and other administratively nodal settlements at this time. Shortly afterwards, these families seem not to have buried their dead at the communal cemetery at all, by the mid-seventh century constructing churches on their rural estates. In short this phase is characterised, with reference to the preceding period, by elite ‘rule-breaking’.

The second model is furnished by the study of the Merovingian inscriptions of Trier. After exhaustive study, Mark Handley argued that the investment in epigraphic commemoration in Trier matched that in grave-goods, and there are indeed some important similarities. It seems to me, however, that the investment in the commemoration of men and women is much more even than with the grave-goods custom, and relative expenditure of resources on the marking of children’s graves is certainly greater. Overall, the Trier inscriptions resemble the seventh-century phase of the rural cemeteries in many ways.

The transition from the sixth-century situation to that of the seventh century, and the phase of ‘separierung’ in particular, can be explained with reference to the emergence of a more established aristocracy, which accords with changes in other classes of data (written sources, urban and rural settlement archaeology and so on) at the same time, around 600. This period saw the end of anything that might be termed a state in Francia, though the kingdom remained fairly coherent. The patterns visible in the Trier inscriptions, which span the whole period, can be viewed as the manifestation of a particularly self-conscious (and highly unusual) local aristocracy in Trier itself, the existence of which is visible in other evidence too. Thus, there are important correlations between particular types of funerary display and certain forms of socio-political formation, which match changes in other forms of data which can be understood in the same way. Finally, the transition from one form of commemoration to another is therefore a good index of social change.

This very briefly sets out some background to my consideration of Pictish society. It sets a context for the questions that, from a Merovingian perspective, I would ask of the surviving data. It is most definitely not the aim to use the Merovingian pattern to calibrate the Pictish, to ‘read off’ the Pictish evidence against a set of Frankish correlates. By contrast, I will use the Pictish case to question my reading of the Frankish evidence. I want to see if employing insights from a better-documented area might lead us in some slightly different directions to provide a model that might be refined, corrected or rejected by future analyses.

Long cist inhumations: How Christian? How Roman?

I begin with two interpretations of the ‘classic’ Pictish long cist cemetery. The first is that these cemeteries and the rite of inhumation relate somehow to Christianisation. More subtle studies distinguish the appearance of the inhumation rite from the appearance of long cist cemeteries and, analytically, this seems to me to be quite right. Nevertheless long cist inhumations have generally, as far as I have been able to detect, been interpreted in terms of conversion or Christianisation, in spite of doubts cast upon this as long ago as 1980. The religious explanation is wanting in many ways, however, being based upon several fundamentally mistaken premises. The first is that there is something essentially Christian about the absence of grave-goods. Given the general absence of grave-goods throughout the prehistoric, Roman and early medieval eras in Scotland, excepting those furnished inhumations associated with ‘Anglian’ and later (more plausibly) Scandinavian settlement, their absence in the post-imperial era cannot be deemed especially significant. The general assumption of a Christian equivalence finds no prima facie written or archaeological support. The analogous inhumation rite generally replaced cremation within the western Roman Empire in the third century, before the significant adoption of Christianity. The late antique Church took no interest in grave-goods, except where the objects concerned were liturgical or church property, and there the issue was the alienation or diminution of ecclesiastical wealth, not involvement in un-Christian ritual. Numerous archaeological and documentary examples of Merovingian furnished inhumation under churches are well known. Thirty-three to thirty-five years after Bailey Young’s classic study of the issue, this point ought not to need repeating. Less well known, perhaps, is the fact that the Church expressed remarkably little opposition to cremation before Charlemagne’s Saxon campaigns at the end of the eighth century. The Christian associations of the rite of inhumation in a stone cist are weak – after all, such inhumations are known in scattered examples from earlier phases of Scottish archaeology. The idea that long cist cemeteries represent a phase of Christianisation is hardly more solidly based. The better assumption (albeit lacking clear empirical foundation, at this date) seems to be that Christians would wish to demonstrate their community in burial, although this is hardly the only possible reason for the appearance of communal cemeteries. The other assumption, not uncommon in British archaeology, is that the Church espoused an ‘obfuscating’ ideology of equality in death; this is simply untrue. Nevertheless, the appearance of the communal site seems to be the most important element of novelty involved in this development.

