Session
6 – Crossing boundaries, bridging cultures
Moderator:
Bethan Morris
A: Alex
Woolf
Sutton
Hoo and Sweden
In this
paper I shall endeavour to revisit the relationships between the boat burial in
mound one and Sutton Hoo and the analogues high status burials of Vendel period
Sweden. The analysis will focus on the social context of deposition rather than
on the direct relationship of the material culture deposited. It will be argued
that both East Anglia and northern Uppland were frontier territories of
Germanic-speaking Europe where new social hierarchies were struggling to
establish themselves in the decades around 600.
Response:
Brian Wallace
B: Jörg
Drauschke
The
development of contacts and trade between the Byzantine Empire and the Frankish
Kingdom until the early 8th century
The
paper focuses the question, how contacts and exchange between the eastern Mediterranean
and northwest continental Europe developed during the 7th century AD. The
research is based on the archaeological sources from the Frankish Kingdom but
takes also into account important written source material. Following the
traditional view, international trade and transport in the Mediterranean
reached its bottom from the middle of the 7th century onwards, mainly
influenced by the research of Henri Pirenne, but after his famous study this
subject was discussed even more intensely until today with different opinions
about the date concerning the closing of the Mediterranean Sea.
At
first sight archaeological material from the Frankish Kingdom does not seem to
can add a significant contribution to this problem. But with the help of a
careful analysis of the inventories of Merovingian row graves a large group of
objects could be identified that due to their provenance must have been
transported from the eastern Mediterranean resp. the Byzantine Empire and even
from regions far more east over the Mediterranean and Italy and southern France
to the regions in northern Gaul and north of the Alps. Among these finds are
precious stones from India/Sri Lanka (red garnet, amethyst), cowrie shells from
the Red Sea, elephant ivory from northeast Africa, jewellery, bronze vessels,
and buckles from the Byzantine Empire. Not only the quantity of these objects
is surprising that reaches its height at the end of the 6th and the beginning
of the 7th century, but also the fact that – in spite of a constant decrease of
their total number during the 7th century – they still appear in the graves at
the time around 700 AD. This is explained as an indication of a continuity of
exchange between the regions in question, but with clear signs of decline and
change of general circumstances.
Response:
Tom Brown
When
the East came to the West: the seventh century in south-east Spain: living amongst Visigoths, Byzantines and Muslims
The
seventh century in Iberia brought about a number of transformations in a
society that had kept a remarkable continuity of the cultural and political
structure of Rome during the “long sixth century”. In this century, the
Visigoths achieved the unification of their society under the Catholic creed
and consolidated their dominion of Iberia by expelling the Byzantines from
their last peninsular strongholds. And yet the classical tradition was visible
in many aspects of this society until the Islamic invasion of the eighth
century, which meant the downfall of the Visigothic Kingdom and a fast
Islamicisation of the Peninsula. This event produced a very different sort of
“long eighth century” in Iberia as compared to the rest of Europe and is marked
by deep changes at all levels. It meant a much more evident break with the
Roman past.
The
phenomena described in the paragraph above can be clearly identified in a space
the was a border area between the Visigothic kingdom and the Byzantine
occupation in Iberia: the Vega of Granada. After an early occupation by the
Muslim invaders, this was also the space in which Islam lasted longer in the
peninsula, until the conquest of Granada in the fifteenth century. Therefore,
it is a space of special interest for the identification of the patterns of
continuity and break that took place in the seventh and eighth centuries. In
this paper we will offer information about settlement patterns, cemeteries and
ceramic production of these two centuries. The combined analysis of these
archaeological features will allow to venture the meaning of the
transformations of the end of the Roman world in an essentially rural area
placed in a very strategic location.
Respondent:
Javier Martinez
See the full schedule for more details!
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