Roland Steinacher

Migrations and Conquest: Easy Pictures for Complicated Backgrounds in Ancient and Medieval Structures

In case that only very few written sources survived this century, what will be known of our social, political, economic, cultural, or intellectual identities in a far future? Archaeologists excavating the ruins of present-day Europe in the distant future could discover structures confusing to them. The remains of our material culture could be interpreted by our future colleagues as those of a unified world in the northern and parts of the southern hemispheres. Or, as another possibility, would Europe be defined as an American colony or vice versa? Would the models generated be sophisticated enough to describe the complex structures of present-day societies? Could archaeologists or historians believe in migrations and decline, conquering westerners, and conquered, decadent easterners and southerners? Could great American invasions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries become an explanation if the industrial areas and more modern city structures of Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York appear mightier than those in Europe? Or would our future colleagues believe in a massive Chinese takeover at the beginning of the twenty-first century due to the millions of plastic objects with Made in China on them? Or would they have learned from our discussions and intellectual evolutions in this field of study and try to avoid simple explanations? These considerations have been inspired by Chris Wickham. Wickham tried to criticize simple ethnic identifications of archaeological material and put it like this cum grano salis: And indeed, a man or a woman with a Lombard-style brooch is no more necessarily a Lombard than a family in Bradford with a Toyota is Japanese; artefacts are no secure guide to ethnicity (Wickham 1981, 68). The famous German archaeologist Volker Bierbrauer did not like this too much and considered Wickham’s idea as a joke (Bierbrauer 2004: 48 and note 23).