What alternatives to the questionable Christian interpretation might there be? One, more recently proposed, would see the appearance of this rite as the product of Roman influence – after the early fourth century this would not be incompatible with Christianisation. In favour of the interpretation one could point to the appearance of unfurnished inhumation in the far north of Germania Magna at the end of the fourth century, almost certainly resulting from Roman influence in the region. On the other hand, the evidence which goes alongside the northern German evidence to make that interpretation likely – the imports of metalwork, pottery and so on – are apparently absent from Scotland north of the Forth, where imperial imports seem to be an increasingly élite phenomenon. Furthermore, the rite itself, as noted, has fairly long antecedents in Scotland and why the introduction of cemeteries should be a product of Roman influence in the region is unclear.

Long cist cemeteries: a slightly different approach

Neither Christianisation nor imperial influence seem, in broader perspective, to be particularly compelling explanations for the appearance of Pictish long cist cemeteries. We should probably seek an account in developments within Pictish society. In this regard it helps to look at the burial’s surviving features, which might provide clues as to any statements being made during an inhumation about the deceased or his or her family. The fairly frequent analysis of the age and sex of the deceased gives us something against which to try and read off other variables: skeletal position, the arrangement of the limbs and so on. The construction of the burial chamber itself potentially contains differences that were meaningful to contemporaries. We could look at the organisation of the cemetery and whether it appears to be organised according to communal principles or grouped into apparent family plots. Alas, some variables undoubtedly noted during excavation – such as the positioning of the skeleton – are not systematically published.

The most important feature of change seems indeed to be the shift towards communal burial – or at least more communal than hitherto. The cemeteries’ frequent organisation into rows suggests (as with the famous Merovingian Reihengräberfelder) that the burial’s location and arrangement was to some extent governed by factors other than a desire to place members of the same family in close proximity. This might in turn mean that in their rituals, funerals ‘spoke’ to each other in quite direct and distinctive ways.

If the date of the cemeteries’ appearance, around the fifth century, is correct, then it took place against a background of exiguous settlement archaeology in the region, described by Fraser Hunter as a late third- to fifth-century ‘gap’. Combined with the evidence of greater dispersion of settlements in the period immediately preceding the ‘gap’ it is possible that the new cemeteries were used by several different settlements, providing a shared ritual focus. A similar phenomenon can be suggested for sixth-century northern Gaulish cemeteries, which also appear against a backdrop of scattered, ephemeral settlement evidence. Developing this, one might hypothesise that burial became a more public, communal occasion than had hitherto been the case and that a wider audience participated in the funeral process, now apparently including some sort of procession from the household to the cemetery. These features might make the funeral the occasion for statements about the deceased, his or her family, inheritance, and so on.

Although I have employed the term ‘communal cemetery’ above, it is clear that not everyone was chosen for interment in these cemeteries (something which undermines the strongest support for the Christian interpretation). From an admittedly problematic sample of long cist inhumations whose excavation has been reported in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquities for Scotland (giving us an admittedly very problematic sample of over 200 burials), one sees two notable features: a clear imbalance in favour of females over males and a distinct preference for young subjects. The absence of old individuals can be doubted, considering the weaknesses of traditional ageing techniques, which telescope ages over about forty. Low numbers of mature and old adults consequently feature commonly in reports of early medieval cemeteries. However, the subjects with age-estimates are very often rather younger even than forty. The idea of a particularly low age of death amongst the Picts seems implausible. Similarly, it is unreasonable to suppose that many different physical anthropologists working at various times with data from diverse sites have uniformly underestimated the ages at which physiological changes took place, allowing us to stretch the age distribution evenly across the adult range, and the notion that they have uniformly mistaken the sex of the deceased is even less plausible. I think we may conclude that our picture shows us that some deliberation took place about who was suitable for ‘public’ burial in the ‘communal’ cemetery.

