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| Sorry this is blurry. I wanted to blow it up so that the peninsula looked a similar size to that in the other map. |
I was struck by the decline of villas in the Po valley, especially compared with the rest of the peninsula, as shown on this pair of maps. There seems to be a stark pattern of abandonment there in the sixth century, especially north of the river. I pondered this and how it compared with the pattern of 'Lombard' cemeteries, so I looked up a recent-ish map of the distribution of the latter, from 2008.(2)
What I find interesting here is the fact that the 'Lombard' furnished cemeteries appear largely in the area in which the villa pattern had recently collapsed. The reasons for that collapse are usually pinned on the Gothic Wars of the mid-century, and it would be contrary, even by my standards, to deny that that must have played an important part, especially given that in some areas, such as southern Tuscany, the settlement pattern showed signs of recovery, under Ostrogothic rule, from some of the fifth-century decline.(3) [So much for the idea that economic decline in the 5th century was all down to barbarians...] That said, the dramas of the mid-sixth-century (plague as well as war) may not be the whole story. A comparative study of western Europe seems (to me - provisionally at least) to suggest that a new period in the development of the rural settlement pattern, opening around the middle of the sixth century, was not uncommon. The mid-sixth-century events might of course have played a role there too, and the 'direction' of change was not always the same; my point is simply that we might need to refine our interpretations to some extent.
In various publications over the years, I have drawn attention to the relationship between the collapse of the villa system and the appearance of the rite of furnished inhumation cemeteries (burial with grave-goods). I have developed an interpretation of the latter burial rite as being fundamentally a sign of competition for local status, or at least of the tensions involved in transmitting such status from one generation to the next. As I have argued before(4) there are regional and chronological variations in the lavishness or competitiveness of the rite, and the extent to which it is practised by only a few families or whole communities, and whether the patterns of grave-goods distribution seem to stress élite family-membership or age and gender, and that this calibrates the interpretation as a sign of stress. Nonetheless, thus calibrated, that interpretation seems remarkably applicable throughout western Europe in the period between c.300 and c.700, especially when cemeteries viewed in a full archaeological context which includes the settlement pattern. In the North-East of Gaul, the distribution of cemeteries maps very closely onto the distribution of the late (post-300) Roman settlement pattern (this has been demonstrated in exhaustive studies by Frauke Stein, though her interpretation could not be more different from mine(5)). In the Upper Danube valley, the distribution of 'Germanic' cemeteries also replicates that of the villae - thus located overwhelmingly on the formerly Roman territory. The precise relationships at the very local level may differ but the general pattern can also be illustrated in Anglo-Saxon England (see below, from Worlds of Arthur).
All of the instances just cited, however, belong to the fifth and early sixth centuries. The villa system collapsed earlier in the northern provinces than in Italy, and furnished inhumation cemeteries appeared earlier too, as (in my view) a consequence. So it's interesting to see the appearance of furnished burials after the Gothic Wars(6) in the fertile Po valley, where a social system based round the villas had but recently withered away. This does seem, provisionally at any rate, to suggest the same sort of pattern as has been detected in the northern and north-western provinces of the former Empire.
So. What are we looking at here? First of all we have the collapse of the antique settlement pattern in the region. Now, as far as I can tell, Italian villas show a long period of transformation through the fifth century, rather than the fairly rapid process of collapse that one can detect in the north of Gaul, the Rhineland or Britain. That surely implies some different explanations. I remain convinced that the collapse in the north-western provinces was very much to do with political instability and economic constraints consequent on that. The developments further south (whether in southern Gaul, Iberia or Italy) seem to represent something different. The villas survive longer, as villas, but their productive functions increase and their 'traditional' residential features decline.(7) Sometimes they become sites of, or are swallowed up into, the larger communal settlements ('villages' as they are termed in Italian archaeology) for which they had been the foci. Sometimes religious buildings appear on the old villa site, as well as burials. Nonetheless it's possible that, although being renegotiated and redefined, traditional local social hierarchies - including long-standing aristocracies - remained in place. As has long been well-known, though, the Gothic Wars were catastrophic for the traditional Italian social hierarchy and the developed, modified, even recovering, settlement-pattern of antiquity disappears quite dramatically, it seems in the second half of the sixth century. That must have created social stress.
This stress can only have been emphasised by the Lombard attacks and especially by the failure of the Lombards rapidly to conquer the whole peninsula and impose a centralised kingdom on the pattern of that of the Ostrogoths (that failure probably linked partly at least to the collapse of established local social hierarchies, just mentioned). A series of political identities was available in post-Justinianic Italy. Clearly there were new families, and new local military powers, moving into the Po valley. Some families competing for local might well have allied themselves with the incomers; others perhaps not. Local families trying to fill the 'vacuum' left by the collapse of the traditional social hierarchy might well have chosen the new Lombard political identity. Wherever one is, though, it seems to me that one is better placed to understand the appearance of 'Lombard' cemeteries and grave-goods in this context of local competition for authority, or stress in maintaining existing preeminence. Analyses of some of the better recorded 'Lombard' cemeteries have shown similar age and gender-related patterns of grave-goods distribution to those I identified in Frankish necropoleis thirty years ago, and a similar interpretation probably applies. Clearly, incomers wree an important element in this situation but I maintain that they do not explain the appearance of furnished inhumation and that, even where such families did bury their dead in this way, that fact was more linked to the local socio-political conditions than to the simple fact of an ethnic affiliation.
Clearly, though, this provisional interpretation needs to be looked at in more detail on the regional and local scale, looking at the precise uses of villa sites, and also at the full range of inhumation models.
Notes
(1) Angelo Castrorao Barba, ‘Ville romane e riusi tra Tardoantichità e Altomedioevo: per un bilinacio nazionale’, in F. Redi & A Frogione (ed.), Atti del VI COngresso Nazionale di Archeologia Medievale. L’Aquila 12-15 September [sic] 2012. All’Insegna del Giglio. Florence, 2012), pp.175-80. The map is figure 2.
(2). From: Volker Bierbrauer, 'Die Langobarden in Italien aus archäologischer Sicht', in M. Hegewisch (ed.) Die Langobarden: Das Ende der Völkerwanderung. Katalog zur Ausstellung im Rheinischen LandesMuseum Bonn 22.8.2008-11.1.2009 (Primus. Darmstadt, 2008), Abb.11, p.119.
(3). See, Emmanuele Vaccaro, Sites and Pots: Settlement and Economic Patterns in Southern Tuscany (AD 300-700) BAR(I) 2191 (Oxford, 2011), esp. pp.24-32
(4). ‘Gräberfelduntersuchungen und das Ende des römischen Reichs’, in Zwischen Spätantike und Frühmittelalter, ed. S. Brather (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), pp.103-17.
(5). Particularly good maps in Frauke Stein, ‘Die Bevölkerung des Saar-Mosel-Raumes am übergang von der Antike zum Mittelalter.’ Archaeologia Mosellana 1 (1989):pp.89-195.
(6). These cemeteries are habitually called Lombard and may indeed have a link, a close link even, to the expression of Lombard politico-ethnic identity. The dating of the material, however, is still to a large extent 'led' by the historical record and an absurdly precise date (568) placed on the opening of this chronological horizon. It would be rare indeed for the archaeological data on its own to be able to make a chronological distinction between material from the last years and immediate aftermath of the Gothic Wars (say 550-568) and the Lombard Invasion under Alboin and fuller understanding may require the uncoupling of the archaeological data from the historical record.
(7). There is a whole series of caveats needed here about the patterns of villa excavation but space forbids. Consider them made.
