Empires and Barbarians (6 page)

Such post-nationalist readings of the historical evidence for barbarian Europe in the first millennium had similar but independent roots to the new dawn that was sweeping simultaneously through archaeology. But the vehemence of the archaeologists’ new mindset has added further momentum to the evident potential for rewriting the story of barbarian migration from historical sources. So convinced now are some historians that large, mixed migration units could never have been a feature of the past that they have started to argue that the handful of historical sources that apparently report the opposite – the source of the invasion-hypothesis model of migration – must be
mistaken. Graeco-Roman sources, it has been suggested, are infected with a migration topos, a cultural reflex that made Mediterranean authors describe any barbarians on the move as a ‘people’, whatever the real nature of the group. A European history composed of long-distance, large-scale population moves is being replaced by a history of small-scale mobile groupings, gathering in followers as they went. Migration – though the word is now scarcely used – remains part of this story, obviously, but with the scaling-down of the numbers of people envisaged as participating in those journeys, the key historical process is no longer the movement itself but the gathering-in of new recruits afterwards.
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There is a beautiful symmetry here. The old Grand Narrative subdued archaeology to the demands of history, with archaeological cultures that were understood as ‘peoples’ and a migration model derived from first-millennium historical sources which ordered the progression of these cultures into a historical narrative punctuated by episodes of large-scale migration and mass ethnic cleansing. Now, the credibility of these same historical sources has been undermined by a reaction against migration which started with the archaeologists’ ferocious rejection of culture history and the invasion hypothesis that was its natural corollary. History used to lead archaeology; now archaeology is leading history. In the process, a vision of early European history driven by outside emigration has given way to another characterized by few immigrants but by many people adapting to whatever stimuli were provided by the few who did move: a story largely of internal development. This is in its own right a beautiful pattern. We have now reached a point that is the mirror image of where we were fifty years ago. But while this is satisfyingly symmetrical as an intellectual progression, is it convincing history? Should migration be relegated to such a minor, walk-on part in the history of barbarian Europe in the first millennium
AD
?

The invasion hypothesis is dead and buried. No longer would we even want to litter prehistoric and first-millennium Europe with a succession of ancient ‘peoples’ carving out their chosen niches via a lethal cocktail of large-scale movement and ethnic cleansing. Arguably, such a cocktail should never have existed. At least the ethnic-cleansing element of the old Grand Narrative finds little support that I know of in the sources. The demise of the invasion hypothesis does not mean, however, that migration has entirely disappeared from the story. Nor could it. Even if you accept that a migration topos operated among Mediterranean authors, their cultural fantasies would still have had to be underpinned by population movements of some kind, and some of the archaeological evidence is likewise suggestive of humanity somehow on the move. Two alternatives to the invasion-hypothesis model of mass migration have consequently come into use.