Before examining what might have lain behind such deliberation, one variable is worthy of comment. Although based upon a tiny sample, it might be the case that there was a difference in the skeletal arrangement of men and women. Women may have been buried with arms flexed, or folded, whereas men were interred with theirs lying at their sides. The only male with flexed arms that I could find was one from the Orkneys, dated by carbon14 to the eleventh century, long after the period that concerns us. It is tempting to relate this to a posture covering a woman’s sexual attributes and thus making a comment about chastity or sexual propriety. Such a conclusion and its elaboration require us to know more about how the body was interred. If it was in a costume that simply leaves no archaeological trace, then such a posture would be publicly displayed; if the dead were interred in a shroud then such positioning would, one assumes, have been done within the household and have a slightly different reading. If this observation is not the simple product of statistical chance, which of course it is very likely to be, it might tell us something about Pictish attitudes to sex and gender. Furthermore, the positioning of the corpse within its shroud might still have been visible to people at the grave-side enabling such a statement to be made to a wider audience.

Grave-construction appears to have been the main locus for any effort expended on demonstrating differences between graves, and certainly have been noticeable at the funeral, but it seems fairly standard. The main distinctions in this regard seem to be that between cists and ‘dug graves’ (simple trenches) and, within the cists, the existence or otherwise of floors or lintelled roofs but I have not noticed any very clear correlations between these and other variables thus far. How much care was invested in the tomb’s construction?

Nevertheless, from the archaeology as it stands, it does not look as though the funeral was the focus for particularly intensive competitive display. It did not involve the expenditure of resources upon grave-goods, although it is worth stating that even in areas where furnished inhumation was normal grave-goods rarely represent huge amounts of wealth. Be that as it may, the deceased’s social role or identity was evidently not symbolised through elaborate costume. Or, at least, not by costume adorned with fasteners and accessories or jewellery. It was certainly not demonstrated by the deposition of appropriate symbols. Such means of public marking of the deceased’s identity can be viewed as a symptom of instability and competition for local authority. The seeming absence of such displays and the investment of effort in tomb-construction instead may therefore be understood as its opposite. It is entirely possible that the funerary process was the occasion for other activities suggestive of competition and instability, such as feasting or the exchange of gifts, which might leave no trace at all in the archaeological record. That said, some evidence suggestive of these activities shows up in the Frankish evidence. We might wonder, therefore, whether the Pictish evidence overall suggests a society wherein social organisation and stratification were stable.

Such a conclusion could be no more than provisional and might be fundamentally misjudged; indeed, for reasons that I will shortly discuss, I think it would be quite mistaken. For one thing, the conclusions drawn from grave-goods rely, to no small extent, on observable change from one situation to another, and back again. The sheer, relentless uniformity of burial rite in northern Britain – where even cremations come in cists – over long periods of time, and the almost universal absence of grave-goods, renders very difficult the simple transfer of the hypothesis where grave-goods equate with insecurity and grave-monumentalisation with stability. Indeed one might valuably take the Pictish case to question the conclusions drawn from the Frankish. Again, though, the issue of differential change through time, with quite dramatic change in burial rites in Francia, renders the application of the Pictish evidence to the Merovingian situation as potentially inappropriate as its inverse.

Straightforward application of these particular conclusions about social structure – drawn from Frankish cemetery archaeology – is thus not possible. We must return to the variables observed within Pictish cemeteries, in particular to the choice of individuals for burial in the cemetery, was highlighted earlier. These patterns permit some suggestions about fifth- or sixth-century Pictish society. It should be said at the outset that these do not match either of the Frankish models although they reveal some important similarities with the sixth-century pattern.

As mentioned, the most striking feature of Pictish cemeteries is without doubt the overwhelming predominance of female subjects. These outnumber the males by nearly 2:1, a fact that led one archaeologist to moot a return to the old idea of Pictish matriliny. This would be premature, not only methodologically, by subordinating archaeological explanation to a notion drawn essentially from a misunderstanding of the written sources, but also because this archaeologically-visible pattern has no necessary link to high status for women, let alone matriliny or matriarchy.

