Do things made in fifth-century Britain have ethnicity?

Description: Professor Robin Fleming of Boston College is interviewed by KAS President Kerry Brown about her views on the application of ethnic identities to objects in the period after the Romans left Britain. This interview is in place of the recording of a talk in September that Professor Fleming gave as one of the KAS series of live events. Historians and archaeologists habitually apply the ethnic label “Anglo Saxon” to fifth-century ceramics and metalwork. These objects, in turn, are employed to distinguish early medieval burials and settlements from Roman-period ones and to identify communities of Anglo-Saxon immigrants and their descendants. Robin will be arguing that a long, hard think about fifth-century pottery highlights the difficulties (tautological and otherwise) that arise when we ascribe ethnic identities to things in the first century after Rome’s withdrawal from Britain and then turn around and use those things to determine the ethnicities of their makers and users.

Transcript: [Music] so professor robin fleming in boston it's a great honor to be able to have this discussion with you you spoke to the kent archaeological society some weeks ago uh but i'm afraid although we were talking about uh a period properly known as the dark ages but a term that you don't use as far as the archaeological society goes teams brings its own particular darkness which we are avoiding this time by using zoom um what i thought would be good is that beginning as someone who's obviously studied this particular very um important but controversial period between uh the end of what we call roman britain and then obviously the you know kind of beginning of the only early medieval period um how would you describe what happened over the first sort of one or two centuries of that period so i mean would you kind of think of this as being a period of uh great disruption economically that meant that there was a huge influx of you know new settlers or would you think of it as a much more complex process with kind of an even impact across britain or do you use some other kind of model um well i think the the second model that you proposed is closer to the one that i would see i mean in terms of what i see this period looking like i think one of the problems in thinking about it is that um we have this nice break between the roman period and the early medieval period that we think of that happens in 400 or 410 or 450 you can pick your own date but somewhere in there but if you look at the evidence actually things start unwinding in britain earlier than that and so in the 350s and 60s you can begin to see pressures on um the roman state and the roman economy in britain um and then those um the the problems that are beginning to happen accelerate over time um and i think things are pretty difficult for a couple of hundred years for people at the top or people who would have been at the top of society but i do think what happens is there's a kind of flattening i think that the world that's created as rome withdraws and the roman economy collapses is that um it's much harder for people to um get a lot of resources and then store those resources and know what to do with those resources to actively give themselves more power in the world um and so i think that hierarchy flattens out quite a bit and so i think in terms of disruption it's very disruptive for people who had um had a lot of connections with the roman state but i think if you're a sheep farmer in somerset i think things might be better for you and so it might not be such a bad period for you um you're not having to pay taxes uh it's harder for elites to get things out of you so you're probably not paying as much um of what you're actually producing so i think it's the kind of golden age of the subsistence farmer um and i think subsistence farming is something that peasants like right it's not a it's not a bad thing if you're a peasant it's a good thing so in your penguin history of this period sort of the fall of roman britain i think it came out about 10 12 years ago you have a very haunting description of what happened when the roman period ended um of kind of the archaeological record showing sort of you know like in canterbury you know kind of everything kind of stopped and there's this sort of layer of earth where everything presumably you know just kind of deteriorated so you know if we were sort of um The Ruins of Canterbury standing uh in canterbury in i don't know november 450 um what so we would be standing in a place a bit like sort of you know that great kind of fun poem the ruin you you know we'd be standing in a place that was presumably partly inhabited i mean what what would it have been like to be in that place at that time do you think well i i think it would have been a kind of difficult place to be in because there had been a lot of infrastructure in a place like canterbury and once it was no longer maintained it began to fall apart right and so buildings collapsing moves collapsing squatters starting fires and um you know in uninhabited buildings and and we can see this in a lot of um you know the places in in in america so there were some very haunting pictures taken of um some of the great buildings of detroit from the early 20th century and they had all fallen apart and they were all ruinous and they had all been abandoned and so you could kind of see hints of the glory but you could also see that there was nothing but decline in decay in those buildings um so i think that the you know i mean i think there would have been a lot of um a lot of wreckage and a lot of ruin and it's not a very easy place to live and why would people choose to live in a place like that i mean there's there's certain resources that you can have i mean there if you want to um scavenge you can find things in sites like that but it's much easier to move out from these decayed urban places and move to the countryside i think so i think that there's um i think it's quite likely that most of these places were mostly abandoned it doesn't mean that there aren't a few people living in the ruins but i think it's just much easier to live outside the walls than inside the walls of a former roman settlement so in in your newest book um you talk about the sort of material