Empires and Barbarians (106 page)

1
Annal of Fulda
882 for the incident with Poulik (1986) on the archaeology.

1
Bohning (1978), 11.

2
For useful summaries of the modern evidence, see Salt and Clout (1976); King (1993); Collinson (1994), 1–7, 27–40; Holmes (1996); Cohen (1995), (1996), (1997), (2008); Vertovec and Cohen (1999). Canny (1994) provides an introduction to early modern migration evidence. 200,000 Germanic-speaking peasants: Kuhn (1963), (1973); Bartlett (1993), 144–5; and see, more generally, Phillips (1988), (1994).

3
For an introduction to the pre-Roman world of the Celts, see e.g. Cunliffe and Rowley (1976); Cunliffe (1997); James (1999). In fact, there is no one-to-one equation between Celts and the Oppida culture, and Roman conquest did advance just beyond its bounds: see Heather (2005), 49–58.

4
For useful introductions to the early Germanic world, see Hachmann (1971); Todd (1975), (1992); Krüger (1976), vol. 1; Pohl (2000). Note, though, that there is a strong tendency in some of this literature to avoid discussing Germanic groups around the Vistula and further east – a squeamishness resulting from the Nazi era, when the fact that ancient Germanic speakers had once dominated these lands was used as an excuse for territorial aggression.

5
For an excellent, recent overall introduction, see Batty (2007); on the broader cultural role played by Scythia in the formation of the Greek world view, see Braund (2005).

6
Khazanov (1984) provides an excellent introduction to the world of the steppe.

7
‘The Veneti have taken’: Tacitus,
Germania
46.2 (cf. 46.4 on what lay beyond); see also Pliny,
Natural History
4.97; Ptolemy,
Geography
3.5.1 and 7. On the geography and ancient archaeological patterning of the society and economy of these regions, see Dolukhanov (1996). Within the Russian forest zone, many of the river names are actually Balt rather than Slavic in origin, even in areas where Slavs would be dominant by the year 1000
AD
. It is thus unclear whether Tacitus’ Veneti are likely to have been Slavic-speakers, Balt-speakers, or speakers of a tongue ancestral to them both (see
Chapter 8
).

8
Nomads too played their part: the Huns in the fall of the Roman Empire, the
Avars in the slavicization of central and eastern Europe, and the Magyars and Bulgars in laying the foundations of two substantial political entities whose lengthy histories underlie the existence of modern Hungary and Bulgaria.

9
The literature on the cultural significance of the rise of nationalism is now vast, but for introductions, see Gellner (1983); Anderson (1991); Geary (2002).

10
Early modern and modern accounts of Germanic migration consistently pictured migrants as family groups, while more contemporary Roman sources, when they said anything, also sometimes recorded the presence of women and children alongside the warriors. (I have simplified here, and the actual evidence will be surveyed in subsequent chapters.) Students of the collapse of the Roman Empire are broadly divided between viewing the Germanic invasions as its cause, and as its result. For useful overviews of the range of opinion, see Demandt (1984) and Ward Perkins (2005). With regard to the Slavs, one body of opinion has wanted to identify a very large, if submerged, population of Slavic-speakers throughout central and eastern Europe since the Bronze Age, but the evidence remains unconvincing (see
Chapter 8
). For a useful survey of traditional approaches to the Vikings, see Sawyer (1962),
chapter 1
. Nationalist conflicts also led to the downplaying of the so-called ‘Normanist’ view, that Vikings were responsible for the first Russian state: see Melnikova (1996),
chapter 1
(and see also my
Chapter 9
).

11
Childe (1926), (1927).

12
See note 9 above. The general point is accepted even by those, such as Smith (1986), willing to conceive of relatively solid and sizeable group identities in at least some corners of the pre-nationalist past.

13
Leach (1954); ‘evanescent situational construct’: Barth (1969), 9. For more recent overviews, see e.g. Bentley (1987); Kivisto (1989); Bacall (1991).

14
That hypothesis was already marked in the work of Kossinna himself: see especially Kossinna (1928). It showed itself even more strongly in the equally influential work of Gordon Childe (see note 11 above), who generalized many of Kossinna’s ideas, while dropping some of his assumptions about Nordic racial superiority. On Kossinna’s legacy, see e.g. Chapman and Dolukhanov (1993), 1–5; Renfrew and Bahn (1991).

15
For an overview of these intellectual developments, see Shennan (1989); Renfrew and Bahn (1991); Chapman and Dolukhanov (1993), 6–25 (which includes an instructive difference in emphasis on the part of the two authors); Ucko (1995). The work of Ian Hodder – especially (1982) and (1991) – has been particularly important in rehabilitating the view that patterns of similarity and difference in material cultural items might sometimes reflect important aspects of human organization.