When one considers why younger adult women
might be made the object of public funeral ritual,
the sixth-century Frankish model becomes useful.
In northern Gaul, adolescent and especially
younger adult women were the recipients of
significant grave-goods assemblages. Adolescents
are seemingly not heavily represented in Pictish
burials but the difference might be explained by
considering that between the burials of teen-age Frankish women and those of women above about twenty. The grave assemblages of the younger age-group are very largely concerned with a costume, which I have suggested related closely to their ‘marriageable’ status, and perhaps especially to their status as betrothed or married women. The grave-goods of women older than twenty were much less exclusively related to the adornment of body and costume but were generally more numerous, suggesting a funerary status connected to a role as the mother of young children. If we remove the aspect of costume, on the basis that Pictish costume is not visible in the burial data, certainly that jewellery was not interred, a concentration on women between the ages of twenty and forty remains and perhaps a similar explanation can be proposed. If one considers the life-cycle, not only of particular individuals but of the generations above and below them, synchronically, one might see that a woman who died between the ages of about twenty and about forty was likely to have died before her children had reached maturity, especially if she died in the first half of this age bracket. To accept the analogy, one must accept similar ages at marriage and bilateral inheritance among the Picts as among the Franks, both – of course – things we know next to nothing about. One can insist on that ignorance and reject any attempt to postulate a social structure or, more reasonably, one can insist on the difference between Frankish and Pictish society, better couched as that between a specifically post-imperial provincial society and one that had always lain beyond Roman law’s effective reach, than in terms of supposed differences between ‘Celtic’ and ‘Germanic’ societies, both of which are chimerical. But one only needs to accept bilateral inheritance, not all the details of the Frankish system. Equally, my model can incorporate a higher female and a lower male age at marriage without much difficulty.

If then we proceed – cautiously – with a limited Frankish analogy, then the concentration on the public burial of women between the ages of twenty and forty does not indicate the high status of women – as such – as much as the importance of women as the linchpins in alliances between kindreds. In this model, a woman’s death between these ages would mean the dissolution of a marriage alliance, probably before any children produced by the union had come of age; a subtle but important distinction. This would produce stress in relations between the families, especially concerning property and inheritance. The ensuing burial of such women in the shared cemetery might involve both families in the ritual, and efforts to smooth over that tension, resolve the issues and maintain the alliance. If I am right about that, then the earliest phases of the long cist cemeteries might suggest, rather than complete stability, a situation wherein politics operated at a very local, community level, dominated, as one might expect, by systems of marriage and other alliances between families. This could suggest more or less equality between kin-groups and a certain rivalry and competition between them.

Above-ground monuments

The other observable variables – and change – within the Pictish burial record concerns above-ground monuments, in which we can include square and round barrows, cairns and probably the Class I symbol stones. Although, as far as I have been able to ascertain, none has yet been found entirely in situ in association with a burial, the most plausible interpretations of these stones see them as commemorative. As already implied, there is a crucial difference between the burial marked by an above-ground monument and the ‘flat grave’ in Francia and the same surely holds for Pictland too. Whatever the ritual and purpose of the standard long-cist burial in a shared or focal cemetery, the fact remains that there was little to record the burial and its significance, except perhaps some stone settings and earth up-cast once the grave was filled in and the mourners went home. As Howard Williams has correctly pointed out, in critique of my work, this does not mean that the transient ritual was without effecting enduring and specific memories about the deceased – quite the opposite. But nevertheless such memories were confined by the lifetimes of the witnesses. The above ground monument might have given information about the deceased that was pretty limited and 1-dimensional by comparison with the actual burial ritual itself, even where straightforward textual epitaphs were employed, but this information was nevertheless available, to those who understood it, potentially until eternity. This seems to me to mark an important social shift, concerning the degree to which families’ positions in local society were established and seen as able to be projected into the future with this sort of permanent mark on the landscape.

