Archaeology, History and Bad Science: A critique of the analysis of DNA at Szólád (Hungary) and Collegno (Italy). Part 1 (Introduction; setting up the experiment).

 

[This is a critique I wrote to form my part of an article I co-wrote with Prof Martial Staub (Sheffield) about genetics and archaeology. Later I cut it down, with the idea of publishing the more detailed elements as 'online supplementary materials'. It didn't get published, sadly. I think that there were two main problems: one was a significant jump in the scale and breadth of Martial's part and mine; the other was that detailed critique like this is maybe what needs to happen before an article like that under discussion comes out, rather than afterwards. Nonetheless, I think this detailed critique is worth making, and if anyone does know of a journal or other publication that might be interested in considering this (or a shorter version of it), do please let me know.

I have split the piece into three shorter blogs for ease of reading. This part contains the introduction and discussion of the problems involved in the setting up of the 'experiment'; part 2 discusses methods and results; and Part 3 contains the overall conclusions, and an afterword.]

Introduction

As a more specific focus for our critique, we consider one particular study which made something of a media splash in 2018.[1] This thought-provoking piece compares evidence from a cemetery at Szólád near Lake Balaton in modern Hungary (Late Antique Pannonia) and another at Collegno in Piemonte, Italy, two areas linked historically by the sixth-century Longobard (or Lombard) Migration to Italy. The analyses revealed discrete groups within both cemeteries, showing different genetic traits, which were related to northern and southern Europe. These groups correlated with different methods of burial and (to a lesser degree) in terms of their diet.

When it appeared, the link to the online publication was retweeted by one Twitter account with the claim that ‘Peter Heather was right. The Völkerwanderung was a thing!’[2] We can leave aside for now the point Heather certainly was right, for the very good reason that no serious scholar has ever denied that the ‘Great Migrations’ happened.[3] What requires more rigorous examination is whether this article supports the interpretation of the Barbarian Migrations that lies behind the term ‘Völkerwanderung’: not simply a large-scale, short-term population movement, but one that introduced novel cultural practices into the regions where the migrants eventually settled. More specifically, we can ask whether it does anything to help us ‘understand’ ‘6th-century barbarian social organization and migration’, as its title proclaims. Here the problem might be a disciplinary divergence in the meaning of the phrase ‘understanding society’ but, if viewed in a purely historical or archaeological sense, my answer will be definitive: no, it doesn’t. It describes two situations where people had (in some way) moved into a specific locality from elsewhere and had (possibly) used different burial practices. That is valuable. If, however, we want to understand those specific local phenomena and, a fortiori, if we wish to draw conclusions from them about the wider events of the ‘Barbarian Migrations’, I will demonstrate that we are no further on than when we were at the start. The only way in which the micro (local) and macro (pan-European) phenomena can be linked is via a number of uncritical assumptions, which the publication in question does nothing to interrogate. Those assumptions are, first, that if migration occurred then that must have been ‘barbarian’ and, second, that social organisation and variation in material culture must be explained by migration. In other words, the fact of ‘barbarian migration’ (which no one is denying) is the necessary and sufficient cause for late antique population and cultural change. It is in the current climate of ‘push-back’ against, and indeed flagrant misrepresentation of the views of,[4] those who deny a unique causal primacy to the Völkerwanderung, the enthusiastic expostulation about how science had proven that the Great Migrations were ‘a thing’ finds its context.

A more critical look at the analysis and its approaches is, however, necessary.[5] The popular reception of such studies and the nature of their media coverage are heavily grounded in suppositions that the methods of laboratory science are superior to the inevitably subjective assumptions and opinions of the historical disciplines and the partial – in both senses of the word – nature of their evidence.[6] Popularly, the epistemological claims of ‘hard science’ trump those of the arts and humanities. The Online Supplementary Materials (hereafter OSM) of the article under discussion set out the procedures employed in the laboratory analyses and mathematical modelling. I can see no reason to comment critically on these. It is no part of this discussion to cast – or even to imply – any doubts upon their quality and rigour. Whatever else one might say, it is an impressive piece of mathematical modelling and complex data analysis. My critique departs instead from consideration of the study’s rigour as a scientific experiment and thus confronts the broader epistemological claims. To anticipate my conclusions, my argument will be that – in that more general sense – the experiment represents bad science.

Setting up the experiment

The authors describe the experiment and its results thus:

[W]e obtained ancient genomic DNA from 63 samples from two cemeteries (from Hungary and Northern Italy) that have been previously associated with the Longobards, a barbarian people that ruled large parts of Italy for over 200 years after invading from Pannonia in 568 CE. Our dense cemetery-based sampling revealed that each cemetery was primarily organized around one large pedigree, suggesting that biological relationships played an important role in these early medieval societies. Moreover, we identified genetic structure in each cemetery involving at least two groups with different ancestry that were very distinct in terms of their funerary customs. Finally, our data are consistent with the proposed long-distance migration from Pannonia to Northern Italy. [Emphasis added]

The experiment was designed to confront the following questions:

Were specific barbarian peoples described in texts culturally and ethnically homogeneous populations, or were they ad-hoc and opportunistic confederations of diverse, loosely connected groups? What role did biological relatedness, being that of close kinship relations or long-term shared ancestry, play in the organization of these barbarian communities and how are such relationships related to patterns of material culture? Did this period involve long-distance migrations as described by late antique authors?

The most troubling aspect of the experiment concerns the way it was shaped by assumptions about its likely results. The OSM include a brief history of the Longobards but not one of late antique northern Italy and its long history of social, cultural, economic, and political relationships with transalpine areas. A reader of the article and its supplementary materials can be forgiven for believing – entirely incorrectly – that the Longobard movement was the only significant migration into Italy to occur in the period. Furthermore, the cemetery-sites investigated are located in the regions linked by historical accounts of the Longobard migration. In other words, the selection of data was made on a priori grounds. Now, genetic scientists might be led to believe that the epistemological status of the ‘Longobard’ label or identifier attached to the sites from which their samples were drawn was much more secure than it is in actuality, or that such a label might imply a genetically discrete population. They can understandably not be familiar with the broader historical and archaeological issues to which we shall return. One may therefore assume a ‘good faith’ procedure on their part in accepting certain parameters in the setting up of the experiment.

Fundamentally, though, one must ask where the control sample is. Assessment of the results’ significance requires comparable analysis of other sites either from the same period but not connected by the Longobard migration, or in the same regions but from a slightly earlier period. The main comparative aDNA evidence used was a pan-European range of samples from the Bronze Age, 1500 years or more before the Longobards’ migration.[7] This is insufficient. One needs comparanda from, say, the middle Roman period. A few early medieval samples were considered but their selection was problematic. A cluster taken from a 4^th-7^th-century English context was listed as ‘Anglo-Saxon’. Others, from the Caucasus, were labelled as being ‘Alans’. This raises questions in the context of a study of Barbarian Migrations as these names are late antique or early medieval ethnonyms not necessarily linked to genetics or to material culture in any straightforward way. In particular, the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ implies that these subjects had migrated into the Empire, in this case into the diocese of Britanniae. When linked to the burials of supposed migrants in Hungary and Italy it risks giving the impression of a shared ‘barbarian’ origin.