issues right over this period and you also describe um what attitudes towards roman monuments may have been like and and and you give it if i understand it correctly a kind of different sort of interpretation because it's like these may well have been symbols of oppression and you know kind of highly politicized for people who who you know lived um you know kind of in the decades after the roman administration ended um so i mean presumably one of the reasons why you know kind of roman monuments um kind of were taken apart and used in building new kind of structures was was it because of this you know kind of political um you know this idea that this was a symbol of oppression or i mean and and how is this like a hypothesis or do you think that there's you know kind of quite strong evidence that there was this antagonist some more feelings of uh you know complex feelings towards the former roman period well i i think that there's no doubt that in the immediate generations after the withdrawal of the roman state that people would have had quite complex feelings about the roman state and again it would really depend on your social position i think and where you stood in the hierarchy um and i and i do think that people who had been oppressed within the villa system and within the the roman states taxation system probably weren't all that sad to see the roman villa in their neighborhood abandoned but as elites begin forming again in britain and as um people come into britain from other parts of the former roman world in particular churchmen they understand the value of those buildings and they understand the prestige of building in stone so they're the ones that are taking apart these buildings and then reconfiguring them into new buildings and that i think is a political statement saying we're we're like them uh we're as good as the romans looked at us we're building these buildings and so the people who are taking the buildings apart ironically aren't the people who probably were never very fond of those buildings but the people who really really love the idea of the roman past now um we're going to have to hit this issue at some point so we may as well hit it now um there's um a lively debate and you're probably maybe aware of it probably happily keep out of it um but but i mean it's noticeable you you definitely use the term early medieval and you sort of um and i i suppose what is i mean do you feel um that term anglo-saxon is Anglo Saxon um i mean presumably it's unhelpful so you know kind of how do you feel that that term should be used now because of course it's so kind of encoded in resources and and literature i mean do you think we should just basically boot it out you know it's just become too politicized or do you think it has a kind of role but it's much more you know you have to define it very carefully well i i think it has no role at all in the fifth and sixth centuries i think before the formation of ideas about englishness i think it does nothing but it's obscure what's happening because what it suggests to people is that people are coming over from the continent as if english people are coming over from the continent uh with their fully formed culture and arriving in england and then conquering england or whatever they're supposed to be doing and so i think that i mean that's that's factually wrong um and so i think it's extremely unhelpful in these early centuries people in later centuries um like king alfred begin to use the term right and so it has a kind of contemporary meaning in the 9th 10th 11th centuries and so i think one can make an argument that it's useful to use then when the people were studying actually used it themselves and sometimes describe themselves that way although i think i probably wouldn't use it just because i think there's a lot of baggage associated with the word but i do think in in talking about the early the very early centuries of the middle ages as anglo-saxon it is just wrong um and i think that most people who uh grow up and become anglo-saxons or think of themselves as english in the seventh century had grandparents or great-grandparents who were british so i i think the making of the english people is uh is an act of ethnogenesis and when we use the term anglo-saxon it seems like we're talking about genetics yeah well so i mean sort of an indirect way to kind of come to that the striking thing about the your work is the way that you bridge archaeology and history and i mean it's sort of strange isn't it um that that bridge is all too often not kind of crossed and i think one of the points you make in them you know your latest book is how actually you know the documentation of course is not great for the period you're talking about barely exists right but archaeology has really you know exploded and you kind of um refer to many really great discoveries so you know kind of how how do you marry the you know the Historians and archaeologists historic kind of historians tend to sort of be in their ghetto and the archaeologists in the ghetto have you found in your work that you're seeing signs that those those bridges are being crossed or do you feel that there's still too much division well i mean i think that there have always been people who worked on both sides of the divide and i'm one of a bunch of historians i think who have become more archaeological in our approach i think archaeologists have been more willing to read historians than the other way around traditionally um but i also think that a lot of times archaeologists are working with older historical paradigms that they might have learned when they were undergraduates that are no longer current um and so the marriage hasn't been perfect on either side um i think the sort of up-and-coming generation of medievalists are much more open to material culture um than people have been in the past and i do hope that there will be more people who are willing to work on both sides of the divide but i think it's really a matter of it's really a matter of training i mean we grow up you know i grew up learning how to be an archival historian and that's a different proposition than learning how to read an archaeological report and so i think that the training that we give both undergraduates and graduate students needs to change to accommodate allowing for