Post
Since I seem to be sort of livetooting this workshop - it's now session two, there may be gaps if I have to focus hard or give my talk.
First we have Walter Pohl, who for those unfamiliar is one of the most eminent scholars of early medieval European ethnicity.
He's discussing his HistoGenes project and using interdisciplinary study and work on whole burial sites not sparse samples to avoid the issue of genetic studies being treated as ethnically deterministic.
@JubalBarca thank you for this thread, it sounds like a really interesting workshop.
@JubalBarca i remember him! i was in his lectures
Historical sources discuss migrations, but peoples are named in inconsistent ways; grave archaeology can tell us about cultural features, but often not what cultural group people understood those to imply; genetics on bodies can show gene flow and how much populations mixed, but not necessarily how or why or any cultural implications.
Pre-assuming a single "wandering people" or "nation" from these ends up pre-determining what people conclude from the evidence.
We can show some things genetically though - for example, high status graves from some Avar culture graveyards show more eastern Asian genetics in their mix, suggesting some elites of that society did originally move from the eastern rather than western steppes to reach Europe, and that they retained those genetic markers for six generations or so, suggesting quite tight intermarriage among the east Asian Avar elite.
But, and this is particularly interesting - other Avar period graveyards are genetically very different and show more European genetics despite having basically identical grave goods. So elite Avar culture may have spread despite a lack of intermarriage rather than marriage being an important vector for cultural sharing, which is interesting.
Lots of potential of circular arguments in this kind of work - one person might e.g. ask "does the spread of Slavic culture spread this pottery type" and find the answer "yes" but then you find that someone has in fact been partly defining Slavic culture *by the presence of that pottery type* which makes the logic circular.
Mixing analysis and avoiding starting assumptions helps: sometimes ethnicity, culture, and genetics overlap, but certainly not always and overlaps are trends not absolutes.
Now we're on Roman Law regarding the dead. Roman law had to blend sacred and secular duties - pontifical and civil law were separate things, but were clearly intermingled, and to be an expert on one you probably needed to be an expert on the other.
Lots of tricky definitional questions - for example, notes that a burial site becomes a sacred space, but the surrounding plot does not even if the wider tomb covers that too. Space in a tomb could thus e.g. be sold but burial plots couldn't.
"Exposing a body to the rays of the sun" is explicitly part of the crime definition of grave violation. Specific mention is made of this including breaking into a tomb to put an extra person into it, so that was a thing that happened.
The punishment was exile for elites, or being sent to the mines if you were poor. Or death if you broke into the tomb while armed with a weapon, so harsher sentencing for brigands effectively.
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