Only six Italian aDNA samples were consulted in the whole analysis, all from prehistory, and three from the same site. On the basis of this lacuna alone, one is entitled to doubt the results’ validity. The authors state that what they consider to be ‘northern’ DNA is otherwise unknown in Italian samples.[8] This is illogical unless one assumes, a priori, that those graves with such DNA at Collegno were not of Italians. The only Italian aDNA from the relevant period to be considered was that at Collegno, so it is equally true to say that ‘northern’ DNA was found in every early medieval Italian population examined in the study. Without appropriate comparanda it is not possible to know how atypical this profile would be for a late antique cemetery in the Po valley. The only mitigation again concerns the information passed to the genetic scientists. If the assumption, made in good faith, was that Szólád and Collegno were both sites that could reasonably be accepted as having had Longobard populations, then the issue of a control might possibly have been seen as moot. If the Longobard nature of these cemeteries, their populations, and some of their material culture is taken as a given, its correlation with other variables being the subject of analysis, it does not need testing.

But therein lies the problem. On what basis is either Szólád or Collegno ‘Longobard’? The assignment of ethnic identities to forms of archaeological evidence has been hotly debated for over thirty years.[9] The Szólád/Collegno analyses were initially intended to contribute critically to this debate. While many archaeologists now accept that giving ethnic labels to forms of material culture is dubious, these reservations and the newer interpretations which they have engendered have been bitterly resisted; Longobard archaeology is one of the more conservative areas in this respect.[10] This problem even affects the sites’ dating. The earliest period of ‘Longobard’ archaeology begins in 568 precisely, because (so runs the argument) there were no Longobards in Italy before 568 and the material is Longobard. The ethnicity of the associated people is thus entirely prejudged. The same is true in Hungarian archaeology where, conversely, Longobard material cannot be later than 568. There is no archaeological reason to suppose that the first phase of ‘Longobard’ burials at Collegno could not belong to a period perhaps ten (or more) years before 568. Archaeological periodisation cannot be fine-tuned to that level of accuracy and the development of its techniques over the past forty years has shown that phases of change can drift back or forward by decades. For example, a key archaeological transition in artefact-forms which, in the 1980s, was dated to ‘c.600’ is now placed closer to 575/80.[11] The extent to which early Italian ‘Longobard’ material is still generally congruent with comparative material from the period after 568 is unclear. Without the influence of the historical record, some of it could unproblematically be placed earlier. Equally, there is no archaeological reason why Szólád could not have been used for a decade or more after 568. Overall, there are no prima facie archaeological grounds for supposing that the earliest phase at Collegno is not contemporary with the last period at Szólád, whether before, after, or straddling 568. This must influence how we employ cemetery evidence to think about trans-Alpine connections and the Longobard migration.

The link between this material and the Longobards’ arrival is, however, too well entrenched in most Italian archaeology to permit detailed or rigorous scrutiny of the idea. Indeed, the archaeology of this period is currently experiencing a backlash against attempts to reassess the role of Barbarian migration in material cultural change, further making critical revaluation unlikely. The lead-author of the OSM Collegno discussion has written a forceful – if unconvincing – defence of the traditional idea that ethnicity is manifest in late antique burial customs[12] and the lead-author of the Szólád discussion subscribes to a similar viewpoint.[13] The team involved in the Szólád-Collegno analyses included only archaeologists who subscribe to traditional ‘ethnic’ readings of material culture so no serious consideration was given to alternative interpretations.[14] Against that background it is extremely difficult to avoid the implication that incomers distinguished from locals are to be identified as Longobards.

We must also scrutinise the assumptions about the nature of population movement, which can be illustrated with three quotations:

While previous sampling from the era has been limited, we note that published fourth- to seventh-century genomes from Britain, Bavaria, Lithuania, and the Caucasus, analysed alongside our own ancient samples, cluster close to their modern counterparts.

We found no evidence that such ancestry was present in northern Italy during this time (who instead resemble modern southern and Iberian Europeans), which would be consistent with inferred long term barriers to gene flow in Europe across the Alps.

Modern European genetic variation is generally highly structured by geography.[15]

The fundamental assumption is of long-term population immobility, against which seemingly rare migration can be set and, one assumes, be clearly identifiable. Whatever the scientific grounds, historically it is a counterfactual. As will be discussed later, movement of individuals or large groups across the Alps, in both directions, has been constant since prehistory. Instead, support was drawn from an article claiming that the study of a person’s DNA allowed their geographical origins to be reliably estimated even to village level.[16] This conclusion was reached from analysis of populations from three islands off Scotland, three villages in the Alps, and three villages in Croatia. When separated by up to thirty miles of sea or several thousand metres of mountain, it is scarcely surprising that marriage tended to take place within each individual locality. The Croatian case study, where such natural barriers were absent, was far less conclusive. Another support was a study of the British Isles which claimed that modern British DNA showed the persistence of the political units of the ‘Dark Ages’[17] but actually came, very clearly, to the hardly staggering conclusion that people in low-lying arable areas find it easier to move around to find sexual partners than those living in the middle of mountain ranges.[18] Some of these issues resurface when considering the experiment’s methods. The logical accompaniment to the idea that difficult physical geography creates barriers to gene-flow – that areas of easier communication might accelerate it – seems not to feature anywhere in the cited literature. The methods of plotting the spatial distribution of particular genetic components[19] assumed a ‘flat earth model’ – in other words, a genetic feature would normally diminish across space in an even fashion. This contradicts the assumption that physical geography presents long term barriers to gene-flow, as indeed does the very wide geographical spread of modern subjects listed as Swiss.

Notes

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[1] ‘Understanding 6th-century barbarian social organization and migration through paleogenomics’, in Nature Communications (2018) 9:3547 (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-06024-4). For interesting discussion of the media and aDNA studies, see, Källén, Anna & Mulcare, Charlotte & Nyblom, Andreas & Strand, Daniel. (2019). ‘Archaeogenetics in Popular Media: Contemporary Implications of Ancient DNA.’ Current Swedish Archaeology. 27. 69-91. 10.37718/CSA.2019.04. I am grateful to Oren Falk for this reference.

[2] This tweet or the account seems subsequently to have been deleted.

[3] Susan Oosthuizen, The Emergence of the English, is the latest attempt to deny that there was an Anglo-Saxon migration but her argument is extremely problematic.

