Going native, becoming German: Isotopes and identities in late Roman and early medieval England

Perhaps not surprisingly in a world menaced by climate change, catastrophic explanations for the origins of the English have re-emerged. However, analyses of the biological make-up of those who were there in the fifth and sixth centuries reveals the persistence of choice, knowledge and adaptability as key characteristics of humanity. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2010) 1, 142–149. doi:10.1057/pmed.2010.5 Explanations for the end of the Roman empire have tended toward the catastrophic – especially when considering the fate of the province of Britannia. In traditional accounts, the depopulated and reforested landscape (in a return to Nature) was overrun in the mass-migrations that characterized the Age, and the remnant population put to flight or to the sword in a devastating mixture of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The result was the creation of a tabula rasa on which the English could begin their teleological journey to Empire (Jones, 1996, 1–12; Moreland, 2000). In these accounts, the individual and the group were biologically constituted in the sense that all the ‘people’ were descended from a common ancestor. Identity and belonging were carried and delivered in the blood; individuals were born into the people. The myths and memories (the tradition) that linked the r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 142–149 www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/ people with the ancestors were materialized in ritual, ceremony and objects, and marked their ethnic difference from Others. Material culture was both a product and summa of tradition; archeologically, it is a marker of ethnic cleansing as one people replaced another. Biology to a large extent conditioned what it was to be human. Researchers have now questioned this scenario. On the one hand, historians assure us that the ‘peoples’ who migrated across the Continent (and into England) were not as homogenous (as pure) as was once assumed. They were not biologically constituted, but came into being as a product of the decisions and choices made by individuals in the new circumstances of a post-Roman world (Moreland, 2000, 40–44). Ancestry was still important to the groups that emerged into the light of history, but here it was ‘belief in common descent,’ constructed in the context of ‘actual common interests’ (Amory, 1994, 4). On the other hand, archeologists have been able to demonstrate significant continuities in demography and land use between Roman Britain and AngloSaxon England, casting doubt on mass migration, ethnic cleansing and/or genocide (Hills, 2003, 85–107; Higham, 2007). In addition, they have shown that the material culture of the fifth and sixth centuries was not a summa of ancestral tradition, but a product of selection and choice drawing upon both Romano-British and Germanic styles and motifs (Hills, 2003, 90). In this scenario, individuals constructed themselves, and the group to which they belonged, by drawing upon a range of resources – including a belief in common ancestry and a myth of migration. Material culture was integral to the process though which people constructed themselves as Angles, Saxons or Jutes. Culture and knowledge lay at the heart of what it meant to be human. In recent years, however, catastrophic events have re-emerged as explanations for the transition from Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon England. On the one hand, we have had suggestions that a comet strike, climate change or plague brought an end to the Roman world (Jones, 1996; Baillie, 1999; Little, 2007; see also McAnany and Yoffee, 2010 for some critical comment); on the other hand, new arguments for mass migration and ethnic cleansing have been put forward. Peter Heather, for example, argues that large numbers of Angles, Saxons and Jutes migrated (as biological entities) across the North Sea, bringing with them elements of their traditional material culture. Although they did not institute a policy of genocide, the native population was so weakened and impoverished that the migrants were able to establish a social hierarchy based on ethnicity – ‘much of the indigenous non-landowning population of lowland Britain found itself consigned to y [the] subordinate classes (Heather, 2009, 303–304). Other archeologists and historians have drawn on evidence in the late seventhcentury law code of king Ine (of Wessex) that the wergeld (the level of compensation paid for the death of an individual) for Anglo-Saxons was significantly higher than that for Britons, to argue for ‘an apartheid-like situation Going native, becoming German 143 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 142–149 in which elevated social and economic status grant[ed] higher reproductive success to the immigrants’ – leading to the ‘disappearance’ of the Britons (Thomas et al, 2006, 2651; Woolf, 2007). Here, despite the acceptance of demographic continuity, and the acknowledged limitations on the scale of the migration, the Romano-British were still (ultimately) ethnically cleansed/wiped out and made little or no contribution to the history of the English. What, I think, is significant about these explanations is the way they place human beings at the mercy of (make us a product of) ‘natural’ forces – comets, plague, reproductive success, climate change. And it is, I think, no surprise that these forces have returned to haunt us at this time. We are all aware of the fact that what (and how) we write about the past is conditioned by the world in which we live now. In his recent book Man, Beast