Archaeological remains represent the concrete products of once-living individuals and groups. This may seem obvious, but it bears stating because it is all too easy to begin to view the material complexes we find through excavation as entities of their own rather than the products of multivalent human agency. The problem is that humans are complex creatures at both the
individual and group levels. In the rigid world of nineteenth century science, when the whole cosmos appeared to be ruled by immutable, predictable, natural laws, it was logical to assume archaeologists could read backwards from collected artifacts in order to identify and understand the people who deposited them in the same way scholars were eagerly collecting and categorizing the earth’s plants, animals, and minerals in order to understand the intricate clockwork of the natural world.292 Although the rigid nineteenth century conception of natural law has also been sharply critiqued, the problem is even more extreme when studying complex human cultures. Archaeology can tell us a lot about the concrete elements of how people lived, and sometimes even identify the movement of groups from one region to another, but it is not nearly as good at revealing how individuals and groups constructed their various identities. This is particularly true in prehistoric settings or in regions without a coeval epigraphic habit or literary tradition, like the Hungarian Plain during the Roman period.
The basic problem is one of practice vs. meaning. An illustrative example will be useful at this juncture. Even if, for example, we know from excavation that people in the Roman-era Hungarian Plain tended to bury their rich female dead in clothing decorated with glass beads and
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held together with bronze fibulae,293 we have no way of knowing all the details of what that tradition meant, both on an individual and societal level. Was the beaded decoration a sign of
ethnic affiliation - that is, a statement of a particular group membership aimed at outsiders (“This woman is a woman of the Iazyges, an exclusive group with a shared history.”), or, rather, did it send a
message of status identity directed at members inside the community (“This woman is a wealthy
member of the aristocracy.”)? Perhaps the burial costume broadcast both messages, or something else
altogether. Further, we must ask if the costume reflected anything at all of the dead woman’s own
personal identity (“In life, my status a Iazyx/elite/whatever was important to me.”) or should we see it
as the material reflection of an imposed identity made by the group that buried the woman (“We
buried our grandmother in a manner reflecting how we wish to present her importance, and our family’s position to our broader society.”)?
As previously discussed, traditional theories of settlement archaeology (siedlungsarchäologie) rely on simplistic theories regarding the identification of observed material culture complexes with attested (or retrojected) groups and cultures. This mindset can easily lead researchers to assume that observed patterns in material evidence, particularly in intentional depositions, such as burials, automatically reflect outward-focused ethnic identities.294 Not only does such an assumption indicate a poor understanding of how ethnicities form and manifest themselves, but it also overlooks the many other potential messages material evidence might have been intended to send. There is no
293 This is, indeed, how elite women are most commonly buried in the Roman-era Hungarian Plain. See sections 3.4.2 and
3.4.3 below for the main discussion of burial ritual and personal adornment.
294 We see this mindset frequently in contemporary and twentieth century scholarship from the various national academies
of the Danubian region. In addition to the works cited in note 289, above, all of which rely on this mindset to a certain extent, see Vaday et al. 1989, for a discussion of Sarmatian costume. The ‘burial items = ethnic expression’ mindset underlying the entire work is revealed in the final discussion (p. 114).
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academic consensus on how ethnicity functions, a fact no-doubt reflective of the great diversity of organizing principals among humanity’s many ethnic divisions, past and present.295 There are, however, a few widely-accepted features that tend to set ethnicities apart from other types of group identity and which are relevant to the interpretation of archaeological material. Although somewhat venerable, Frederik Barth’s theoretical framework remains fundamental to most current
understandings. First, ethnic identities are categories of ascription; in other words, an ethnic identity is something that individuals claim for themselves, albeit often unconsciously, rather than
categories of imposition, where an outside agent defines the boundaries and characteristics of a
group.296 Right away, this definition causes problems for the scholar of Rome’s barbarian neighbors. Lacking any early textual tradition, we have no preserved internal voice for the people beyond the
limites, but much written from the outside perspective of Greek and Roman ethnography. Even if
we accept some or all of the details of a particular ancient account, we must remember that the tribal divisions and defining characteristics given by Herodotus, Ovid, Tacitus, Pliny, Ammianus, etc. reflect outside impositions rather than unfiltered expressions of internal, barbarian group identities. This is not to say that we cannot use Greek and Roman sources but we do run into problems when attempting to put such sources in dialog with archaeological material because said material, an expression of internal identities, may not actually be organized according to the same criteria used by
295 The most basic disagreement is between those scholars (eg: Barth 1969, Nash 1989, Weber 1978, ) who advocate a
constructivist/instrumentalist form of ethnicity where individuals have some potential for changing their ethnic affiliation through performance of specific cultural displays (Barth 1969, pp. 11-15, 25), and those (eg: Geertz 1963, Grosby 1994, Fishman 1980) who posit a model where more primordial ties of lineage, language, and/or phenotypic expression tend to be of particular ethnic salience and thereby limit individuals’ ability to move between ethnic communities (Geertz 1963, pp. 108-115). There is good evidence in favor of more constructivist ethnicities among the barbarians of Roman antiquity, when we can speak of ethnicity at all (Amory 1997, Kulikowski 2007, Goffart 2006), although this does not preclude more primordial ethnic identities in other contexts.
