Conclusions
The aDNA analyses of Szólád and Collegno were combined with study of stable isotopes in the skeletons and then compared with the distribution of grave-goods. The essential overall conclusions were expressed – less than clearly – as follows:
In both Szólád and Collegno this genetic structure mirrors the variation that emerges from their mortuary practices, i.e., how living members of the community represented the individuals that they buried. This perhaps suggests that in these two cemeteries there may indeed have been a biological basis to the notion that long-term shared common descent can shape social identity and that this is reflected in the material culture. However, whether the association between genetic ancestry and material culture reflects specific peoples mentioned in historical texts (i.e., Longobards) or stemmed from a deeper/long-term descent (of mixed barbarian ancestries[[1]]) is as yet unclear.[2]
The stable isotope analysis is very interesting; the discussion of furnished burial deeply flawed. This, however, is not the place to discuss those or to present an alternative interpretation.
Towards the start of the article we read:
We note that we are not aiming to infer Lombard ethnicity, which is a subjective identity.[3]
This is disingenuous. The experiment was designed to examine the Longobard migration, and chose two sites associated with Longobards, excavated and discussed by archaeologists predisposed to read variations in the data on ethnic lines and to see change in material culture as resulting from Longobard migration and who have previously interpreted the sites in those terms. The background to the problem analysed was exclusively expressed in terms of the history of that migration. To say that the implication is not that the supposed incomers are Longobards, defined and unified by their (supposed) ancestry, and that that was what gave rise to the variability in material culture is entirely unconvincing.
But what, if anything, has been shown? It is, to be sure, interesting that the analyses suggest a linkage between different kindreds and particular funerary rites and diets, and that these include the evident incomers at Collegno, but this does not explain the use of those rites. The association between the furnished inhumation burial rite and ‘Germanic’ ethnicity has absolutely no prima facie evidential support whatsoever in the archaeological record. As a rite, it was clearly developed within the frontier provinces of the Roman Empire. As Irene Barbiera has proven, inhumation with weapons was a rite known in Northern Italy before the ‘barbarian migrations’.[4] That cannot be stressed strongly enough. If repeated aDNA studies reveal that furnished inhumation was generally employed by incoming groups from Germania Magna, that will demonstrate that this old assumption was the luckiest guess in the history of archaeology! It will not, however, explain why these groups, with no prior history of using the rite before their migration, suddenly decided to employ it once on Roman or formerly Roman territory, or retrospectively confer methodological or logical rigour on the initial assumption.
The analyses made no linkage between the incoming group in Collegno and the supposedly immigrant group at Szólád, other than the broad similarity of their genetic make-up when plotted on PCA diagrams.[5] Close consideration shows them not to overlap by very much even on the analyses’ own terms. The modern geographical regions associated with the supposedly incoming, ‘northern’ groups are moreover very broad. But let us in any case accept this conclusion. Does it necessarily say anything about the migration of Longobards? Think of all the other possible explanations. If the Collegno incomers do have, loosely, ‘central European DNA’ could they not (as the authors admit) be descended from Ostrogoths, or from any of the barbarians who made up Odoacer’s army? For that matter, although growing up in the locality, why can the different ‘southern’ kindreds at Collegno not belong to either of those groups? Furthermore, what if they were descended from ‘Romans’ who had moved back from the transalpine provinces?[6] Some of the areas from which the alleged newcomers might have come, according to the genetic evidence, lie inside the Empire. All these possibilities are entirely consistent with the experiment’s results.
The authors claim that the results are ‘consistent with an origin of this [putatively immigrant] group east of the Rhine and north of the Danube and we cannot reject the migration, its route, and settlement of the Longobards described in historical texts.’[7] Indeed they are, but they are at least as consistent with a wide range of alternative interpretations and do nothing to render the authors’ preferred reading more plausible than the others. In short, the Szólád/Collegno analyses involved an experiment set up with a series of interpretive conclusions in mind; that experiment did nothing to rule those out, so it is implied that they have been confirmed. This is bizarre. Traditionally, scientific method proceeds by deduction, by ruling explanations out, rather than simply picking, out of a wide range of possibilities, the one that accords with the analysts’ preconceptions on the grounds that it had not been excluded by the experiment. There is actually very little that is ruled out by this experiment.
Let us suppose, though, that in spite of all my misgivings the analyses had revealed the arrival of Longobards at Collegno and that they were the people using grave-goods. As noted, it would still not explain their decision to use that rite; it would certainly not authorise us to describe the rite and its analogues as Longobard or Barbarian. What would it tell us? That there was a Longobard migration into Italy and, perhaps, that it contributed to stress and social competition at a local level? We knew this. No one to my knowledge is denying – or has ever denied – that there was a Longobard migration, or that it involved the usually-cited numbers of people: perhaps 100,000. In other words, the most positive reading of the results, and one, let me repeat, that by no means automatically emerges from the data, would tell us absolutely nothing that we did not already know and, with considerable likelihood, not even that. Forcing the data into the support of that maximalist reading potentially obscures what they might be saying about a broader and more interesting range of topics.
The Szólád/Collegno experiment – like many other studies of this sort – offers us, by way of conclusions, a choice between the obvious – something we already knew and no which sane person doubted (people moved into the Roman Empire from Barbaricum) – and the impossible – that no one moved and populations were entirely homogeneous. Hence, they frequently rely on setting up the second alternative as a straw man.
[1] Why ‘barbarian’?
[2] Amorim et al. ‘Understanding’, p.8.
[3] Amorim et al. ‘Understanding’, p.2.
[4] I. Barbiera, ‘Remembering the Warriors: Weapon Burials and Tombstones between Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages in Northern Italy’, in Post-Roman Transitions: Christian and Barbarian Identities in the Early Medieval West, ed. W. Pohl & G. Heydemann (Turnhout, 2013), pp.407-35.
[5] Amorim et al., ‘Understanding’, fig 2a, 2b.
[6] As is famously recorded in Eugippius’ Life of Severinus. Life of Severinus: Eugippius. The Life of St. Severin, trans. Bieler, L., (Washington, 1965).
[7] Amorim et al. ‘Understanding’, p.9.