people to truly work in more interdisciplinary ways um when you look at archaeological reports i mean presumably it must be a very different process to make sense of them and tell stories about them because one thing i notice in your work is you know you do thematically and and you know you kind of come out with uh interesting narratives and archaeological reports are often you know that's not i mean that's not what they're about really i mean they may kind of conclude on something but you know it's that they're very very circumspect and you know um they're very careful about what they are claiming so Historians vs archaeologists you know how do you feel that historians with the kind of training that you've had kind of learn to read these documents and do things with them that are kind of useful and may be different right well well i mean i think one of the things i think i mean just getting back a little bit to why a lot of historians don't read much archaeology i think it's because the archaeology report is a daunting animal um that we don't really we aren't really trained to to approach but i think that um i mean a lot of historians are pretty grumpy that archaeologists aren't writing history um which i'm not grumpy about at all i think archaeologists are supposed to write archaeology and that's what they do and if we want history written out of that material evidence we have to do it ourselves so historians have to learn how to deal with the beast that is an archaeological report and we we think differently we have different historiographies in our heads we have different questions in our heads and we write in the active voice unlike archaeologists who write in the passive voice and right there there's a there's a big change in what we're doing with the material right we're trying to um we're more focused i think i mean this isn't completely fair but i think historians in general are more focused on people and i think archaeologists are more focused on places and things and so if we can learn how to you know to deal with the kinds of materials that archaeologists um produce i think we naturally do something quite different with it because of our training as historians so on sort of the issues that you write about you make one point about so the overwhelming documentation is about men from this period well i mean from the fifth century to say the 11th century yeah well or to the 20th maybe we could i i defer to your man yes no i i wouldn't i wouldn't just say um but but i mean so there was a very recent i think it was uh mark mark norris i believe a kind of you know very accessible you know very worthy history of anglo-saxon um you know kind of england um and and it was all about men uh you know he didn't recognize at the beginning this is you know because there's limited documentation however you make the powerful point that archaeologically it seems that the you know most material is about women um so i mean how so that kind of is really Writing the history that's a bit of a clash and is how do you sort of manage that in in writing the history do you basically have to say that the documentation is um just per blind to this or or i mean how do you kind of interpret that well i mean i think you know i mean as as we know um historian you know that the people who write histories are often more interested in themselves than they are any anybody else and the people who are writing um texts in the early middle ages are by and large men they're by and large um ecclesiastical men and their by and large members of elite families and so of course that's the world that they're going to present to us i mean they'll occasionally give us shout outs to uh high status women and the odd um abbas but they're not going to tell us very much about um anybody else but they're it's not just that they're just going to talk about men but they only talk about elites and so the i was when i first started my penguin i wanted to put more women into history but i really really wanted to put more small farmers and peasants into history is what i want to do because they're 90 of the population whether men or women and so the written sources we have don't deal with them at all and so i you know i wrote two books quite happily on um you know the english elites in the 10th and 11th centuries and um i was very interested in them i was very engaged in writing about them but they were almost all men and they were all pretty elite and i just i i wanted to know what was underneath them and so i decided to that the only way i could find those people was by looking at archaeology and i think that that's true actually i think you found it out of richness yeah so one of the things you've obviously also found um is is interesting things about ethnicity um or you know how do we talk about ethnicity because you know in some of the archaeological material you look at you know the kind of clothing and the jewelry people have you show this sort of disconnect between you know what their symbolism is and you know might mean and but for instance some dna kind of evidence um could you say a bit about that i mean DNA evidence because i mean dna um a kind of evidence is obviously a very new thing but it seems very startling what it shows that you know kind of people can be dressed and look kind of like they're from somewhere else but they're definitely from their genetic record that you can see um not so how revolutionary do you think that is and how disruptive is it to the narratives we might have well i mean i think a lot of people have been pushing back on on the idea that um if you um if you look at the exterior of a person and how they dress and then you cut them open you're gonna find exactly that same person on their inside right i think that for um decades there have been a lot of people mostly archaeologists pushing back on this notion that uh you know a particular broach might um give a clue to the actual biological identity of a person um and that we've long understood that uh people put on identities or claim identities and they can do it in various ways dress hairstyles slang language religion um and so so i think for quite a while people have been thinking about that but i still think that there's a tendency to think that if you look at a cemetery and the women are wearing brooches on both