Shifts in this regard possibly took place slightly earlier in Pictland than they did in Francia or other parts of the post-imperial West. The sample is very small, the dating imprecise and consequently the conclusion no more than provisional. Nevertheless if, as I think one should, one tries to make a statement on the basis of extant data, for all its problems, then the C14 dates from the Lundin Links cairns suggest their appearance in the sixth century. This does not seem out of line with general trends. The Redcastle barrows might be slightly later, in the seventh century, but the vagaries of carbon dating make a date in the sixth century (possibly earlier) possible too. The Dunrobin cairn yielded a date of 653-782 at two sigmas and a cairn at Urquhart appears to belong to a similar date. This would not be out of step with general views on the appearance of the Class I stones, the earliest secure dating for which would seem to be provided by the fragment found in a probably sixth-century context at Pool in Orkney. Overall, with all the necessary caveats, does not seem too controversial to see the above-ground monuments as secondary to the appearance of the cemeteries and to suggest, provisionally at least, a date after the middle of the sixth century as that for the appearance of these features. This might be a generation or two earlier than the introduction of such monuments on rural Gaulish cemeteries, or of the élite barrows of Anglo-Saxon England.

There are, it seems, some subtle differences between the people buried under above-ground monuments and those buried under what we might very loosely term ‘flat graves’. If one compares the two we see that the subjects interred under barrows or cairns are overwhelmingly adults. It looks as though there is a much greater preference for adults in their 20s and 30s (maybe as many as three quarters of the people in these graves). On the basis of the sample, its size and problems, one would not want to push that suggestion too far but it is something that might bear scrutiny in future research. Certainly there is an even larger proportion of females buried under these monuments than there is in the “flat graves” or cemeteries overall.

One must obviously bear in mind a serious of important caveats concerning the data, the sample and its quality, so I am obviously presenting this as no more than a sketch of some data as it stands, which might be worth thinking about as new sites and/or data become available. If, as I think one is duty bound to do, one attempts to think about what this pattern might mean (and it is always worth remembering that more, new and better data might as easily confirm the pattern as force its rejection), then there are some points that one might make – though you should please bear in mind that I am doing this only provisionally. The first is that this pattern is not like either of the Frankish patterns. The recipients of these burials, when looked at according to their age and gender, look in some ways more like the sorts of individual who received the most lavish expenditure in terms of grave goods: young adult women and (perhaps) slightly older adult males. On the other hand, the concentration on female burials represents an important area of difference. The more ‘monumental’, seventh-century phase of Merovingian burials are much more evenly spread across the sexes and age-groups. But the concentration on the (ideally at least) permanently visible is quite different from the relative transience of the “flat burial”, with or without furnishing. There is one other area of similarity, and that concerns the possible issue of rule breaking.

 Grave 54 at Hallow Hill was a ‘massive cist’, which possibly lay under a low cairn. The subject of the burial was a child of about five-and-a-half years of age, and was buried with grave-goods, largely of Roman origin, most notable a Roman seal box. This is one of very few burials of the Pictish period to be accompanied by artefacts and one of only two children’s burials under a ‘monument’ that I could identify (the other being Thornybank grave 114). This display of difference, both to those present at the interment (viewing the deposition of the goods) and to those who might come later (via the cairn), with the burial of subject not normally interred in such style, clearly manifests some sort of a claim to difference on the part of the child’s family. Burials comparable, in context, to this are not unknown in Francia (the boy’s tomb under Cologne cathedral would be the most obvious example) in the sixth or the seventh centuries, but particularly the latter.

How might one account for this pattern? If one were to combine the evident concentration upon adults who (following the provisional interpretation sketched earlier) died before their children would be old enough to have established themselves, with the sorts of stress that such a death might cause in social relations and the marking out of some sort of difference or a claim to a permanent position in local society and the landscape, I might tentatively suggest the following. These burials are those from families with a newly emerging position within society which enables a more confident statement of that status. However, this position is not entirely secure and depends to some extent upon alliance, through marriage and so on, with other families of the same standing. Such alliances are brought into question by the death of wives, as discussed above, but also by those of fathers who die before their sons have come of age or younger adult males, perhaps similarly important as the linchpins of marriage alliances. They therefore need remaking through funerary ritual. This would in many ways be a similar mechanism to that discussed earlier for the bulk of the population of the cemeteries, but perhaps operating at a particular, slightly higher social level. As mentioned, though, this can only be a provisional attempt at an explanation but the pattern as it stands does seem interesting, and to require some such attempt.