[4] G.P. Brogiolo, ‘Dati archeologici e beni fiscali nell’Italia Goto-Longobarda’ in Between Taxation and Rent: Fiscal Problems from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages/Entre el Impuesto y la Renta. Problemas de la fiscalidad tardoantigua y altomedieval, ed. P.C. Díaz & I. Martín Viso (Bari, 2011), pp.87-105, at p.100; G.P. Brogiolo & A. Chavarría Arnau, ‘Chiese e insediamenti rurali tra V e VIII secolo prospettive della ricerca archeologica’ in ‘Ipsam Nolam barbari vastaverunt’: L’Italia e il Mediterraneo occidentale tra il V secolo e la metà del VI. Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi (Cimitile-Nola-Santa Maria Capua Vetere, 18-19 giugno 2009), ed. C. Ebanista & M. Rotili (Cimitile, Tavolario edizioni, 2010), pp.45-62, at 46-47.

[5] In 2019 I presented a preliminary critique of this piece at the University of Sheffield. The authors’ response, made before the lecture’s text was publicly available (at https://600transformer.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-barbarian-migrations-in-21st-century.html), was dismissive at best. Cp. the similarly aggressive response by the authors of Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson et al., “A Female Viking Warrior Confirmed by Genomics,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 164.4 (2017): 853-60, to Judith Jesch’s similarly blogged response: “Let’s Debate Female Viking Warriors Yet Again,” Norse and Viking Ramblings (9 September 2017) http://norseandviking.blogspot.com/2017/09/lets-debate-female-viking-warriors-yet.html. Källén et al., ‘Archaeogenetics in Popular Media’, p.85. I am grateful to Oren Falk for letting me read his unpublished paper ‘Death and the Shield-Maiden: Viqueering Vikings and Viquens’, a detailed critical discussion of the supposed woman-warrior found at Bjirka and the ensuing debate.

[6] Källén et al., ‘Archaeogenetics in Popular Media’.

[7] Below, n.28.

[8] Amorim et al. ‘Understanding’, p.5.

[9] This debate was reignited by G. Halsall, ‘The origins of the Reihengräberzivilisation: Forty Years on.’, in Fifth-Century Gaul: A Crisis of Identity? Ed. J.F. Drinkwater and H. Elton (Cambridge, 1992), pp.196-207; G. Halsall, ‘Archaeology and the late Roman frontier in northern Gaul: the so-called Föderatengräber reconsidered’, in Grenze und Differenz im früheren Mittelalter, ed. W. Pohl & H. Reimitz (Vienna, 2000), pp.167-80. These studies are reprinted in G. Halsall, Cemeteries and Society in Merovingian Gaul. Selected Studies on History and Archaeology, 1992-2009 (Leiden, 2010), pp.93-130, alongside ‘Commentary 2: Careful with that axe, Eugenius’ (pp.131-67), which responds to critiques made up until about 2010. For similar criticisms of the traditional ethnic reading, see above all, S. Brather, Ethnische Interpretationen in der frühgeschichtliche Archäologie (Ergänzungsbande zum Reallexikon der germanischen Ältertumskunde 42: Berlin, 2004); P. von Rummel, Habitus Barbarus: Kleidung und Repräsentation spätantiker Eliten im 4. und 5. Jahrhundert Ergänzungsbande zum Reallexikon der germanischen Ältertumskunde 55: Berlin, 2007); F.J. Theuws & M. Alkemade, ‘A kind of mirror for men: sword depositions in late antique northern Gaul’, in Rituals of Power. From Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, ed. F.J. Theuws & J.L. Nelson (Leiden, 2000), pp.401-76; F. Theuws, ‘Grave-goods, ethnicity and the rhetoric of burial sites in late antique northern Gaul’, in Ethnic Constructs in Antiquity. The Role of Power and Tradition, ed. T. Derks & N. Roymans (Amsterdam, 2009), pp.283-319.

[10] See the works by Brogiolo, above n,00; V. Bierbrauer, ‘’Zur ethnischen Interpretation in der frühgeschichtlichen Archäologie’, in Die Suche nach den Ursprüngen von der Bedeutung des frühen Mittelalters (Vienna, 2004); Kazanski, M., & P. Périn, 2008. ‘Identité ethnique en Gaule à l’époque des Grandes Migrations et des Royaumes barbares: étude de cas archéologiques’.  Antiquités Nationales 39, pp.181-216. the articles by Giostra and Vida cited below, n. 00

[11] R. Legoux, P. Périn & F. Vallet, Chronologie Normalisée du Mobilier Funéraire Mérovingien entre Manche et Lorraine (3rd revised edition; Condé-sur-Noireau, 2009).

[12] C. Giostra ‘Goths and Lombards in Italy: the potential of archaeology with respect to ethnocultural identification’, Post-Classical Archaeologies 2011, pp.7-36. There is no space for detailed refutation of the argument here.

[13] T. Vida, ‘Conflict And Coexistence: The Local Population Of The Carpathian Basin Under Avar Rule (Sixth To Seventh Century)’, in The Other Europe in the Middle Ages. Avars, Bulgars, Khazars and Cumans, edited by F. Curta, Brill, Leiden, 2008, pp. 13–46. Vida dismisses Brather’s work: ‘Brather’s position may be popular with advocates of a post-processualist critique of both archaeological sources and the methods of the archaeological inquiry, but it rests on wrong assumptions’ (p.15). He presents no substantive reasons why this might be the case. He and Giostra both deploy ‘post-processualism’ – a very loose archaeological school of thought of which neither seems to have a clear understanding – as a sort of bogeyman, and both rely on the heavily criticised notion of a pan-Germanic culture. For recent discussion of the latter, see M. Friedrich & J. Harland (ed.) Interrogating the “Germanic”: A Category and its Use in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.

[14] The acknowledgements of Amorim et al., ‘Understanding’, include thanks, for ‘helpful’ conversations, to Dr Philipp von Rummel and Professor Frans Theuws, both of whom have published rigorous critiques of the traditionalist ‘ethnic’ reading of grave-goods (above, n.00). These conversations have clearly been ignored.

[15] Amorim et al. ‘Understanding’, p.5, p.5, p.9, respectively.

[16] O’Dushlaine, C., et al. ‘Genes predict village of origin in rural Europe.’ Eur. J. Hum. Genet. 18, 1269–1270 (2010).

[17] Leslie, S., et al. ‘The fine-scale genetic structure of the British population.’ Nature 519, 309–314 (2015).

[18] Readers should note here the significant difference between the proposition that mountain ranges act as barriers to gene-flow across them and the claim that mountains constrain gene-flow among the population living within the range.

[19] Yang, WY., Novembre, J., Eskin, E., & Halperin, E., A model-based approach for analysis of spatial structure in genetic data. Nat Genet 44, 725–731 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.2285

Facts and Legends: Britannia after the Romans (until around 700)

 [This the English original of the short piece I wrote for the German history magazine Damals. My thanks to Mischa Meier and Steffen Patzold for the invitation to participate in that issue.]