soldiers shoulders what you have is an anglo-saxon cemetery and the people buried in that cemetery are anglo-saxon and i think between the stable isotopes and the ancient dna which is a real work in progress and it you know uh see what everybody thinks 20 years from now because it's a very fast-moving field and there have been a lot of kind of over promises and overstatements and a lot of um refinement of techniques over the last 10 years but i think that that's i think that's really going to change the narrative but it hasn't quite done it yet because we don't have enough evidence where would you say things are now because i mean in your books you or the most recent one you refer to you Where are we now know indigenous or the native peoples of britain do you think that the dna evidence is showing i mean i remember years ago reading something about you know it seemed very settled you know kind of sort of dna evidence showed no great kind of influx of new people but obviously that's become much more complicated where do you think things are now it i mean it has come become more complicated and it depends on the state i think i think the study of the dna of living populations in britain is not going to get us anywhere i think that what's going to get us someplace is the study of agent dna and but we need to have hundreds and hundreds of examples before we can make major claims about what's happening i think i mean the problem with sort of looking at modern populations and comparing ancient dna to modern dna is that people have been coming into britain since the neolithic and they've been coming in from the same places um so it's just really you cannot tell if somebody's ancestors came over in the fifth century or they came over in the eighth century where they came over like my family the name of fleming right they came over in the 14th century but they're all genetically they all look pretty much the same and so it's very difficult to tell what stage of the game you're in so even though there does seem to be quite a large input of um of genetic material from northwestern europe when you know when did that happen we don't it's very hard to to tell a timeline for that why do you think so this period i mean it's a kind of pretty obvious question Why does this period matter but it's an important one i mean why does this period matter i mean it seems to i mean is it just there's not much known although it's not what not much that's thought to be known about it so people are intrigued or do you think it's really really a significant period i'm talking particularly about you know the kind of the fifth century to the seventh century you know that that period which is so sort of shadowy in a way at least from the documentation why does that period matter um well i i mean i think it matters for a bunch of reasons i think every period matters and every period should have history written about it so i mean it matters in that way um but i mean living in the world that we live in right where um we're very dependent on the state and on objects that aren't produced by us and we live in very very complicated society in the same way that a lot of people lived in the 34th centuries um and we're living in a period of a you know pandemic catastrophic climate um difficulties i think it's worth thinking about what happened how why why big systems go away and what happens um to the people who are left behind and thinking about things like resilience so i think just in our own particular historical moment i think it makes sense to look at this period but that's not really i mean i really look at it because i'm curious about the people who live there so i'm interested in it for its own sake not so much for what it could do for us yeah and i mean so but i believe that you're kind of currently out of office The Roman period message anyway you're currently researching roman roman period in particular roman dogs i believe um i i mean the image that one has of the roman period is it was just all kind of great i mean you know it's sort of uh yeah after the kind of um uprising with whitaker in 60 a.d you know then yeah it was all great everything was fantastic and then round about 350 you know started to go a bit ragged but kind of was okay and then suddenly everyone cleared off and they turned out the light and and in 4 10 or 4 9 that was it now i presume that is a massive uh kind of pile of nonsense and actually it must have been a you know a very complex period so if you think of the fourth century what you're researching at the moment um presumably that period also was one which intimated what was coming there must have been a lot of fragmentation and a lot of kind of tensions and this elite that you refer to i think you said there's about 14 000 maybe 15 000 in this elite who were beholden to the roman state as it exist in britain must have been aware that their world was changing um how would you describe that period i mean how do you conceptualize that period as a sort of interim period or kind of the end of days or you know the beginning of something new i mean it i i mean it's interesting because it's i mean we're we're not we're not romans right i mean i think we are in many ways much more beholden to the medieval period than we are to the ancient world and the reason for that is what happens in the late fourth fifth and sixth centuries um so the kind of world that we grew up in and of the world that was made was made i think more by medieval people um than by ancient people um so i mean i so i i guess that's what i would have to say about that um but i i you know i think the roman period is an an interesting and important period in its own right and one of the things one of the reasons i'm writing about roman dogs um as a historian is because most the the field of roman britain is almost entirely um practiced by archaeologists and it is almost 100 an archaeological field and there are very few people who consider themselves british historians who write the history of roman britain and i think this is a very bizarre state of affairs and what it means is that british history actually begins in 450 or 500 or you know pick a date sometime after you know the romans left as we like to say um which means that british history which is a history of britain is conceptually thought to begin