Sandby Borg
The Barbarian World ended at many times and places, while elsewhere it continued forward into history, like tracks in a railway yard in which some sidings end at bumpers while others continue on to rejoin the main line. One of these tracks ended on the shore of the Baltic Sea on the island of Öland at the end of the fifth millennium BC. Here, a ringfort lies about 42 metres (140 ft) from the current waterline. One spring day around AD 480, something very bad happened at Sandby Borg.50
Sandby Borg is one of nearly twenty ringforts from the first half of the first millennium AD on Öland. It is a stone oval about 92 metres (300 ft) along its long axis, with walls 4 metres (13 ft) wide at the base. Inside were 54 stone and turf buildings with gravel and limestone floors, with houses in the centre and stables and storehouses around the inside of the wall. A well provided water.
Reconstruction of an Anglo-Saxon village at West Stow, Suffolk, showing both semi-subterranean houses and timber halls.
In 2010, archaeologists noticed evidence of unauthorized digging and moved to secure the site. Metal-detectorists were mobilized to locate metal objects, and exploratory excavations commenced. The results were astonishing. Lying under a thin cover of soil, at least ten skeletons bore traces of violent deaths and had been left unburied where they fell. Eventually, the turf house walls collapsed and covered their remains. One skeleton of an individual in his late teens had a massive lethal cut to the skull which could only have been made if he had been kneeling. Lamb bones, the remains of uneaten meals, indicate that the slaughter took place in the spring. Archaeologists believe that dozens of additional skeletons lie across the ringfort’s interior.
The attackers looted the site, but they missed five caches of beads and jewellery hidden just inside the doorways of separate houses. These included gold and silver brooches in a Germanic style, bells, gold rings and amber and glass beads. A gold solidus from the reign of Valentinian III (assassinated in AD 455) provides evidence of returning mercenaries, as do the glass beads.
Who attacked Sandby Borg? Although the ringfort lies in an indefensible location near the shore, archaeologists believe that the attackers were fellow residents of Öland. As wealth was accumulated in farmsteads, it drew the attention of marauding gangs that preyed on fellow islanders. One day, the alarm was raised, and the inhabitants of nearby farmsteads sought refuge in Sandby Borg. In anticipation that some would not survive, they hid their valuables, presumably in prearranged locations. It was to no avail, and they were all slaughtered.
Sandby Borg was never reoccupied, unlike other ringforts on Öland that saw habitation in later centuries. It may have remained off-limits, first as a place of violent death, then perhaps as a haunted or taboo location. In many respects, the Sandby Borg massacre encapsulates many conditions at the end of the Barbarian World in which wealth coming over long distances triggered local social stresses that often ended badly.
The Barbarian World in AD 500 and beyond
Ending this book in AD 500 imposes an artificial stopping point on the continuous story of the Barbarian World, and thus the heading includes the words ‘and beyond’. The societies of temperate Europe did not stop changing, and the impact of the Roman Empire was permanent, even if it had ceased to function in western Europe. Barbarian peoples were now left to their own devices and gradually developed the characteristics of civilization on their own. The artificial boundary between the peoples and places that lay within the Roman frontiers and those outside of it disappeared, and the remaining parts of the Barbarian World became integrated with the peoples of Gaul and Britain just as before the Romans arrived.
Gold-and-glass bees from the coat of Childeric.
One of several skeletons of the massacred inhabitants of Sandby Borg on Öland.
The dominant feature of post-Roman temperate Europe was the emergence of many small kingdoms. Most had limited territorial aims but provided vehicles for the aggrandizement of their rulers and their retinues. The heterarchical structures of the High Iron Age faded in favour of hierarchical organization and dynastic succession. Some of these kingdoms grew over time to control large areas. The Franks, now led by Childeric’s son Clovis, consolidated control over northern Gaul and neighbouring parts of Germania.
Across the Barbarian World, we see changes in ritual behaviour. For example, in southern Scandinavia the practice of depositing valuables in bogs and wetlands ends around AD 500. After that, such items appear mainly at the seats of local magnates and in ritual structures, like the halls at Gudme and Uppåkra. This transfer of sacred activities from wild locations to central places of habitation and commerce presaged religious transformations of the second half of the first millennium across northern Europe.
Christianity, the dominant religion in the Roman Empire since the fourth century, was taken up in neighbouring parts of the Barbarian World. Missionaries from Roman Britain and perhaps Gaul, as exemplified by Patrick (although he was certainly not the first), brought Christianity to Ireland early in the fifth century, and by AD 500 it was firmly established. The penetration of Christianity into southern Scandinavia and eastern Europe took a couple more centuries, but it was on the way. A dramatic instance of the acceptance of Christianity by a prominent barbarian was the conversion of Clovis in AD 496.
Many Roman towns were abandoned during the fifth century AD. Londinium, whose defensive walls survived and where ruins of Roman buildings were probably still visible, appears to have been largely depopulated. Instead, rural populations continued to live in farmsteads, hamlets and small villages, as they had done for centuries. We do not see great agglomerations of population in temperate Europe at the middle of the first millennium AD, although central places like Uppåkra continued to flourish and grow. Although the supply of Roman goods and coins faded, trade in commodities and slaves continued to motivate inter-regional connections throughout temperate Europe.