Historians nowadays very rarely use the phrase ‘The Dark Ages’ to describe the period after the disintegration of the western Roman Empire. It is now understood that it wholly misrepresents the early middle ages by implying that it was somehow a period of cultural collapse, or even an end (or near-end) of civilisation, or that there exists so little information that no one can know anything about it. Yet there is one part of the period that can – in at least one sense – be described as a Dark Age, and that is Britain in the period between about 400 and about 600. In the area of ‘the history of events’ or political history an impenetrable darkness descends upon the island. Around 550, the only stories that reached Procopius from Britain involved such things as a wall dividing the island in two, with a fertile territory to the east and a land where even the air was toxic to the west, and the ferrying of the souls of the dead to this island from the Frankish coast. These seem to have been so absurd, and so incompatible with what he knew of the history of the formerly Roman island of Britannia, that Procopius invented a whole new island, called Brittia, in which to localise them. In Britain itself, in the early eighth century, when Bede wrote his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, he could barely find any more information than we still have today. Britannia had fallen off the historical map.

Apart from a couple of brief and extremely vague entries in the Gallic Chronicle of 452, there is only one reliable written source that describes some outlines of British political history in this period. That is the De Excidio Britanniae (On the Ruin of Britain) written by someone called Gildas. Gildas included a short historical section in what was otherwise a sermon about the moral back-sliding of the Britons’ secular and ecclesiastical leaders. Given that this section was only written as part of a rhetorical composition, it was never meant to represent a serious historical narrative; indeed, had we any actual historical sources for the period no one would be very interested in this passage at all! Because we don’t, however, it has acquired an importance that probably would have dismayed its author, who wanted people to concentrate on the important part of his sermon and mend their ways. Gildas gives us two actual names (Ambrosius Aurelianus, who was a British leader, and ‘Agitius’, who seems to be Aëtius, the Roman general in Gaul), one allusive reference to someone else (the ‘proud tyrant’), the name of a siege (Mons Badonis) and a general outline of events. Unfortunately, no one knows for sure where or when Gildas wrote, who Ambrosius or the tyrant were or where Badon Hill was, and even his narrative is so rhetorical and stylised that it might not represent one sequence but two, which overlapped in time. It is very difficult to do very much with this, and almost all of the other sources we have are later and entirely unreliable.

Only the very beginning and the very end of the period are quite well documented. In the first, ‘Rome’, in the form of the army in Britain, leaves Britain; in the second, ‘Rome’ in the form of the papal mission to the Anglo-Saxons, returns. In 406 the British garrison rebelled against the Emperor Honorius and eventually chose a soldier called Constantine (usually called Constantine III by historians) to be their emperor. Like most previous British usurpers, Constantine immediately took the British army across to Gaul. The point was not to leave the Roman Empire (this was no fifth-century ‘Brexit’, as some have claimed!) but to take control of it and re-establish the fourth-century system of imperial rule, from northern Gaul, with the close involvement of the Gallic and British provincials. Of course, Constantine III failed; he was captured at Arles and executed in 411. At the end of his rebellion, the Britons saw the way the war was going, expelled Constantine’s officials and seem to have declared loyalty to Honorius. Some garrison must have remained in Britain but no reinforcements ever reached it; regular imperial government and administration was never restored in Britain or even across much of neighbouring northern Gaul.

The political history of Roman Britain ends with these events. Nearly two decades later, in 428, Bishop Germanus of Auxerre came to Britain to help resolve a dispute within the island’s Christian community, as is described in his Life, written in the 480s. Clearly some British institutions still functioned and the Britons could still get in contact with Romans across the Channel, even if, by then, some Romans considered the island lost. After that we have nothing to help us other than Gildas’ vague allusions, until Saint Augustine of Canterbury, despatched to Kent by Pope Gregory I, arrived in Kent and began the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons. Between those two visits by churchmen – Germanus and Augustine – it is impossible to say anything precise.

That does not, of course, mean that no history of any sort is possible. We have a huge amount of archaeological evidence in the form of burials, settlement-sites, individual finds, palaeobotanical evidence, and so on. Sometimes the negative evidence – the abandonment of Roman villas and towns – is as interesting as the positive. These data can tell us a great deal about a wide range of issues, ranging from the health and diet of the population, through their economy and management of the land, and the organisation of their communities, through to their attitudes to issues like gender and age. What this material does not and cannot tell us about, however, are the details of political history.

For many years, nonetheless, it was believed that the archaeological data could tell us about the ways by which the Roman provinces of Britain became the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England. One thing that is certain is that between the visit of Germanus and the arrival of Augustine the usual or default ethnic identity in the lowlands of Britain changed from being Roman or British to being Angle or Saxon. How did this happen? This has been one of the major debates in the academic study of this period. Some have proposed a mass migration from the northern regions of Germany while others (albeit not many) have gone as far as to suggest that there was no Anglo-Saxon migration at all. A variety of positions in between those two extremes have also been taken. Of the latter, perhaps the best known is that of ‘élite replacement’ or ‘élite take-over’, by which is understood the replacement of the Romano-British aristocracy by one of north German origin. In some ways this is analogous to the ‘ethnogenesis’ interpretation put forward by scholars such as Herwig Wolfram: a militarised elite becomes the focus for a social aggregation, with those who join the group adopting the leaders’ culture, origin story and so on. In this case the cultural ‘package’ to which people subscribed would include the English language as well as a range of cultural practices.

The extreme arguments are difficult to sustain, especially the proposal, recently elaborated in a short book, that there was no migration. The notion of a mass population movement, leaving parts of the north of Germany deserted, and large-scale population-replacement is also much too crude. That being said, it seems to me to be very difficult to understand some aspects of the culture of early medieval lowland Britain without envisaging a significant movement of people from the northern, coastal regions of what the Romans called Germania Magna. The linguistic change is one such aspect; another is the appearance in Britain of a cremation rite very similar to that in the Saxon territories in Germania.

There is, however, a subtle but vitally important distinction to be made in how we understand such changes. The change of language, or the introduction of cremation, or the popularity of artefacts of styles that originate on the eastern shore of the North Sea may be difficult to understand without population movement; that does not however, mean that such movement explains such changes. Mass migration might occur and yet leave almost no archaeological trace. Take, for instance, the movement of Germani into the Roman Empire between c.AD 1 and c.AD 400. During that period, many thousands – perhaps hundreds of thousands – of people left barbaricum and entered the Empire of their own volition, to serve in the army, or to seek work or lands to farm. There is almost no archaeological evidence of their presence. That which exists, ironically, is usually Roman in form: the name of, for example, a certain Hnothfrith who commanded an auxiliary unit on the Hadrian’s Wall frontier, is recorded in the inscription on an altar he set up, in good Roman fashion, in the fort at Housesteads. Immigrants keen to assimilate into a host population, especially one in which attitudes towards outsiders could be violently hostile, will frequently adopt that population’s material culture at the expense of their own cultural practices. In other cases, we know of the presence of fourth-century Germani in the Empire not because of any barbarian traces they left there but because they went home again and were eventually buried with elements of their Roman uniform

Hnothfrith is only known to history because he erected an altar to three of his gods and, sensibly, the numen augusti. Perhaps, like the fourth-century men whose ashes were buried with their old army belts in northern German cremation cemeteries, he went home to Germania at the end of his service and, until the end of his days, used his Roman material to show off the impressive fact that he had served the mighty Emperor. Or perhaps he settled down on a farm in the Roman provinces and lived out his life as a respectable veteran, his barbarian origins entirely invisible. And yet, any distant descendants or relatives of his who arrived in Britain in the earlier fifth century actively proclaimed their non-Roman origins. This was a very different situation. The shifts we can detect on fifth-century lowland Britain manifest different cultural relationships, not necessarily a change in the patterns of human mobility.