The first is the ‘wave of advance’ model. Applicable to small migration units, it provides an alternative view of how a group of outsiders might take over a landscape. It has been applied in particular to the spread across Europe of its first proper farmers in the Neolithic period, and shows how, even with individually undirected moves, farming populations might nonetheless have come to dominate all suitable points in that landscape. According to this model, Neolithic farmers did not arrive en masse and oust the hunter-gatherers in an invasion. Rather, the farmers’ capacity to produce food in much greater quantities meant that their population numbers grew so much more quickly that, over time, they simply swamped the hunter-gatherers, filling up the landscape from the points nearest the first farming sites, as individual farmers grew to maturity and sought their own lands. It is a model for small-scale, family- or extended-family-sized moves and unintentional takeover, which, by virtue of these qualities, also allows for the possibility that some of the indigenous hunter-gatherers might have learned farming skills for themselves as the process slowly unfolded. What could be more attractive for scholars trying to free themselves from a world of mass moves and conquest?
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Even more popular among archaeologists, because of its greater range of potential applications, is the ‘elite transfer’ model. Here, the intrusive population is not very large, but does aggressively take over a territory by conquest. It then ousts the sitting elite of the target society and takes over its positions of dominance, while most of the underlying social and economic structures which created the old, now expelled or demoted, elite are left intact. The classic example of this phenomenon in medieval history is the Norman Conquest of England, where, because of the astonishing wealth of information surviving in
Doomsday Book
, we know that a few thousand Norman landholding families replaced their slightly more numerous Anglo-Saxon predecessors at the top of the eleventh-century English heap. Again the vision of migration suggested by this model is much less dramatic than that envisaged under the invasion hypothesis. It retains the latter’s intentionality, and some violence, but because we’re talking only of one elite replacing another, with broader social structures left untouched, this is a much less nasty process than the ethnic cleansing that was central to the old model. And because it is merely a question of swapping a few elites around, the outcome is likewise much less dramatic and in one sense less important, since all the main existing social and economic structures are left in place, as they were in England by the Norman Conquest.
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The intellectual response to the oversimplicity of the invasion hypothesis has thus taken the form of developing two models which in different ways minimize the importance of migration, whether by cutting back on the likely numbers involved, the degree of violence, the significance of its effects or, in one of the two, the extent to which there was any real intent to migrate-cum-invade at all. These models are obviously much more compatible than the invasion hypothesis with those visions of group identity that deny that large, compact groups of humanity could ever intentionally move as a cohesive block from one locality to another. But while these models are certainly more sophisticated, and are to that extent a step in the right direction, they do not yet, even in combination, add up to a satisfactory overall approach to migration in first-millennium Europe. Confining discussion to a framework supplied by just these two models involves three specific problems, and one much more general one.

The first problem stems from the fact that in their excitement that human beings do not always organize themselves in self-reproducing, closed population groups (and, I think too, in their determination to banish for ever the abominations of the Nazi era), historians and archaeologists of the first millennium have tended to concentrate on only one half of contemporary discussions of identity in the social-scientific literature. At the same time as Leach, Barth and others were focusing on group behaviour and observing individuals swapping allegiance according to immediate benefit, a second group of scholars turned their attentions to the close observation of individual human behaviour. These have sometimes been called ‘primordialists’, because they argue that group affiliations have always been a fundamental part of human behaviour. Some of these studies seemed to come up with different conclusions from those generated by Leach and Barth in that they showed that, in some cases, inherited senses of group identity apparently cannot be manipulated at will, but constrain individuals into patterns of behaviour that go against their immediate interests. Differences in appearance, speech (whether language or dialect), social practice, moral values and understandings of the past can – once they have come into existence – act as formidable barriers to individuals who might wish, for personal advantage, to attach themselves to a different group.
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The two lines of research have sometimes been held to contradict each other, but in my view they do not. They actually define the opposite ends of a spectrum of possibility. Depending upon particular circumstances, not least past history, inherited group identities can exercise a more or less powerful constraint upon the individual, and provide a greater or lesser rallying cry to action. Again, this is firmly in line with observable reality. In terms of larger group identities now, the rhetoric of Britishness strikes a much stronger chord in the United Kingdom in contemporary debates about the EU, for instance, than does, say, Luxembourgeoisness in its home corner of Europe, neatly located between Germany, France and Belgium. And so too at the level of the individual: individual members of any larger group show marked differences in their levels of loyalty to it. Accepting the fact that group identity is sometimes a stronger and sometimes a weaker
force in people’s lives does not, I would stress, really contradict what Barth had to say (even though
he
might think it did). His famous aphorism is that identity must be understood as a ‘situational construct’. Fair enough, but a crucial point is that all situations are not the same. Influenced in part by the old Marxist dogma that any identity that is not class-based (as group identities will not be, unless every member has the same status) must be ‘false consciousness’, and partly by the fact that he was primarily reacting against a world dominated by nationalist ideologies, Barth stressed, and was most interested in, the kinds of situations that produced weak group affiliations. But even the logic of his own phrasing implicitly allows that there might be other situations that produced stronger types of group affiliation, and the so-called primordialist research has explored some of them.

