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).
Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul . By G. Woolf. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge1998/2000. Pp. xv + 296, figs 20. Price: £40.00 (bound); £15.95 (paper). ISBN 0 521 414456 (bound); 0 521 789826 (paper).
1. On Romanization 2. Roman power and the Gauls 3. The civilising ethos 4. Mapping cultural change 5. Urbanising the Gauls 6. The culture of the countryside 7. Consuming Rome 8. Keeping faith? 9. Being Roman in Gaul.
Exemple aristocratique et mode funéraire dans la Gaule mérovingienne
Lorsqu'en 659 elle sentit la mort approcher, Gertrude, abbesse de Nivelles, donna de strictes instructions relatives à son vêtement funèbre : il fallait qu'on ne lui mît qu'un cilice et qu'un « très grossier » voile de nonne donné par quelque pèlerin, sans autre ornement, insista-t-elle, qui fût de laine ou de lin. Une telle insistance suggère qu'elle savait combien cet excès d'humilité choquerait de la part de celle qui, nonne ou pas, se trouvait être la fille de Pépin de Landen et d'Itta. Après tout, Theodechilde, l'abbesse fondatrice de Jouarre, qui mourut seulement quelques années plus tard, fut enterrée avec un manteau brodé de fils d'or — moins splendide sans doute que la superbe tunique (fig. 1) dont la broderie colorée imite la joaillerie du temps et qui a été associée à la sépulture de la reine Bathilde, morte à la même époque dans sa retraite monastique.