Romano-British society and economy collapsed in the fifth century; the decline had already set in by around 400, possibly in connection with the retreat of the centre of western imperial government from Trier to Milan in the early 380s. It may have contributed to Constantine III’s rebellion. There can be no doubt about that collapse, though nuance can be added to the statement. The melt-down might not have been as absolute as was once believed; some areas – especially those further west – might have survived better and for longer. Nevertheless it is indisputable that the lowlands of Britain in c.475 were unrecognisable from those of a century earlier. In a world where traditional Roman cultural forms, such as villas and towns, had disappeared, new forms of identity and new bases of power had to be established. This did not necessarily mean abandoning Roman-ness; the fourth-century army had adopted all sorts of ‘barbarian’ or ‘barbarised’ identities without thereby ceasing to be Roman. The multiple layers of late Roman identity probably allowed people to navigate these changes, make common cause with soldiers from barbaricum (as throughout the fifth-century West) and even perhaps accept their leadership.

In my own book on this period I suggested a ‘two-pronged’ model for political change in lowland Britain, on analogy with a reading of how northern Gaul became Francia. Gildas’ story of how Saxon troops were hired and posted to the British frontier might in reality have meant that they were stationed on the edges of the lowland zone, to which some archaeological evidence might suggest the frontier had been withdrawn in the late fourth century. This border region between highlands and lowlands was the wealthiest part of late Roman Britain and was also the area where the most powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdoms emerged. Whoever controlled the forces in this band of territory would have an enormous advantage. It is also possible that the language of the Saxon leaders could act as a lingua franca in areas like these, where there were Latin- and British-speakers. The other ‘prong’ would be the people migrating from northern Germania and arriving in the eastern coastal regions. The social and economic crisis around 400 had affected the coastal regions of northern Germany too, causing political upheavals and, as was often the case in such circumstances, migration from barbaricum into Roman territory, in this case Britannia, as well as the coast of Gaul.

This political struggle for mastery of the lowlands is usually the backdrop for the legends of ‘King Arthur’, a doomed ‘last of the Romans’ attempting to defend civilisation against an onslaught of barbarians. Sadly, we can never know whether Arthur existed. There is no reliable evidence that he was a real historical personage, but equally there is no way of being sure that a genuine figure did not lie behind the later legend. In the fifth century, real figures could easily disappear from history. The Roman general Syagrius (possibly an analogue for Arthur) would have been forgotten, had not Gregory of Tours read a lost source (probably a Life of Remigius of Rheims) that mentioned him in connection with the tale of the Vase of Soissons. But, as is shown by the story of Syagrius and his father Aegidius and their rivalry with Childeric and his son Clovis for control of the Frankish army on the Loire, fifth-century politics very rarely settled down into a neat binary opposition between barbarian invaders on one side and Roman defenders on the other. Gildas talks of ‘civil war’ in Britain as dominating the former provinces’ recent history, rather than barbarian invasions. If the rest of the western Empire provides any sort of guide to the sorts of process that went on in lowland Britain between 400 and 500 we ought to envisage warfare between different factions, each one made up of alliances of Romans and Barbarians. ‘Roman’ generals could command ‘barbarian’ armies, or ‘barbarian’ generals might lead the armies of a ‘Roman’ polity. When, in the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries, writers came to compose their histories of fifth- and sixth-century Britain, what they wanted (as their contemporaries in mainland Europe also wanted) was a story of how one people – that which by their day dominated the area in which they lived – had come to oust those who had occupied these lands before. Conquest and expulsion was the only model they had for explaining how one ethnic identity had replaced another. How had the barbarian Franks or Saxons ousted the Romans? Roman commanders of Saxon troops in a Romano-Barbarian faction had no place in that kind of narrative. In that scenario any Arthur figure who might once have existed had only one place left open for him, and that was legend.

How the World forgot about Far-Western Eurasia

[I am at a bit of a loss as to how to open The End of Western Antiquity. I essayed an alternative opening on here before. I still like that, but one of the things that I want to do in this book is, while writing about western Europe, not give the impression that this history is in some sense privileged. I want to attempt to decentre Europe while writing about it (indeed I would argue that the western concept of 'Europe' belongs to this period of what I think of as the 'closing of far western Eurasia'). I have talked about this before. A lot of recent history has tried to make the case for information networks between east and west and these, to be sure, existed. I think, though, that for all the effort the harvest is pretty meagre and that the interest is largely one-way. At the same time, though, I don't think that the West was in thrall to the 'Byzantine' East or slavishly copying it. I think it was going its own way, but it was a way that ran separately to the great networks of early medieval world history. See what you think, anyway. This is very much a first draft and, in this version at any rate, it lacks any references.]

Sometime around the middle of the sixth century, the scholar and bureaucrat Procopius of Caesarea was finishing the eighth and final book of his greatest work, The Histories, narrating the closing stages of the Gothic War in Italy. Around the middle of that book, however, in a somewhat unexpected detour, he decided to tell a story that he had heard about a war between the Varni (a people) and the soldiers who live on the island of Brittia.  In this tale he locates the Varni beyond the Ister (the river Danube) with their territory reaching as far as the Ocean, along the other side of the Rhine from the Franks, the people who by this time ruled what had been Roman Gaul (and who obviously gave their name to modern France). Procopius says that peoples like the Franks, the Varni and others all had their own tribal names but really they were all Germanoi (‘Germans’).  This is intriguing in its own right but when Procopius turns to the island of Brittia things get stranger. Brittia, he says, lies opposite the mouth of the Rhine. We could be forgiven for thinking, on those grounds, that Procopius means Britain but he confounds that expectation. Brittia, he tells us, lies between Britain (Brettania) and Thule, which in his geography appears to be Scandinavia. Procopius says that Brittia is inhabited by three peoples: the Angiloi, the Frissones, and the Brittones – the Angles (eventually the English), the Frisians and the Britons. Later, Procopius mentions a great wall built in ancient times, which divides this island into two. The replacement of the Saxons by the Frisians in the list of peoples we might expect to encounter in sixth-century Britain is interesting and the account of Hadrian’s wall is garbled but nonetheless Brittia seems, in spite of Procopius’ earlier comment, to be Britain after all. What is this Brittia that is not Britannia, this Britain that is not Britain? 

