Sarah Semple (ed.) - Early Medieval Mortuary Practices

Heinrich Hrke

This is a belated answer to a question from the audience in the last few minutes of the concluding discussion of the Exeter conference. The essence of the question was: What is the current state of thinking on the inference of ethnicity and race from archaeological evidence? How can we play the numbers game concerning the relationship between immigrants and natives in the Migration Period? The question was not directed at anybody in particular, but a reference to my interest in this matter made clear that it was indirectly meant for me. However, it was such a big question on a complex issue that I was unwilling to give an off-the-cuff answer. Having had some time to consider it, I am willing to give it a try now given the continued importance of the question for the study of early medieval mortuary practices. But in relation to the complexity of the question, it will have to be a reasonably short answer books can be, and have been, written on this question. Inevitably, it will also reflect my own current thinking on this subject more than that of the discipline as a whole, not least because I retained an interest in the archaeological identification of ethnicity and migration throughout the time when these topics were considered to be deeply unfashionable or even objectionable in some quarters of British archaeology. The emphasis will be more on archaeology than physical anthropology in which I cannot claim specialist expertise; mine is therefore a consumers perspective on skeletal data.

First of all, we need some clarification of the terminology in order to avoid (or remove) confusion. The concept of race was originally meant as a tool of biological classification, and if it is used at all (see below), it should be limited to this. Ethnicity, by contrast, is a cultural concept, describing perceptions and expressions of group identity as seen by observers or the respective people themselves. Students of the Early Middle Ages will also frequently encounter the term tribe: strictly speaking, tribes are units within a segmentary type of social organisation, and they should therefore be conceptually distinct from racial and ethnic groups. In addition, names of language groups (Celts, Germani, Slavs, Balts, Turks etc.) are often used in early medieval archaeology as if they reflect biological or cultural group affiliations or even socio-political units which they do not, neither in principle nor, mostly, in practice.

Unfortunately, recent political terminology has muddied the waters, with ethnicity becoming the politically acceptable term for what used to be called race, possibly because the latter term has become tainted with the connotation of racism (as ethnicity has now become tainted by the association with ethnic violence and ethnic cleansing). It does not help that some scholarly texts, particularly history textbooks, still use race to describe culturally or historically defined groups of people. In a more general, but equally wrong sense, race is occasionally used for the entire human species (the human race).