when the english arrive which seems highly problematic and it's all about the 19th century and it's not about what actually happened and i think we should be looking more at both the roman period and the early middle ages together so that we actually can figure out what was happening um so i i i think that that the the division between roman and early medieval um has obscured a lot of what's going on and i think we kind of need to glue those periods back together again and more of us trained as historians need to look back on the roman period um because it's by i mean i i know this for a fact that people who teach early medieval british history or people who teach early uh medieval history um on the continent as well know much more about fourth century syria and fourth century egypt than they know about fourth century britain and that's because historians write on fourth century syria and fourth century egypt but they don't write on fourth century britain well that's so i mean just a final couple of things i mean so the kent archaeological society um our predominantly our holdings are kind of um you know kind of artifacts of which there are you know kind of eight or nine thousand are overwhelmingly classified as early medieval to sort of mid medieval and at the moment uh are displayed in uh mainstream museum which is where we're holding them um as as that you know well as anglo-saxon so we've got immediately to revise that but we will be kind of re-um reordering this so i mean if you were kind of given so we have some roman artifacts i suppose by that by which i mean pre you know fifth century yeah we have a lot of funerary and kind of jewelry and you know other artifacts from the fifth the sixth century on one so if we were to give this to you and say look how would you narrativize this how would you display this seeing as a lot of it is about death The 21st century and the treatment of the dead yeah how would you do that in ways which can be understood but also informative for you know a 21st century audience i mean i i think what i what i would do is i would try to show how your early medieval holdings are related both to what comes after and what comes before and talk about what may be related to older roman populations and what may be related to incomers because you can't get a lot of newcomers i mean it's one of the places where there's a lot of immigrants coming in in this period unlike other places in um in um in england so um but but what i would try to do is not draw a hard line and say oh this is the roman stuff and it doesn't have anything to do with the medieval stuff but instead try to connect the two and see how there's not just continuity but there's change and there's not just um not just change in population but there's continuity in population as well and i know i mean i know a couple of the pots in your collection are related to some of the pots that i showed when i talked to your society um that look they're they're from the fifth century but there are things about them that look kind of roman and i think it would be interesting to kind of tease out that story and a place that's done a very nice job of that is um at hitchen the local museum of kitchen and uh um the the one of the people there who used to he's the archaeologist for that part of um that part part of hertfordshire and um has done a lot of digging in that part of harvard but it's also associated with the museum has worked very hard to tell the story of the transition and i think it's a real model for other local um museums in their collections of course so his name is keith fitzpatrick matthews i mean and he's terrific and there's a there's a beautiful display case that actually kind of does all this work do you i mean do you think the british museum does a good job of this and it's sort of national holdings so would you if you were given that would you say okay i want to reorder this completely and you know do it in a different way it's very ethnic the uh yeah the yeah you know its approach is very ethnic or it's i mean it's it's it's centered on great gigs which i can understand why a museum would want to do like that new but you know there's the there's the visigoth you know container in the anglo-saxon container and it's a it's a little um it's a little 1970s conception of ethnicity for my case that's interesting so look we'll if we get this right we'll definitely invite you to look around and to sort of yeah if i can ever get back to england i wouldn't i will we we hope that will happen soon very finely i mean just to sort of i mean another personal question but i mean you're as i understand it you studied in california and now you're in boston i mean obviously i get this all the time as i'm sort of dealing with china and why am i you know why are my interests in china why um how did this sort of become such a sort of important part of your life i mean it was a particular reason or a particular moment or is it just something that you you kind of came across as you your event was an historian i mean i i think in part it's because the evidence matched the way my brain worked um so i i you know so i think that i always liked the kind of evidence of the period and i like working with the evidence even as an undergraduate but i think really it comes down to what it comes down to for so many people is i had a couple of really really inspiring undergraduate teachers and they made me want to do what they did and you know it's just sort of dumb luck and the kind of connections that you make as you go through your education and i think that's it and i spent a very nice year at uh westfield college at the university of london as an undergraduate and it changed my life i you know i never looked back except well look it's great for the field and it's great for us that you didn't look back um and you know you're you know incredibly important and back you know some magnificent books have been hugely helpful in understanding a very you know kind of complex time and raising really important questions so i'm really grateful that you've had this discussion with us and uh well look forward to inviting you to our museum when it's re you know explains the museum when they're redone thank you very much are you actually are you actually open uh well no sorry i'm sorry i just done [Music]