The next 500 years would see the revival of towns, the emergence of trading ports around the North Sea and Baltic Sea, the flourishing of the Merovingian and Carolingian Dynasties in western Europe, and the introduction of Christianity to eastern Europe and Scandinavia. From the eighth century AD onward, the dominant force of coastal temperate Europe was a people known as Vikings, who were responsible for the establishment of many towns like Dublin across western Europe, as well as penetrating into eastern Europe and establishing the Russian state. The Vikings are often considered to be the last barbarians because of their unfortunate habit of sacking coastal settlements and looting monasteries, but their peaceful activities such as exploration and commerce are their more lasting legacy. But they did not come out of the blue. The Vikings, along with the other societies of the early Middle Ages in temperate Europe, were products of millennia of prehistoric development. The roots of European civilization can be found as much in the Barbarian World as in the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome.
SIX
BARBARIANS LIVE ON
The barbarians of prehistoric Europe exercise a powerful hold on the imagination of the twenty-first century. This fascination is not new, however, and much of the way modern people view the prehistoric past is based on perceptions, appropriations and myths that emerged long ago. The word ‘barbarian’ is casually thrown about to refer to anyone who engages in violent, uncivilized behaviour. This is a legacy of the Greek and Roman portrayals of the non-literate inhabitants of temperate Europe and the exalted position of texts by classical authors in humanistic scholarship that began in the Renaissance. Barbarians are permanently consigned to a subordinate status as depraved and culturally deprived Untermenschen until they were illuminated by language, culture and civility coming from the Mediterranean.
In many cases, such as in fantasy literature, video games and film, the depravity of barbarians is portrayed in the most lurid fashion, not just behaving viciously but also having fantastic powers and implausible mystical insights. Conan, a character invented by pulp fiction writer Robert E. Howard (1906–1
936) for fantasy stories in the 1930s, is perhaps the most celebrated depiction of a barbarian in this light. He is said to be from Cimmeria, a fictional homeland whose name evokes the label that Herodotus gave to barbarian tribes northeast of the Black Sea, although Howard imagines him as having ‘pre-Celtic’ roots. In his original conception, Conan speaks many languages, is capable of profound observations and possesses immense strength. Howard created an imagined Barbarian World in which Conan has his adventures. Unfortunately, in more recent depictions, Conan has become a simpler brute, in keeping with the ‘barbarian’ stereotype.
On one hand, an accurate imagining of the Barbarian World must include its endemic violence that was simply a fact of life in prehistoric Europe. There was clearly also a mystical, spiritual side to barbarian life, as shown by practices such as votive deposits and war-booty offerings. The inter-regional connectedness of local societies meant that it would not be out of the question for a leader to be able to communicate in several dialects. So the original Conan genre is not that wide of the mark in certain aspects. On the other hand, the recent indelible association among Conan/Schwarzenegger/Austrian accent/gratuitous bloody violence/supernatural characters has done the Barbarian World a disservice.
Archaeology is a field of scholarship in which popular imagination confronts evidence and reasoned interpretation. While this might be common to all historical disciplines, archaeology has the added mystery of lacking historical individuals with biographies supported by primary sources. Thus we see an explosion of theories and narratives surrounding Ötzi the Iceman, as people try to turn him into a historical figure. Arminius has a name and an event associated with his life, but yet an immense mythology has built up around him. After the fall of Rome, more barbarians leave prehistory and enter the historic world, but they are beyond the scope of this book. For most of prehistory, the lack of historic figures means that all sorts of stories can be imagined, whether or not they conform to evidence (or lack thereof). The attraction of Conan is that despite being fictional, he is a character with a name, an origin, and a story, however implausible.
A usable past
It would be sad if Conan was our only way of connecting with the Barbarian World. Luckily, there are many other ways in which the barbarians of prehistory are present in the consciousness of the modern world. The Barbarian World looms large in European culture and society. Continuity from prehistory into medieval history and thence the history of more recent centuries means that there is no fracture between prehistory and history as there is in the New World. The prehistoric societies can be incorporated into a narrative that reaches back at least to the end of the Ice Age that modern Europeans and their descendants can consider part of their own story.
The American historian Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998) has pointed out the difference between the American view of its past as a literary exercise in either celebration or sentimentality about documented events and characters and the European past rooted in folklore, oral tradition and myth.1 Both represent a search for a ‘usable past’ that helps people understand who they are and to create a communal understanding in the present. For Europe, the Barbarian World is very much a part of its usable past.