There are plausible-looking elements of sixth-century history in Procopius’ story but they are embedded in what looks like a fairy tale. In his account, the Varni were ruled by a king called Hermegiscel who allied with Theudebert, king of the Austrasian Franks, and married his sister. Hermegiscel had a son called Radegis by a previous, deceased wife, whom he had betrothed to a princess, born in Brittia and sister of the king of the Angiloi. After allegedly predicting his own death from something he heard in the croak of a bird in a tree, Hermegiscel advised his son to discard his betrothed and instead marry his stepmother, on the grounds that the Franks were a more dangerous neighbour than the Angiloi. After his father died (as predicted), Radegis did as he had been advised and married his father’s widow. Although he compensated his fiancée, the latter was not satisfied and, when diplomacy failed to make a difference, she led an expedition of 100,000 men in 400 ships to the land of the Varni, alongside one of her other brothers. After describing the sail-less vessels of the Angiloi and how neither they nor the Varni have any mounted warriors (in the case of the Angiloi because no horse has, according to Procopius, ever been seen in Brittia) Procopius tells how the Angiloi defeated the Varni. Radegis, hiding in a wood, was captured but the spurned princess, far from killing or injuring him, berated him for his fickleness and compelled him to make good his promise of marriage. So Radegis returned his step-mother to the Franks and married the young woman from Brittia.  This is one of those stories that present a puzzle to historians of Late Antiquity. Some of its elements admittedly look interesting and plausible  but can we justifiably sift them from a context that is obviously mired in the mythic? A garbled – but genuine – historical event or an old folktale with modern names inserted to increase its plausibility? The remainder of the chapter does not reduce the problem, for Procopius goes on to tell us about the ancient wall that divides the island. Unlike Hadrian’s Wall, this divides the island east from west. More than that, according to Procopius, whereas all the land east of the wall is fertile and prosperous, the land to the west is so fetid and toxic that no man can live once he has entered it. As if that is not strange enough, Procopius rounds off the chapter with a story that even he admits sounds like mythology. However, says he, since many other people have written about the story or claim to be first-hand witnesses of it, he will record it because, although he thinks people must just have dreamed it, it would look as though he was ignorant of the nature of this island if he left it out. On the coast of the kingdom of the Franks, says Procopius, live fishermen who pay no tribute to the Franks in return for performing the service of transporting the souls of the dead to the island of Brittia. At night they hear a mysterious voice summoning them to this task and are drawn to crew boats which appear on the shore. Although no one can be seen in them, they feel heavy and sink low in the water. The fishermen row these boats across to the island of Brittia where they hear a voice which calls out the names, careers and fathers’ names of the men or the names of the husbands of the women, feminism evidently not really being a thing on the Isle of the Dead. After this, the boats seem quite empty and skip lightly over the water back to the land of the Franks.  

What is going on here? The wall is clearly a bizarre rendition of Hadrian’s Wall, and the story of Brittia as the Isle of the Dead is possibly a play on the similarity between Thanatos – death – and Thanet, the eastern tip of Kent, and an island in antiquity.  That misunderstanding, or possibly pun, was known in late antiquity. In the early seventh century, Isidore of Seville repeated information from Julius Solinus’ third-century Wonders of the World, which said that the name of the island of Thanet came from the Greek word for death but (possibly confusing it with Ireland) that this was because snakes could not live there and that soil from the island would kill them.  Something like this might lie behind Procopius’ story but two points should be made.  One is that the text itself does not name the island as Tanatos (Thanet), rather than Brittia, or speak of death or the dead; it talks rather of souls (psyche). The other is that a Thanet/Thanatos wordplay could only have originated among native Greek-speakers in Procopius’ own world or the much reduced and rapidly declining number of educated westerners who, like Isidore, knew Greek.  The fruitfulness of the east of the island possibly came from a source like Solinus, who says that Thanet is bounteous and fertile, but if so it had been badly mangled by the time it reached Procopius, for Solinus clearly gives the name of the island as Thanet; there is no Brittia in his account. In any case Procopius’ story of the isle of the dead contains not the faintest echo of anything in Solinus’ account, in which Thanet is simply the most prosperous of the many islands off Britain. 

Wherever he obtained his information, the strange reports about Brittia seem to have been a problem to Procopius, who made clear his scepticism about at least some of them. The difference between the islands of Britannia and Brittia, which Procopius expressed as geographical, is probably historical.  Until the end of the fourth century, Britain had been part of the Roman world, close to its administrative centre and frequently involved in high-level politics, as Procopius was aware. He knew from various written sources that early in the fifth century it had raised the usurper Constantine against Emperor Honorius and that, after Constantine’s suppression, it had not been recovered by the Empire but had been ruled by tyrants. In his own day, the stories that reached him from Britain were of a quite different order; Procopius himself thought they were only marginally credible. They were more akin to the tales told in classical ethnography about the isles of remote north-western Barbaricum, at the end of the world.  How could a Roman province, even one now ruled by ‘tyrants’, be the source of such mad tales? Procopius appears to have refused to accept that it could be; the stories must have originated in Barbaricum and so he invented the additional North Sea island of Brittia. The opposition between civilised Bretannia and weird, barbarous Brittia illustrates how, between the beginning of the fifth and the middle of the sixth century, the former north-western provinces of the Roman Empire had, for educated inhabitants of the Mediterranean, simply dropped off the edge of the known world. 

Procopius’ ignorance about Britain is nonetheless not surprising. When Procopius was finishing his Histories, Georgius Florentius was a young boy growing up in the Auvergne, the heart of the Massif Central in the centre of the southern Gaul. Thirty years later, as Bishop Gregory of Tours, he would be composing his own Histories, moved to write by the profound changes of the later sixth-century whose analysis lies at the heart of the present book. Gregory was fairly well-informed about the Mediterranean world and had a reasonable knowledge of political events in the Eastern Roman Empire. But of Britain, he knew, or at least said, next to nothing in spite of it lying considerably closer to his world than to that of Procopius; indeed, it was geographically much closer to his world than the Mediterranean regions he tells us so much more about. He twice mentions the marriage of a Frankish princess to a Kentish notable, variously described as a ‘man’ and as a ‘son of a king’, and that is it. His gaze, as is well-known, firmly faced the south and the east. When one remembers that, during this period, it produced no historians of its own to make up for mainland European writers’ lack of interest in its affairs, it is no surprise that Britain effectively falls out of recorded history between c.410 and c.597. 