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Greek and Roman authors to describe the people of the same region. In other words, just because Dio and Pliny describe Sarmatian Iazyges living in the Hungarian Plain at a certain time, does not mean that our elite woman in the beaded dress considered herself a Iazyx simply because her burial falls within an observed material culture complex with similar geographic and chronological boundaries.
A second important feature of ethnic identities is that while they define themselves in dialog with other ethnicities through displays of cultural practice, not all elements of cultural practice within a given society are ever considered ethnically salient. Additionally, it is often impossible to determine which cultural markers are of ethnic salience by observing material and praxis from the outside.297 In other words, even if we do accept that the Iazyges we hear about in the texts were an ethnic group (as opposed to some other type of collective), we cannot assume that the cultural markers used internally to identify an individual as an insider or outsider are the same ones we find in the material remains. Assuming our beaded lady did think of herself a Iazyx, we must consider whether perhaps this ethnic identity was visually marked by something archaeologically-invisible, say a particular hairstyle or woven dress-pattern, or even maintained by something entirely incorporeal such as membership in a particular lineage - real or fictive - or profession of a certain religious belief.298 In such a scenario, the material elements preserved in her grave might be
297 Barth 1969, pp. 13-15.
298 Indeed, lineage/descent is often thought to be of particularly broad, cross-cultural salience within ethnic communities.
Descent is often acknowledged to rely more on belief and ascription than genuine, biological connection, at least on the scale of centuries and large populations. Such ‘fictive kinship’ remains at the core of highly-influential conceptions of ethnicity in the classical and late antique worlds (Wolfram 1988, Hall 2002). This is not an unreasonable approach, but it does not mean that all ethnic groups considered common descent to be of such value.
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broadcasting an entirely different, non-ethnic set of messages, and we, from our perspective as archaeologists, might well never be able to tell the difference.
Finally, ethnic identities are not of equal importance for all societies, and only some societies choose ethnic affiliation as a defining feature. The rise of the ethno-state in 19th century Europe and the continuation of the principal of ethno-nationalism in the 20th century Balkans following the successive, messy dismemberment of the poly-ethnic Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Yugoslav states, encouraged scholars from those regions to retroject their own obsession with ethnic identity onto earlier inhabitants of their lands.299 Ethnic movements were also important forces in the breakup of the European colonial empires in the decades after World War II, as many former colonial subjects sought to define themselves in more internally-meaningful ways. This phenomenon has ensured the enduring importance of ethnicity as a category of group identity within postcolonial theory.300 What all this means for the scholar of the Roman limites is that it is extremely tempting to assume that the peoples who lived beyond the Roman frontier were also organized around ethnic principles. This feels natural to someone from the twenty-first century academy, but we must remain aware that this feeling is more of a product of our own society and academic worldview than a reflection of the ancient evidence, textual or material. In the case of our particular study, as we will discuss below, while we can be fairly certain that a population known to
299 Modern American society, for example, does not consider any single ethnic identity to have a special claim on
‘Americanness.’ If ethnic ascription is not generally used as a positive ethnic marker in the United States, ethnicity is actively used to informally mark certain minority groups as outsiders. None the less, the collective ‘American’ identity remains fundamentally non-ethnic, according to most definitions. The Roman Empire may have functioned quite similarly, particularly after Caracalla’s broad extension of citizenship in 212, with legal status holding much greater salience than tribal or ethnic affiliation (Mathisen 2006), even as certain ethnic groups - most notably for our purposes, Scythians - were excluded or marginalized based on those Roman perceptions of ethnicity.
300 For a discussion of how this feature of the postcolonial critique impacts the study of the ancient world, see Mattingly
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the Romans as the Iazyges did migrate into the Hungarian Plain from somewhere on the Pontic Steppe in the early first century, there is little clear evidence for how that group thought about and organized itself once it got there, or how immigrants and locals viewed and interacted with each other. In such a setting, to return to our beaded lady, it would be unwise to speculate about her origins or personal identity beyond what we can determine from the value of her jewelry and grave goods, and the exchange networks that supplied them.