16
Clark (1966) represents a key turning point away from the invasion hypothesis. For accounts of the range of explanatory hypotheses that have been tried since, see e.g. Renfrew and Bahn (1991); Preucel and Hodder (1996); Hodder and Hutson (2003).

17
Halsall (1995b), 61; and see his further comment: ‘[The invasion hypothesis] is rarely given much credence in archaeological circles today. It is too simplistic, rather on a par with asserting that the change from neo-classical to neo-Gothic architecture or from classical to romantic art in the nineteenth century was the
result of an invasion’ (p. 57). This ‘before’ and ‘after’ approach to migration is quite common. See, for a further example, the comments of Nicholas Higham in Hines (1997), 179, where a reinterpretation of a set of remains that had excluded migration from its discussion is lauded as ‘more complex’. The discussion in question is in Hines (1984).

18
Wenskus (1961); cf., amongst others, Wolfram (1988) on the Goths, and Pohl (1988) on the Avars.

19
Geary (1985) and (1988) provide introductory essays composed from this perspective, Halsall (2007) a full-scale study of the fourth to sixth centuries. The migration topos features in Amory (1997) and Kulikowski (2002).

20
On the ‘wave of advance’ model, see, most famously, Renfrew (1987),
chapters 1
–
2
,
4
(summarizing previous approaches), and
6
(the model itself).

21
For a detailed case study of ‘elite transfer’, see my
Chapter 6
.

22
See note 13 above. Smith (1986) explores some historical applications of this more solid vision of group identity; Bentley (1987), 25–55 uses Bourdieu’s concept of the
habitus
as the basis of a theorized approach towards how identity might be programmed into the individual by the society in which they grow up. When talking about the kinds of differences that prevent the individual from changing group identity so easily (religion, language, social values and so on) the ‘primordialists’ can sound as though they are still stuck in the intellectual world of pre-1945, making out checklists and ticking boxes. But in the primordialist view, it is not these ‘things’ themselves that decide identity, but the individual’s reaction to them. In most of Europe, being a Catholic or Protestant is not a major determinant of group affiliation, but in Northern Ireland, for particular historical reasons, the same religious difference functions as a strong symbol of communal allegiance. It is not the item ticked in a box that decides group affiliation, but how individuals react to that item.

23
On the Greeks and Romans, see Sherwin-White (1973). Halsall (1999) objects to my earlier use of this analogy, but he doesn’t seem to realize that Gastarbeiter and migrants without green cards don’t enjoy remotely full citizenship rights in the societies in which they live, and ignores substantial evidence that even in the first millennium group identity was sometimes made the basis of differentiated rights in culturally complex contexts: see
Chapter 5
. He also takes the to my mind bizarre view that just anyone could turn up to claim a share when barbarian conquerors of different parts of the Roman west were handing out economic assets: see Heather (2008b).

24
Cf. Antony (1990), 895–9; Antony (1992) notes that these revised understandings render obsolete many older theoretical discussions that assumed much starker archaeological correlates of migration.

25
Härke (1998), 25–42, offers a fascinating insight into which contemporary archaeological traditions are more accepting of migration as a possible engine of change, and which more dismissive. British ‘immobilism’ – rejection of migration – finds parallels in the old Soviet Union and Denmark; the German tradition still incorporates migration as one of its basic paradigms.

26
Jerome (1926).

27
A recent five-hundred page book devoted to migratory activity around the fall of the Roman west, for instance, contents itself with drawing on a few
summaries of the literature drawn up for archaeologists rather than engaging with it at first hand: Halsall (2007), 417–22. By contrast, the same book devotes an entire chapter to the group-identity question, based on intense (and insightful) engagement with the specialist literature.

28
On Irish and Dutch migrants, see Bailyn (1994), 1–2. On overall patterns in modern instances, see Fielding (1993a); King (1993), 23–4; Rystad (1996), 560–1. On the historical parallels, see Canny (1994), especially 278–80 (with full references).

29
On the calculation of costs, see Rystad (1996), 560–1; Collinson (1994), 1–7 (both with useful further references.). On return migration, see e.g. Gould (1980); Kuhrt (1984).

30
For reviews of changing policies towards migrants in Western Europe, and their overall effects, see Cohen (1997); King (1993), 36–7; Fielding (1993b); Collinson (1994),
chapter 4
; Rystad (1996), 557–62; Cohen (2008). Obviously in recent years, EU enlargement has led to a huge influx of Eastern European migrants.