The construction of such a usable past inevitably involves simplification and certainty. Unfortunately, the archaeological record is complicated, incoherent and conflicted. All narratives based on it, like this book, are selective, in the way that a drawing differs from a photograph. In the former, the artist chooses what to show and what to omit, while a photograph is faithful to what the eye sees, although in the hands of a skilled photographer it too can be manipulated. To take this analogy a step further, a caricature is a drawing that emphasizes certain characteristics of the subject to make a point. The transformation of the Barbarian World into a usable past in the public imagination requires it to be transformed into a caricature, not only to simplify a complicated body of information but also to exaggerate or even misrepresent some key aspects to make a point deemed useful for a modern audience. In the public imagination, the Barbarian World is a palimpsest of caricatures rooted in selective appropriation of the archaeological record.
Some caricatures of barbarian life are literally cartoons, a common way for modern people to encounter the ancient world for the first time. Archaeologists enjoy cartoons about the people they study. My undergraduate mentor at the University of Pennsylvania, Bernard Wailes (1934–2012), had a display of them on his office door. Unfortunately, too many cartoons about prehistoric people show them in the company of dinosaurs, an anachronism of about 100 million years. Another common motif is the cave dweller who has just chipped a wheel out of stone. The reader of this book knows that the first wheels were made from wood during the fourth millennium BC, so the sheer improbability of a stone wheel does not reflect well on prehistoric mastery of materials.
Although not well known in the New World, the comic character Astérix has had perhaps the most durable impact of a barbarian on cartoon readership in Europe. Astérix and his pal Obelix are Gauls living in northwestern France who resist the Roman invaders together with their fellow villagers. The Astérix comics were first written by René Goscinny (1926–1977) and illustrated by Albert Uderzo nearly sixty years ago.2 Although the humour is distinctly Gallic, the Astérix series has been translated into many languages and remains wildly popular throughout Europe. For many young people, especially in France, Astérix is their first contact with the Barbarian World.
As a guide to life in the Barbarian World, however, the Astérix comics should not be taken too seriously. In 2011 an exhibition called ‘Les Gaulois’ at the Cité des Sciences in Paris was devoted to debunking the image of High Iron Age life portrayed in Astérix. It noted that rather than being pugnacious forest dwellers, Gauls were a refined, complex society, living in towns and villages, with sophisticated agriculturalists and stockbreeders, skilled metalworkers and participants in interregional trading networks. Astérix comics are rife with anachronisms. The menhirs, or standing stones, that Obelix carves and erects really date to the Stone Age. Yet, they would have still been visible in the landscape of the first century BC, as they are still today.
At the same time, archaeologists must suppress their sense of umbrage when they see their beloved prehistoric world portrayed this way. Astérix is only a comic, and its humour is topical within its modern context, not a prehistoric one. In an account of the ‘Les Gaulois’ exhibit,3 archaeologist Matthieu Poux of the University of Lyon was quoted as saying that the Astérix comics are ‘a kind of synthesis of the positive values of contemporary society and of the imaginary world created by Antiquity’. This is the essence of ‘a usable past’.
Reconstructed Village Gaulois in the shadow of a giant radar dome at Pleumeur-Bodou in Britanny evokes an imagined prehistoric world in which Astérix had his adventures.
The perception of time
The greatest source of confusion in the public perception of the prehistoric past is time. If a century seems like a long time to someone, then a millennium will be ten times more difficult to comprehend. Extending the timescale back several millennia, the difficulty in understanding the tempo of prehistoric life increases logarithmically. Archaeologists are accustomed to working over such long spans of time, and they often lose sight of the fact that non-archaeologists find them hard to comprehend. The Stone Age does not seem much earlier than the reign of Augustus in the eyes of many. I call this phenomenon the ‘telescoped past’ in which the Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age are compressed into a single ‘antiquity’.
We encounter this telescoping of the past in the assignment of the symbols of one era to the iconography of another, which in turn is appropriated by modern culture. For example, spiral ornaments pecked into the lintels and kerbstones of Stone Age passage graves are portrayed as a ‘Celtic’ motif in modern art, design and advertising, despite occurring several millennia before any peoples that could be called by that name.
Modern park in Phi
ladelphia devoted to Irish immigration displays motifs that derive from both megalithic and La Tène styles, each point in time separated by millennia.
The classic example of time-transgressive appropriation, to put a fancy name on it, involves Stonehenge. As we saw in Chapter One, Stonehenge is a Stone Age monument. It really has no primary connection with the priestly class known as Druids from Roman accounts. Yet modern seekers have telescoped prehistory to appropriate both the Druids and Stonehenge in a single imagined antiquity, despite their separation in prehistory by two millennia. Such a telescoping of the archaeological record seems normal to many people who do not share the archaeologist’s keen sense of time and change.
Other examples of such telescoping of millennia are not as well known, but they are ubiquitous where a myth can be attached to a site or monument. On a mountain called Knocknarea in northwest Ireland, a massive unexcavated Stone Age passage grave dated to the fourth millennium BC is named Queen Meave’s Tomb after a mythical warrior queen of Irish legend. Meave is certainly not buried in the tomb, if she even existed, but the fusion of physical traces of the past with the more recent myth has given the site a composite identity. Archaeologists themselves refer to the tomb as ‘Meave’, preferring to adapt to the modern usage rather than assert their understanding that the passage grave has nothing to do with a Celtic queen.
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