What is also worth pointing out at this stage is that the appearance of these burials, and perhaps (if I am right) the emergence of a more elevated stratum within local society, is more or less contemporary with a series of other developments. The best known, perhaps, would be the most common earliest phases of the early historic occupation of the famous hill-top fortifications in Pictland and the neighbouring areas. It would also seem to be roughly at this time that the settlement pattern generally underwent some change, with various types of dwelling loosely datable to the second half of the first millennium. It does not seem to me unreasonable to focus an explanation of all this on the emergence of a more established local élite.

Up to this point, I have proposed the existence of a society wherein local social differences were not marked, succeeded by one within which a more established élite emerges, with the point of change lying sometime in the later sixth century. So far, as I am sure you are all thinking, ‘nul points’ for originality. This fits pretty well with the received wisdom, although I do not like the vocabulary of ‘kin-based’ and ‘ranked’ societies that tends to be used for the two social formations, and I hope that I have reached the conclusion via a slightly different route (or at least via one I have not seen in the literature available to me) and perhaps suggested some different points of detail. Where I hope to have some more novel ideas comes at the stage of moving from this conclusion to some thoughts about the relationship between all this and high politics, especially the development of the Pictish kingdom.

Interpretation: Social Development

An outsider can detect an understandable reaction in Pictish studies to old-fashioned notions of the ‘mysterious’ Picts, speaking their own pre-indo-European language, using their unique matrilineal succession system and carving mystic symbols in some sort of misty Scythian/Eskimo elf-land. This reaction seems, however, to have gone almost to an opposite extreme, postulating a ‘precocious’ statehood among the early historic inhabitants of Scotland north of the Forth. A ninth-century Pictish state (let alone a seventh- or eighth- century one) would indeed be quite something, seen in a broad European context, but suffice it to say that I have not yet seen any evidence adduced that would convincingly sustain a notion. This is not to deny the existence of an effective and organised kingdom, fully involved in the western European currents of political thought. That the Pictish realm was about as sophisticated a structure as most of its western contemporaries is wholly convincing. But an organised and effective kingdom is not necessarily a state. Even the eighth- and ninth-century Carolingian Empire cannot, for all its size, wealth and military might, convincingly be labelled a state. Until such time as we have evidence of the Pictish rulers’ ability to deploy an independent coercive force, and given the evidential constraints mentioned above I cannot imagine that such evidence is ever likely to be forthcoming, any reference to ‘the Pictish state’ will be premature.

Nevertheless, that something significant was going on in northern British society, whether Pictish, Scottish or British, in the last part of the sixth century seems fairly clear and it is not controversial to propose that this change is associated with the emergence of a social group that was more secure in its position and on occasion at least capable of drawing on manpower resources to construct defended élite settlements.

My objection to the more linear plotting of kingdom-growth is essentially based around two sides of the same, problematic idea: that the development of a local élite marches hand in hand with a growth in centralised power. I think this is a mistake but not one limited to studies of the northern British kingdoms; it detrimentally affects work on the origins of early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms too, for example, and I think it is the most significant methodological problem with Chris Wickham’s The Framing of the Early Middle Ages. One side of the problem is the fact that the absence of an established élite at a local level does not imply the absence of an effective, even a powerful, centralised government. If we take the comparatively well-documented sixth-century Merovingian kingdom as an example, we see this particularly clearly. The northern Gallic cemetery evidence shows that society was based essentially around age and gender, as I mentioned earlier. There is scant evidence of a local élite, independent of royal service, in the archaeological or the written evidence: I think Chris Wickham is wrong to propose that the Merovingian northern Gallic was unusually powerful and wealthy throughout the early Middle Ages. From about 600 onwards he has a point but in the fifth and sixth century the situation is very different. Anyway, what is abundantly clear is that the lack of a rigid social hierarchy in local communities by no means infers a lack of powerful royal authority. It is not problematic to call the sixth-century Merovingian kingdom a ‘state’; it taxed and it had a coercive military force, even if this did not take the form of a standing army. The key lies in the point just made about the absence of an established local aristocracy other than that based upon royal service. The best way of assuring dominance in the local community, breaking out of the ever-changing network of alliances and gift exchanges was through the acquisition of office in the royal administration. Such offices were extremely desirable as a result and it is clear that the kings rotated their patronage between different groups, distributing and redistributing their favours to ensure that no one faction acquired a dominant position. This meant that the kings held all the aces and that their authority was drawn down into local society along these arteries of patronage.