Two entirely different types of constraint can act as barriers. On the one hand, there are the informal constraints of the ‘normal’, whether we’re talking food, clothing, or even moral values. Research has suggested that the individual picks up many of these group-defining characteristics in the earliest years of life, which helps explain, of course, why they might sometimes have a profound effect, making individuals feel so uncomfortable outside the norms of their own society that they cannot happily live anywhere else. On the other hand, and sometimes operating alongside such senses of discomfort, there can also be much more formal barriers to changing identities. As an individual, you can in theory claim any identity you want to, but that doesn’t mean it will be recognized. In the modern world, group membership usually means having the appropriate passport, and hence the ability to satisfy the criteria for obtaining it in the first place. In the past, of course, passports didn’t exist, but some ancient societies monitored membership carefully. Rights to Roman citizenship were jealously guarded, for instance, and a whole bureaucratic apparatus was set up to monitor individual claims. Greek city states had earlier followed similar strategies. Such bureaucratic methods relied on literacy, but there is no reason why non-literate ancient societies might not also have controlled membership closely in certain conditions. There can also be degrees of group membership. America and Germany, in the modern world, have more and less officially accepted large groups of foreign workers without necessarily giving them full citizenship rights, and herein lies the key, in my view, to a total understanding of the identity question. When full group membership
brings some kind of legal or material advantage – a set of valuable rights, in other words – we should expect it to be closely controlled.
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The underlying conclusions to emerge from the identity debate are more complex, therefore, than has sometimes been realized. For individuals born into all but the simplest of contexts, group identity comes in layers. Immediate family, wider kin, town, county, country, and these days international affiliations (such as citizenship of the EU), together with their own life choices – the desire, for instance, to live somewhere else entirely – all provide the individual with possible claims to membership of a larger group. But any claim he or she makes does have to be recognized, and, according to context, these possible affiliations might exercise a more or less powerful hold upon them. Essentially, Barth’s famous aphorism sets up a false contrast. All group identities are ‘situational constructs’ – they are created, they change, they can cease to exist entirely – but some are more ‘evanescent’ than others.

From this follows a first potential problem in current approaches to migration in the first millennium. They are predicated on the supposition that large-group identity is always a weak phenomenon, but this is only a half-understanding of the identity debate. If a position on identity is adopted a priori – whether it is viewed as strong (in the era of nationalism)
or
weak (in the currently emerging consensus) – then evidence to the contrary will be ignored or argued away. To my mind, it is important to be willing to re-examine the evidence for migration in the first millennium without assuming that the population groups involved will necessarily have been bound together so weakly as some of the current half-understandings of the group identity issue would suppose.

The second problem emerges when the virulent rejection of migration as a possible agent of past change among some English-speaking archaeologists is set against the kinds of archaeological reflection of migration that is likely to turn up in practice. It is not usual in the modern world for entire social groups to move in a block, and, as we shall see in the chapters that follow, this was also true of the period being explored in this study. There is in fact little or no evidence of first-millennium ethnic cleansing. First-millennium migration almost always consisted, therefore, of moving part of a population from point A to point B, with at least some of the latter’s indigenous population remaining in situ, the only exception being
Iceland which was unoccupied when the Norse arrived there in the ninth century. This being so, you can never expect to find the complete transfer of an entire material culture. Rather, only certain elements of the old material culture would be likely to be brought to point B: those invested with particular meaning, perhaps, for the subgroup of the migrant population actually involved in the migration process. At the same time, some or much of the indigenous material culture of point B would probably continue, and some entirely new items or practices might be generated by the interaction of the migratory and host populations. The archaeological reflections of many first-millennium migratory processes, in other words, will often be straightforwardly ambiguous in the sense that you could not be absolutely certain, just on the basis of the archaeology alone, that migration had occurred.
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