Uncovering the Germanic Past
Merovingian Archaeology in France, 1830-1914
ISBN13: 9780199696710ISBN10: 0199696713
Hardback,
408 pages
Aug 2012,
Not Yet Published
Price:
$150.00 (06)See more from the series
Description
Uncovering the Germanic Past brings to light an unexpected side-effect of France's nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution. While laying tracks for new rail lines, quarrying for stone, and expanding lands under cultivation, French labourers uncovered bones and artefacts from long-forgotten cemeteries. Although their original owners were unknown, research by a growing number of amateur archaeologists of the bourgeois class determined that these were the graves of Germanic 'warriors', and their work, presented in provincial learned societies across France, documented evidence for significant numbers of Franks, Burgundians, and Visigoths in late Roman Gaul. They thus challenged prevailing views in France of the population's exclusively Gallic ancestry, contradicting the influential writings of Parisian historians like Augustin Thierry and Numa-Denis Fustel de Coulanges. Although some scholars drew on this material evidence to refine their understanding of the early ancestors of the French, most ignored, at their peril, inconvenient finds that challenged the centrality of the ancient Gauls as the forebears of France.Crossing the boundaries of the fields of medieval archaeology and history, nineteenth-century French history, and the history of science, Effros suggests how the slow progress and professionalization of Merovingian (or early medieval) archaeology, a sub-discipline in the larger field of national archaeology in France, was in part a consequence of the undesirable evidence it brought to light.
Features
- Highlights modern and nationalistic politics of archaeology in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in France, and comparatively in other European countries.
- Places current debates about "Germanic" ethnicity into historical context.
- An interdisciplinary study on archaeology, history, art history, and physical anthropology in the nineteenth century.
- Makes use of archival sources, the majority unpublished and almost exclusively discussed in French, accessible to a wide audience and to readers of English.
- Illustrated throughout.
About the Author(s)
Bonnie Effros is Professor of History and the Rothman Chair and Director of the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere at the University of Florida, where she has taught since 2009. She is the author of the books Caring for Body and Soul: Burial and the Afterlife in the Merovingian World (2002), Merovingian Mortuary Archaeology and the Making of the Middle Ages (2003), and Creating Community with Food and Drink in Merovingian Gaul (2002).