Many of the precise ways in which the Frankish realm worked descended directly from the late Roman Empire; indeed the mechanisms through which the early Merovingian state functioned mirrored fairly closely, albeit on a smaller scale, those through which the late Empire had operated. These precise things, for fairly obvious reasons, could not be postulated for their sixth-century Pictish contemporaries beyond the old frontier. That said, there were plenty of ways in which an analogous state of affairs could have worked, producing an extensive kingdom at least.

One of the most important problems in studying the early medieval Pictish (or Scottish, or British) kingdoms is the simple, brute, inescapable fact that we have absolutely no reliable information about political history before the period around 600. I have argued before that it is very questionable to try and project northern British political geography, as it appears in the written sources of the seventh century and later, back into the late Roman era, or even, I suggest, into the fifth and sixth centuries. One reason why is precisely the fact that so much seems to have been changing in the period when these areas begin to emerge into a dim light of political ‘histoire événementielle’. These changes probably determine the date of the earliest written data just as they govern the appearance of particular forms of archaeological evidence. It is – it seems to me – eminently possible that the kingdoms, as we see them in the fragmentary Irish and Anglo-Saxon records of the seventh century (very few of which are contemporary), might be quite recent creations. That is perhaps not a very novel thing to say, but what I think might very well be the case that, if they are new, then, rather than emerging from some sort of more or less inchoate tribal, ‘kin-based’ society, they might result from the fragmentation of earlier, larger-scale polities, perhaps the sort of extensive ‘Pictish’ confederation that the Romans thought existed north of Hadrian’s Wall. (And it’s worth reiterating that in late Roman political geography ‘Picts’ start at the Wall, not at the Forth.)

At least it should be conceded that the evidence as we have it accords this suggestion plausibility equal to that of its alternatives. Some points might lend it added credibility. Certainly, the period in which these regions, like those further south, begin to be visible in documentary sources, seems to have been one of political turmoil, extending far into the seventh century. Extensive overlordships are fought for, acquired and lost. A Scottish king is seriously defeated whilst evidently on his way to attack Banburgh in 603. A successor might even have reached and besieged the Bernician capital a decade or two later. A Northumbrian king’s son becomes over-king of the Picts and later one of his relatives exercises a fairly effective hegemony of Britain south of the Great Glen, until his son is killed in battle, when the pendulum evidently swings in the opposite direction. The instances can be multiplied. What seems clear is that the framework within which northern British – like southern British or Anglo-Saxon – politics operated was one of extensive overlordship. This might be a hang-over from a preceding ‘late antique’, confederate state of affairs. The rivalry for dominance within the realms between regional, familially- or dynastically-based aristocratic groups might be the new feature, linked with the developments that we can trace in the excavated record.

The third possibility, again equally plausible, is that the kingdoms visible in the seventh century existed earlier, and with the same extent but were somewhat different in their internal composition and political dynamics. The latter would be based upon the political power of local aristocratic élites and this leads me to the other side of the problems with the ‘linear’ model. The emergence of an élite more securely rooted in local socio-economic superiority makes things difficult for any central ruler: be it king, emperor or whatever. Unless a ruler has an independent coercive force, paid for by taxation (taxation levied with the threat of intervention by the coercive force), it becomes very difficult indeed for the writ of the monarch or the central government to run in localities that lie outside the ruler’s direct control.