Procopius’ ignorance did not start at the Channel, though. His knowledge even of Gallic history and geography was tenuous and littered with strange stories and misunderstandings. Here, the contrast with his fourth-century precursor Ammianus Marcellinus, another Greek-speaker from the Levantine coast,  is if anything even clearer. Ammianus finished his Res Gestae (loosely ‘Deeds Done’) a little over 150 years before Procopius completed the first seven books of his Histories but it is inconceivable that he could have been as confused about Gallic geography as Procopius was. It would be wrong to say that the western provinces had been central to fourth- and fifth-century works composed in the Eastern Empire but they had featured nevertheless. How could they not? An Emperor resided in northern Gaul for much of that period; Gallic bishops like Hilary of Poitiers had played important roles in imperial theological controversies. Within two or three generations of Procopius, however, Eastern Roman historians barely mentioned Gaul, let alone Britain. Italy mattered of course; some of it remained imperial territory and the home of the Pope. The Iberian peninsula, however, was drifting beyond their consciousness.  By contrast, western writers, especially in Spain and Italy, continued to write about events in the East. The mid-seventh-century Burgundian chronicler known as Fredegar knew of some political and military happenings in the Eastern Empire and its neighbours, even if his accounts were sometimes confused. This interest was, however, barely reciprocated by writers in the eastern Mediterranean or beyond. East of the Adriatic, among even educated people, by the seventh century the western tip of the Eurasian land-mass had, for whatever reason, simply ceased to matter.

Nonetheless, as will be discussed in more detail later in this volume, maritime trade continued to connect the eastern and western Mediterranean until well into the last quarter of the sixth century and beyond. When Procopius was writing, such seaborne networks continued to reach around the Iberian Peninsula, up the west coast of Gaul and thence to the eastern shores, especially, of the Irish Sea. In fact, in the fifth and earlier sixth centuries the western regions of what had been Roman Britain had more extensive and important contacts with the Mediterranean world than they had during the four centuries of imperial rule. One reason for that was that the longer-distance seaborne routes between the formerly Roman parts of mainland Europe and lowland Britain – now becoming ‘Anglo-Saxon’ kingdoms – appear generally to have atrophied in the fifth century. Stories could have reached Procopius from the Romanised magnates of Western Britain suggesting that Britannia was still recognisably a former Roman province. Whatever stories arrived from the eastern side of the island came via another route and seemed to represent a very different world resembling the mythical islands described by classical authors. By the end of the period that concerns this book these commercial networks too had largely vanished, replaced by rather different webs of interaction.

This disjuncture between the trading links and the seeming disconnection of the written sources is important. Historians and archaeologists have become ever more interested in recreating past networks, an interest boosted by the development of statistical tools and ‘network theory’. Yet, although we can plot lines on maps that ultimately connect places like Tintagel in Cornwall with Carthage in North Africa or Phocaea in the Levant, what did that mean to the people who lived their lives at each end of such a connection? In the last third of the sixth century there were sailors who knew of certain products, such as tin,  that could be obtained from formerly Roman Britain. They knew that there was a market there for Mediterranean wine, oil and high-quality table-ware. The people from whom they bought, or perhaps for whom they sold, their wares and to whom they brought back, and possibly sold, other goods and materials seem, however, to have had no more interest in these far western lands than they had had, in previous centuries, in the lands whence came the amber in their jewellery. Britain, it seems, even lost its rhetorical function as the northern limit of civilisation. Meanwhile, for those in the former western Roman provinces, the east was fast becoming a land of Christian legend and infrequent pilgrimage. Once, a network had radiated from the Mediterranean in all directions, joining up with similar webs spun from China and India; by c.600 the capes and archipelagos of far western Eurasia had largely fallen out of that network of connections.

What are the implications of this isolation? In traditional grand narratives, from Henri Pirenne through to Perry Anderson, these shifts forced western Europe to turn in on itself. For Pirenne the closure of the Mediterranean, which he ascribed to the Arab invasions of the later seventh century, compelled a shift of the western European centre of gravity from the Mediterranean northwards to the Rhineland, and an increased focus on North Sea commerce. Hence Pirenne’s famous dictum that ‘without Mohammed, Charlemagne is inconceivable’. Things did not end there, though. This was only the first chapter in a narrative of the rise of the great European trading cities which in time became the foundation for Western European capitalism and Empire. In Anderson’s Marxist vision, the ‘inward turn’ of Europe after Rome produced feudalism which, in turn, provided the dynamics for urban rebirth, technological advancement and, again, eventually capitalism and the domination of the West. 

The isolation of the far western edges of Eurasia from the great cultural and economic networks of the Early Middle Ages has somehow become part of a triumphalist European grand narrative, explaining how those peripheral western peninsulas and the archipelago just off its shore became the centres of world-exploiting colonial empires. It is, however, worth shedding a different light on this period. It is perhaps helpful to remember that this was a period when what became western Europe (not a geographical term of the time) was peripheral in a global sense; when, as continued to be the case for a millennium afterwards, it had little to offer the great trading networks, when the Empires at the heart of the Eurasian landmass had little to no interest in it.

A Difficult Decade; An Apology

 Readers of this blog will know that I have long suffered with mental health issues, especially depression. I haven't made any secret of this, largely because I felt it was one small way of confronting the stigma which continues to be associated with mental illness.

It's been a difficult decade or so for me, including a minor 'breakdown' (as it would have been called) in late 2015 and several spectacular screw-ups which have been linked one way or another to my mental health.  It was, however, only around the end of 2019 that I began to realise that the depression might be more of a symptom of something else than the whole problem in itself. Reassessing some of my own problematic behaviour led to reading some online articles about Autism Spectrum Disorder, then some books, and taking some fairly well-respected tests(1). The results seemed pretty clear; I am 'on the spectrum'; neurodivergent. Now, this may not come as a surprise to a lot of you, but it did to me. Like a lot of so-called 'high-functioning' (problematic term) adults, I had managed to conceal my neurodiversity even from myself.(2) It was also a case of me having the usual caricature preconceptions of autism. I can't draw the Houses of Parliament from memory after having looked at them for a few seconds; I can't remember 80-digit strings of numbers; whatever. Indeed, for a lot of my lifetime, nobody really was aware of quite how broad the spectrum is or of how it can present over time, at different stages of life. I still don't have a formal diagnosis; the NHS has an 18-month-to-two-year waiting list and obviously (as it should) prioritises people who need more basic support in negotiating everyday life. Private organisations have 6-month waiting lists and a diagnosis can cost £2-3k. Fortunately I am in a position to set some wheels in motion on that front. I do have an opinion from a qualified professional (a specialist counsellor), though, and for now that's good enough for me.

What has become very clear to me is that most of my 'masking' strategies were age-related or even age-appropriate. I masked my uneasiness in social situations and not 'getting' the rules either by making a joke, being a clown or otherwise being consciously unconventional. We autistic (or likely autistic) folk tend to prefer straight talking and - as is well known - don't really 'get' meanings that are wrapped up in diplomatic-speak (this is possibly even more a problem in the UK)(3); my default setting to asking a question after a paper, if there was something I didn't agree with or wanted to discuss, was just to come out and say so; if someone asked me if X might be the case rather than Y, as I had suggested, my natural response is to say 'no - it's not'. You asked a question; I answered. What's the problem? If someone gave a bad paper or wrote a bad book, you say so, right? I never 'got' the idea that you'd be really complimentary about a piece of work and trash it in private conversation. To be honest, I still don't really get that, even if I have learned - slowly and painfully - not just to 'have a go' like I used to. It took me 20 years to learn to say 'thank you for your paper [etc]' before asking a question and to say 'thank you for your question; it's a good question...' before answering and it still seems unnatural, as though I am stiltedly reciting a script and everyone must notice that.

