Human Nature Plus Bias Persistence Equals an Obscure Fifth Century
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-05-07

Many of the general issues of the fifth century are present in Northern Gaul: it lacks a clear understanding of how people lived, what materials they used, who they were and where they came from. Pressing issues are no longer the absence of evidence as much, but rather its identification and interpretation, beyond pointing to barbarians. This paper wishes to focus on why undifferentiated and outdated notions still are able to persist after four decades since the development of the Romanization debate, emphasizing local agency, and the transformation approach in Late Antiquity, studying continuity across the fourth to sixth century ‘gap’. In part, the nineteenth century periodization and the twentieth century ethnic discourse are responsible, but they alone do not explain the persistence of these issues until today. This paper aims to argue that more basic human principles, such as regarding time as a linear progression or the need for classification to process and understand information, are as responsible for obscuring the fifth century as the scholarly biases following Gibbon’s work in the eighteenth century. Finally, a consideration on how to address ‘invisible materials’ would be suggested as a constructive experiment for the archaeology of the fifth century.

Vince Van Thienen (Yale University)