The evidential problems of Pictish society make this a difficult issue to explore, let alone resolve. It might, for all we know, be the case that the Pictish kings did indeed have such a coercive force. In my past brief forays into Pictish history, I have tended to assume that the kings had some ability to call upon manpower, manifested in the construction of the hill-forts. There might be something in this. Perhaps sites like Dundurn are simply the seats of royal officials. Equally, though, it might be that these sites are the seats of local magnates. The first option gives us a kingdom ruling through officers ensconced in fortifications dominating local society; the second gives us aristocrats equally ensconced in dominating fortifications but potentially acting between the king and the remainder of his subjects. I can think of no obvious way of resolving the issue, but I offer the following as reasons for preferring the ‘local aristocrat’ reading to the ‘royal officer’ interpretation. One would be that it would coincide with the other evidence suggestive of the emergence of such an élite at about the same time as the earliest fortification. Another would be – perhaps – a difference from the earlier situation (as I understand it) which seems to have but few, larger fortifications (like Burghead). The change might imply some sort of fragmentation and it would lead to a third reason, which would be to ask why such lower-level ‘administrative’ fortifications only appeared at this time – which is not to say that such a question could not be answered. I think that, for reasons set out earlier, seventh-century history supports the idea of more fragmented power or weaker royal authority, but would gladly concede that it is hardly the only way of reading the evidence.

Perhaps a better reason why I prefer a weakening of power in the face of increasing local authority would be the fact that the above-ground monuments seem to be a fairly short-lived phenomenon. Over time, as the forts become more elaborate, the barrows seem to die out and the Class 2 Stones appear, evidently later in the seventh century. Alongside the foundation of churches all this looks – from a Frankish perspective – like classic signs of the entrenching of the power of local aristocracy. The later abandonment of the hill-forts at the same time as the establishment of other types of royal site, like Forteviot, also makes sense as a sign of royal authority asserting itself over such regional centres. The evidently ritual focus of site complexes like Forteviot is to be expected as the establishment of ideologies investing kings with religious sanction and loyalty to them as the ‘meet and right’ thing to do is a classic later first millennium – Carolingian, if you like – means of confronting the absence of coercive force. 

Conclusions

All this nevertheless leaves the million-dollar question unanswered: why? And only have suggestions in response. One obvious starting point would be some form of economic development at a local level – again tied to the development of an aristocracy. It is of course at roughly this time that continental pottery finds its way to the north-east shores of the Irish Sea, a fact which should, I imagine, be linked to socio-economic development in the importing area, enabling exchange. Such imports do not make their way to the east coast in numbers but one might, given the archaeology, propose that similar things were taking place. One might still wonder why this might take place, not simply why economic development might have occurred at this time, but also, and I think more interestingly, why – if it did take place and if the increased surplus was being garnered by local élites for their own purposes perhaps in opposition to old structures of kingship – such élites were adopting this strategy. It is perhaps too easy to see – as I have tended to do in the past – a somehow natural or innate desire of local élites (or potential élites) to shrug off the overlordship of central or otherwise distant kings or overlords. What one might wonder is whether the changes that were taking place across Europe at this time, around the late sixth century, and which I currently would link to the end of the old Roman ways of seeing the world, had similar effects beyond the old frontier. Given the saturation of barbaricum with Roman ideas of power, at least east of the Rhine and south of the North African limes, it does not seem unreasonable to me to propose that such changes would have consequences in northern Britain too. Perhaps Pictish kings too had to find new ideological supports for their power, and for expecting people to conform with their desires, and perhaps this produced a crisis of legitimacy at moments of crisis as it did at this time in other areas. There were, again as in other areas, new ideological forms becoming available to local aristocrats to bolster their authority – in (as indeed in Gaul and northern Italy) Irish monasticism.

What I conclude – and I assure you that this was by no means what I thought I would conclude when I started thinking about this – is that economic, social and political developments in Pictland were very much in line with those taking place elsewhere around the end of the sixth century, that this part of Europe found itself very much in the same currents of change that were flowing through the rest of the West. What these developments imply, though, is not the straightforward growth of royal or central power, a movement up a neat linear trajectory towards the kingdom of the Scots.  The road less travelled, that I am proposing, is much more uneven and twisting, and its destination more unpredictable but it is therefore, in my view, more interesting.