Guy Halsall

Gender and the End of Empire

[FIRST PARAGRAPH] The problem of the “Fall of the Roman Empire” continues to excite debate among historians and archaeologists, fifteen centuries after Odoacer deposed the usurper Romulus in 476. Similarly, there is an ever-growing corpus of work on women’s history and, to some extent more recently, gender in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. The challenge of bringing these two burgeoning areas of research together has, however, on the whole been avoided.

Burial, Ritual And Merovingian Society

In this essay, the author deals with the first of Paxtons problems, the relationship between mortuary remains and ritual behavior, there are greater grounds for optimism, and it is on this subject that some ideas will be proposed. The paper is grounded primarily in the data of the Merovingian region of Metz. The relevant evidence almost exclusively comprises archaeological data: burials with grave-goods. Previous interpretations of grave-goods have been unsatisfactory because they have failed to take the performative, ritual aspects of the practice into account. Recognition of the performative and ritual aspects of furnished burial, and of the way in which material culture is employed as heightened ritual language, creating, and being created by, social categorization. And in that dynamic for change lie important aspects of the ways in which early medieval society itself changed. Merovingian rituals were not static and neither was Merovingian society.Keywords: burial; cemetery; display; evidence; grave-goods; Merovingian society; ritual

Northern Britain and the Fall of the Roman Empire

This article examines Roman-barbarian relations in the north of Britain in the context of cultural interactions on the other imperial frontiers. On the basis of the less confrontational model of Romano-barbarian interaction that this suggests, a rethinking of northern British politics is put forward. The withdrawal of effective Roman presence from the northern frontier (suggested in the later fourth century) caused political crises in the region between the walls and a break-up of the earlier Pictish confederacy. Change around 600 led, in turn, to the submerging of the British polities that had dominated the region since 400 by new powers, the English and the Scots, whose kingdoms’ foundation might belong to this period. Internal Pictish strife might explain why the Picts do not seem to be a very active player in the early seventh-century politics that are visible to us.

The sources and their interpretation

Historical approaches to the written sources have changed in many ways and at several analytical levels. New evidence, new lenses, have become available. This chapter presents a short survey of the ways in which those forms of evidence are approached and the sorts of questions which they can, and cannot, answer. The most common form of historical writing, broadly defined, was related to ecclesiastical history: hagiography. A common source for post-Roman social history is the series of law-codes issued in the period. Another source of information for the period takes the form of letters. Poetic writing in this period took a number of forms. The theological writings are increasingly of interest to historians of the early Middle Ages, certainly far more than was the case a hundred years ago. The chapter discusses developments in archaeological theory, numismatics and epigraphy, and towns and trade. The study of medieval rural settlements provides many ways of examining social structure as well as economy.

Review article: Movers and Shakers: the Barbarians and the Fall of Rome

Books received for review: The Lombards. By Neil Christie. The Goths. By Peter Heather. The End of Roman Britain. By Michael E. Jones. The Huns. By Edward A. Thompson (revised by P. Heather).

Katalin Escher. Genèse et évolution du deuxième royaume burgonde (443-534). Les témoins archéologiques (BAR International Series 1402 (I & II)). 1102 pages, 47 illustrations, tables, 2 CD-ROMs (2 volumes). 2005. Oxford: Archaeopress; 1-84171-841-6 paperback £115.

A major development was the appointment of Alfred V. Kidder as head of the Division of Historical Research in 1929, who initiated a pan-scientific research agenda which greatly enlarged on Morley’s vision and persisted through the final Carnegie project, at Mayapan in the 1950s. The Carnegie had two principles that made its Mesoamerican work easier: it did not collect, all artefacts remaining in their countries of origin, and it promised to restore excavated buildings, initiating Maya archaeotourism, notably at Chichén Itzá.