Rome's Gothic Wars_ From the Third Century to Alaric - Michael Kulikowski [31]
Archaeology, Identity, Ethnicity
The material remains of the frontier regions are an extremely valuable source for barbarian social history, as will become clear in the next chapter, but they are much less useful as evidence for ancient ethnic divisions. Although that fact has been demonstrated by a great deal of recent work – both practical and theoretical – it flies in the face of more than a century of scholarship. The correlation of particular types of material evidence with particular barbarian groups named in the literary sources has long been, and remains, normal practice, as does the tracing of migrations on the basis of artefacts. The origins of these approaches lie in the early twentieth century and are particularly associated with the archaeologist Gustav Kossinna, though they underpin the work of other great archaeologists of the European barbaricum like Hans Zeiß and Joachim Werner. Kossinna’s Siedlungsarchäologie (‘settlement archaeology’) postulated that materially homogeneous archaeological cultures could be matched up with the ethnic groups attested in our literary sources, and also with the language groups defined by philologists. The shifting extensions of material cultures should therefore be interpreted as the movements of peoples. The rigidity of Kossinna’s approach has long been repudiated, but its legacy is pervasive. One widespread belief ultimately rooted in that legacy is that artefacts themselves carry ethnicity: that one particular form of brooch is Gothic, another Vandalic, and that wherever we find such brooches we can locate Goths and Vandals. This ‘ethnic ascription’ – the attaching of ethnic identity to particular material artefacts – is still ubiquitous in archaeological study of the barbarians, as is the designation of complexes of material evidence with ethnic names drawn from our literary evidence. Ethnic ascription is what allows some scholars to maintain that the Gothic migration recorded in Jordanes is also visible in the archaeological evidence.
Unfortunately, it has now been definitively shown that artefacts do not carry ethnicity in such a fashion.[48] Whether in the cemeteries from which most of our artefacts come or in the remains of barbarian settlements, material evidence tells us a great deal about vertical social relationships – those between different status levels within a society – but much less about horizontal relationships between ethnic or linguistic groups with separate identities. Thus while it is comparatively easy to characterize vertical distinctions within a single archaeological assemblage – such as bigger houses, better grave goods – defining assemblages by contrast to others is much more difficult. For one thing, it is a wholly artificial process that involves selecting out several characteristics – for instance the positioning of weapons in burials, or particular brooch forms or building techniques – and holding them to be diagnostic, either singly or in combination, of a particular archaeological culture. The selection of defining characteristics can itself be a problem, as there is always a danger of taking as diagnostic characteristics that are actually very widely diffused. But even if we avoid that danger, we are still making another problematical assumption: that the characteristics we have selected as definitive are the same ones that contemporaries would have recognized as defining their sense of identity or alterity. That assumption can never be possible in purely archaeological terms. Although we can be sure