I went to a really fascinating lecture last night and thought some medievalists in the bunch might want to hear about it.
The researchers were interested in studying the migration of Longobards (also known as Barbarians) into the northern defenses of the Roman Empire. Many English and French historians argue that these "barbarian invasions" contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire and the start of Longobard kingdoms in Italy from the 5th-7th centuries.
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| Fun fact: this map is based almost wholly on an unreliable 11th-century transcription of ONE contemporary source! It's only a paragraph long, forgets about the Lombard kingdoms, and has an untranslatable word! History is fun! |
The researchers dug up two graves, Szólád (in modern-day Hungary) and Collegno (in modern-day Italy). They were looking for family ties and organizational themes in the cemeteries, as well as hoping to find northern/central European skeletons in both. To find skeletons with the same genetic structure as those in modern-day Denmark and northern Germany would suggest the movement many consider to be true.
In Szólád, as they hoped, they found an inner ring of family members with grave-goods (indicating higher status in life) ALL from northern Europe! There was an outer ring of southern Europeans, indicating that the two cultures lived together but remained separate. There was one exception: one southern European woman DID have grave goods, and appeared to marry and have a child with one of the northern Europeans.
In Collegno, they dug up a cemetery from the 7th century, about 150 years after the Szólád cemetery. They found the same social structures in place as the Szólád cemetery, which indicates that the "barbarian invasions" have a much stronger case for having existed! There were a few more northern-southern marriages, but they tended to be outside of the norm, and the southern Europeans were always women who married northern men: this enforces the class systems the researchers assume existed.
Here's a link to the study expanded to more cemeteries in these areas, if you want to know more about the genetic aspect or any of the processes involved: hey click on me!
2 comments:
This is super interesting! Based off of your description, I feel like this lecture was about difference in burial based upon gender and class, probably among other things. It just makes me think about those remains, of Norse origin I believe, that were thought to m=be male for many many MANY years. But like, last year these remains were found to actually be female. Which I know isn't exactly related but that's what my brain went to.
That's super interesting to me, because one of the main points in this lecture was that DNA evidence provides (at least in some ways) a slightly less biased interpretation of certain facts. That would be something like your example: modern society's structures imposed themselves onto the assumptions of grave goods etc.
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