and Zombie (2000), Kenan Malik argued that our perception of what it means to be human has oscillated between ‘scientific mechanism and human exceptionalism’ (perspectives that see humanity as either part of or separate from the natural world), and went on to suggest that this oscillation was fueled by the prevailing political and cultural climate. He concluded that ‘so long as there remained an optimistic view of what it meant to be human, so long as humans were regarded as exceptional beings y then a fully mechanistic view of Man remained unacceptable’ (Malik, 2000, 13). In such a climate, the emphasis would be on creativity, choice and ‘progress’ – on humanity constructing itself. However, for large stretches of the last century there has been cause to doubt such optimism. The trenches of Flanders, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, genocide in Rwanda and countless other atrocities have led some to conclude that ‘apes have become more angelic during the course of the twentieth century, the angels, or at least their human representatives, more apish’ (Foley, 1995, 39). This pessimism has been exacerbated by our growing awareness of the (potentially lethal) human impact on Nature, and has resulted (I think) in a questioning of human exceptionality, and a concomitant trend toward theories which see humanity as explicable in terms of natural processes and innate characteristics – exemplified in the recent rise of genetics as the ultimate ‘explanation’ of human behavior. We now have genes for ‘aggression, alcoholism, anorexia, anxiety, attention-deficit disorder, autism’ (Malik, 2000, 374) – to list only the As! As in the Natural world into which humanity has descended, we are not responsible for our actions; as with other animals, they are determined by innate characteristics. In 1989, James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, said that ‘we used to think that our fate was in the stars. Now we know, in large part, that our fate is in our genes’ (quoted in Malik, 2000, 374). Just as in the Middle Ages, when human beings were simply the vehicles through which God’s Divine Plan was implemented, so our role today is to play out the script written in our biological make-up. This, Malik concludes, is ‘truly a remarkable way of understanding what it means to be human, an almost medieval notion at Moreland 144 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 142–149 the beginning of the 21st century’ (Malik, 2000, 376). However, science has also provided us with techniques to explore the relationship between ‘biology’ and ‘culture’ in late Roman and early medieval England – and what they reveal speaks volumes for what it meant to be human. Two recent studies have attempted to map the genetic similarities between England and the purported Anglo-Saxon homelands – the assumption being that this would allow us to assess the impact of the fifth-century migrations. In 2002 Michael Weale and colleagues published the results of their comparison of Y-chromosomes (passed in male lines) between males in north Wales, central and eastern England, and Friesland (Holland). This revealed that the English males were genetically different from those in Wales, and were so similar to those in Friesland that, the authors argue, only mass immigration from the Continent could account for it: ‘we estimate y an Anglo-Saxon immigration event affecting 50% – 100% of the Central English male gene pool at that time’ (Weale et al, 2002, 1018). The next year, Cristian Capelli and colleagues published the results of their (much larger) study of Y-chromosomes from across Britain, with comparative material drawn from Norway and Schleswig-Holstein (the latter as the presumed home of the Anglo-Saxons, the former to isolate any Viking influence). Although they concluded that southern England was ‘predominantly indigenous’ (Capelli et al, 2003, 982), the results apparently still pointed to significant migration into parts of eastern and central England, accounting for more than 70 per cent of the population in Norfolk and York (Oppenheimer, 2006, 362–363; see also Thomas et al, 2006, 2651). While this is not the stuff of genocide (except in York and Norfolk), it is certainly mass migration. As Heinrich Härke remarked soon after, ‘the most modern technique returns us to the oldest model’ (Härke, 2004, 456). The peoples of the Migration Age were, it seems, real biological entities, and in large areas of the country they really did displace/wipe-out the Romano-Britons. The problem with these studies, of course, is that they are mapping the modern situation, not that of late Antiquity or the early Middle Ages. And it now seems that the genetic similarities between England and north Germany/ Denmark are much more deeply rooted in the past. Stephen Oppenheimer argues that they are mainly the product of the recolonization of Europe, from glacial ‘refuges’ in Iberia, Ukraine and the Balkans, at the end of the last Ice Age. These primordial migrations, combined with subsequent population flows in the Neolithic and Bronze Age, do ‘not leave much room for the culturally dynamic invasions of the last two thousand years’ (Oppenheimer, 2006, 371). In an attempt to measure just how much ‘room’ we should afford them, Oppenheimer looked for exact gene type matches in samples from the AngloSaxon homelands (‘recent mass migration would be expected to produce such y matches’), and produced a figure of ‘5.5% for genetic intrusion within England, rising to a maximum of 9–15% in eastern England’ (Oppenheimer, Going native, becoming German 145 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 142–149 2006, 374, 379). Genetically, the