All of this was exacerbated by being of my generation. Most, if not all, of us have role models; we try to teach like the people who we respected as teachers, to write like the people whose writing we admire, and so on. This is especially important, though, to those of us on (or likely on) the spectrum. We learn to cope in social situations by copying the behaviour of people who seem to be good at it.(4) Now, when I was young what we'd now see as aggressive, 'macho' - even really unnecessarily dismissive - behaviour seemed to be the mark of the 'fearsome intellectual' (of whatever sex/sexuality). I remember an interview for a Junior Research Fellowship at Oxford when, after a well-known historian of Anglo-Saxon England really laid into me and this really knocked me over, I was told that the correct response was 'to come right back at them'. My PhD viva consisted of 3 hours of another well-known Oxford historian/archaeologist basically being rude about my work (after having told me at the beginning that I had passed, so that was OK). None of this was especially easy to deal with, especially when your default reaction when confronted by people who have the sort of cast-iron self-confidence that comes with a certain British socio-educational background, is to assume they must be right. In those days, spectacularly critical book reviews - often downright rude - were frequently shared with awe and admiration. Dorothy Parker/Margot Asquith-style put-downs seemed to be prized. Not by everyone, obviously (there were some people who were forward thinking), but it was a very common attitude, and some of the forward-thinkers seemed to be just as capable of being vicious in other ways. My first head of department (who once threw a set of keys at me and, on another occasion, shouted at me and told me I didn't do any work, in front of the whole department) was someone who shouldered their way to the very top of the profession. These things make a big impression when you have no instinctive idea of how to manage social situations. Although we have difficulty with unwritten social conventions, we autistics can simultaneously rigidly observe more obvious hierarchies/rules, so I tended to look up to senior folk that behaved like this. I still find it difficult not to treat the 'great and good' with probably excessive intellectual deference. They may not realise this! 

Anyway, all of this was OK when I was a young/er academic. You can be a clown, a joker, and also a bit brash - a bit of a fire-eater - when you're a young man in academia.(5) There were some of the great and good that took against me in c.1991 and have never accepted me since; I always assumed this was a class thing (and to some extent I still think it was) but I now realise this was probably mostly because of my social difficulties. But generally you can get on pretty well as an 'enfant terrible' - up to a point. If you work hard and you are a good teacher, being unconventional, a joker, etc., is 'cool' and you can get away with being a bit of a hard task-master on occasion; it was all part of the package that was 'Guy'.(6) But - for obvious reasons - none of this still works when you're in your late 40s/50s and a 'senior professor'. Well, the reasons are obvious if you have some sort of natural understanding of social situations and how they work. If you don't, well, not so much. My masking strategies have serially failed and left me very exposed. And unhappy. In consequence I have done a number of silly things, some of which I regret for reasons other than that they made me look like a twat.

Part of the problem has also been that I treat most people in pretty much the same way (this is classic ASD behaviour) but, having that possibly excessive deference to my elders, I have expected the respect due to the status I have earned, not in obvious deference, but just in respect that Inabe been doing this a long time, know what I am talking about, and am good at what I do. I think that was what I saw as the pay-off for me generally being informal with people of whatever status (I am not saying that any of this is logically consistent or 'correct'). I have often, as a result, got really angry when I have thought people were talking down to me (of course they may very well not have been). It's symptomatic of a classic ASD obsession with fairness and justice. Unfortunately I have often not realised how what I say has different effects on different people. To be basic, when I say 'oh don't be a dick' to an old friend and (now) fellow-prof, it has very different effects to when I say the same thing to a post-grad, although I mean it no differently. This may seem obvious to you... That's the point. I have had to learn all this and it has taken too long.

The discovery that I am very likely on the spectrum has been a lot to take in. A considerable amount of that has been like turning a light on all sorts of my life; why I am the way I am. Some of it has been regret; if only I had known this when I was [whatever age], either I maybe wouldn't have behaved like that or I would have known how to explain it, or how to get support.(7) Sometimes it makes me retrospectively angry (or yet angrier): so that's why those people bullied me, marked my card in career terms. I have essentially taken partial retirement because of the ongoing failure of my employer to take account of mental illness. It's really not been a retrospective 'get out of jail free card' for my bad behaviour, though; quite the opposite. Previously if I had a melt-down with someone, although I might have wished, for myself, that I hadn't done it, I comforted myself with the idea that at least I was in the right. Now, quite apart from realising that the effect of my words might have been much more hurtful than I supposed (see above) or intended, I also realise that there was also a very high chance that I had the wrong end of the stick and that I had not understood the situation at all.

So, with that in mind I would like, here and now, to make a public apology to the following, all of whom I have lost my rag with either in person or online in a way that - regardless of anything else - was inappropriate, offensive and possibly hurtful:

Mr Jack Wiegand
Dr Jen Edwards
Dr Jon Jarrett
Dr John Jenkins

Ms Kataya McKeever-Willis
Dr Rachel Stone.

Regardless of any other rights and wrongs, I shouldn't have said what I said in the way I said or in the context in which I did so.  There are doubtless others who deserve such an apology; I may therefore add to the list above. There are certainly other people I have had rows with in public and have gone about things the wrong way; let's just say that either, for one reason or another, I don't feel as bad about them or I have publicly apologised before.

It's possible that I will blog more about my experience of neurodiversity in academia, or possibly set up a new blog for that. In the meantime, thanks for reading.

Notes

1: The common tests are problematic, as is fairly well known, but the problems seem to concern subjects who aren't white males. Funnily enough, my own demographic appears to have been the default setting (hardly anything surprising about that, and far more widespread in medicine than just in issues of psychology/psychiatry). More socially disadvantaged or marginalised groups tend to 'mask' in more extensive and different ways. As far as I can tell, though, these tests are OK for white males.

2: To the extent that when I went through the tests with my partner I would be reading out symptoms and saying 'well, that's not really me is it?' and she'd reply 'er, hello? What about x, y and z?'

3: Once, when I was about to something that turned out to do me a fair amount of harm, a senior colleague told me that I needed to 'think carefully' before doing it. So I thought carefully about it. And did it. Afterwards he said 'obviously I meant you shouldn't do it; you should have realised that'. 

4: Check out my writings about social theory. This all seems to take on a new significance now.

5: This again points up all of the everyday sexism in academia, as well as in the diagnosis of autism.

6: I had a colleague over a decade ago now who told me how impressed he was that all the students just refer to me as 'Guy'. I was pretty cool in those days, even if I say so myself, but that was then. 

7: Obviously, for someone my age, the frustration is only increased by the fact that awareness of many relevant aspects of ASD simply didn't exist back then.