peoples of the British Isles (including England!) are more Iberian than Germanic (see the map at Oppenheimer, 2006, 375), and it seems that we need to think of a comparatively small number of Germanic migrants intruding into an already settled and populated landscape. Since ancient DNA does not survive very well, genetic approaches have, as we have seen, had to extrapolate back from modern situations. Isotopic analysis, by contrast, can be carried out on the skeletons of those who actually took part in (who created) the processes we are trying to reconstruct. Analysis of the strontium and oxygen isotope levels in tooth enamel allows scientists to locate (within broad limits) the kind of environment within which an individual spent their childhood (Budd et al, 2004, 128). We can thus distinguish those who grew up in one area but moved to (and were buried in) another, as well as those born in one region but buried in the ‘traditions’ of another. Analyses carried out on remains from the late Roman cemetery at Lankhills (Winchester) demonstrate a complex set of relationships between biological origins and expressions of cultural identity. An initial study set out to test the argument that a group of individuals, buried in the late fourth century within an identifiably ‘different’ material tradition, were Sarmatian migrants (from Pannonia, modern Hungary) (Evans et al, 2006, 267). In addition, the isotopes of nine people buried according to the local Romano-British tradition were also measured – and two of them turned out to have been born and brought up in south-central Europe (Evans et al, 2006, 271). Of those buried within the Sarmatian ‘material tradition,’ one may, indeed, have been from Hungary, but four (two adult females and two juveniles) seem to have been raised locally (Evans et al, 2006, 271). The authors of the report regard them as ‘secondgeneration immigrants revealing their birthplace through their isotope composition but retaining all the cultural behavior of their upbringing’ (Evans et al, 2006, 271) – though other scenarios are possible, including the females adopting Sarmatian traditions on marriage. We would then have RomanoBritons who had ‘gone Pannonian.’ Of the 40 skeletons analyzed in a subsequent study (Eckardt et al, 2009), 21 had strontium and oxygen isotopic signatures ‘consistent with an upbringing in Britain,’ but six of these had received ‘Pannonian’ burial rites and grave furnishings (Eckardt et al, 2009, 2821). On the other hand, five immigrants from the Iberian peninsula and/Mediterranean region were buried according to local custom, and one adult male, buried as a local, was probably from Pannonia – a Sarmatian gone native (Eckardt et al, 2009, 2822)? These results confirm the cosmopolitan nature of late Roman cities, but they also highlight the flexibility of the relationship between objects and isotopes. In the world of late Antiquity, people acquired a sense of being and belonging and expressed it in appropriate material traditions – and these did not always have much to do with biological origins. Moreland 146 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 142–149 Isotopic analyses on skeletons from the fifthto seventh-century cemetery at West Heslerton (North Yorkshire) revealed similar variability in the relationship between biological origins and traditions expressed in death during the Migration Period ‘proper.’ Strontium and oxygen isotope analyses demonstrate the presence of ‘locals’ and ‘non-locals’ among West Heslerton’s dead (Budd et al, 2004, 135–136; Montgomery et al, 2005, 131, 134–145) and, very significantly, the weapon-burial rite, thought by some to be a marker of Germanic identity, appears to have been afforded to both (Montgomery et al, 2005, 132–134). The ‘locals’ buried with weapons might, as at Lankhills (above), be second generation immigrants, born in Britain but buried in cultural traditions of their parents – but they might just as easily be Britons who had adopted those traditions. If, as Härke has argued, burial with weapons was indeed ‘an ethnic marker’ (Härke, 1997, 120), then this might have been an ethnicity that seems to have owed as much to human decision and belief as to biology. Additionally, the fact that migrant burials are found in all phases of this fifthto seventh-century cemetery suggests that immigration from Germanic regions was a long-term process (Budd et al, 2004, 135; Montgomery et al, 2005, 131). This fits with current ‘migration-theory’ which sees one-off mass migrations as comparatively rare, with longer-term population flows and ‘back migration’ (in which immigrants return to their homeland) the norm. The point here is that this continued contact with the ancestral homeland must have played a part in the construction of post-Roman identities – in particular in the perpetuation of the central myth of migration (Howe, 1989; Moreland, 2003). So – we may be living in world conditioned to search the past ‘for the antecedents of the destructive environmental mismanagement of our own age’ (Horden and Purcell, 2000, 300), and to see humanity as the product of natural forces. But new data from those who were there, who witnessed the events and took part in the process we struggle to capture, demonstrate the persistence of creativity and choice in the construction of humanity. Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee have recently questioned our focus on ‘collapse,’ and have argued that resilience and ability to adapt to crises are characteristics that most typify humanity (McAnany and Yoffee, 2010, 10–13). Perhaps there is reason to be optimistic after all – or have we really gone too far this