The Persistence and Change of Expressed Memetic Variants of the Suebi and Alamanni in Southwest Germany, the First Century BC Through the Sixth Century AD
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Threads of Identity: The Persistence and Change of Expressed Memetic Variants of the Suebi and Alamanni in Southwest Germany, the First Century BC through the Sixth Century AD A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Eric William Bangs IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Peter S. Wells, Advisor May 2010 © Eric William Bangs 2010 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my advisor Professor Peter Wells, Department of Anthropology for many hours of advice and for fieldwork opportunities in Bavaria. I would also like to thank my dissertation committee: Professor Martha Tappen, Department of Anthropology, for troubleshooting, advice, and encouragement; Professor Oliver Nicholson, Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies, for serving as my dissertation committee chair and for valuable comments regarding this thesis; and Dr. John Soderberg, Department of Anthropology, for keen insights and agreeing to serve on my committee at the last minute. Dr Christel Bücker, Dr Michael Hoeper, Dr. Gerhard Fingerlin, and Professor Heiko Steuer allowed me to analyze the artifact collections at the Landesdenkmalamt in Freiburg im Breisgau and provided me with much of the background literature for this dissertation. Sára Kaiser, my dear and constant friend, thank you for reading early versions of this and for boundless wisdom. Thank you to my parents Patricia Bangs and Donald Bangs, who set me on this path, showing me pictures of mummies and sphinxes all those years ago. My sister, Susan Bangs-Thom, has been a dear source of positivity and strength. i Terri Valois has been a good friend over the years saving me more than once, thank you. Dennis Lewarch was a formative influence in my early career as an archaeologist and his integrity and intelligence remain influential to this day. Finally, to the friends and family I have made through the years, thank you, too for encouragement and support: Jeffrey Adams, Aaron Armstrong, Timothy Canaday, Avigdor Edminster, Heather Flowers, James Forrest Jr., Jamon Halvaksz, Matthew Hunstiger, Timothy Hunt, Jennifer Immich, Silas Mallery, Patrick McCutcheon, Lynn Newton, Paul Solimano, David Tennessen, Patricia Trocki, and Claudia Vergnani-Vaupel – ‚We few, we happy few, we band of brothers‛. ii DEDICATION For Annika, my dear and sweet girl. iii ABSTRACT Frontiers are contact zones between cultures. The upper Rhine river valley was just such a contact zone when the Romans arrived in the first century BC. Over the next 500 years the Romans engaged in a complex cultural interaction with the non-Roman inhabitants that eventually resulted in a creolized frontier society. A model derived from Roman authors suggests that this society was replaced by the arrival of the Alamanni in the late third century AD who, in turn, were replaced by the Merovingians in the sixth century. The replacement model of cultural interaction in the upper Rhine is tested using a methodology based in Darwinian and meme theory. Seriations were created of stylistic elements from ceramic vessel assemblages from 14 archaeological sites in southwest Germany. The seriations suggest that non-Roman inhabitants in the first century AD did adopt aspects of Roman culture but only in the realm of emotionally charged ritual. For their day-to-day existence, the artifacts they used appear to have changed little and they maintained an identity adopted centuries before. In evolutionary terms, these practices had a high fitness relative to the cost of learning new ceramic manufacturing techniques. In the third and fourth Centuries, the Alamanni arrived and in the archaeological record, we see a proliferation of new style elements and forms. Now it appears that peoples readily adopted new means of expressing identity overturning the old forms. However, no one element had fitness great enough to invade and dominate as Kammstrich had in the first century. With the infiltration of people from central Europe and the continued presence of a Mediterranean culture on the Rhine the dynamism of this frontier context increased on a grand scale. Finally, with the arrival of the Merovingians in the sixth and seventh centuries, the number of style elements is almost too great to count and, while reflecting a reduction of overall fitness of the memes, the means to express identity expanded. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................ i Dedication ........................................................................................................................ iii Abstract............................................................................................................................. iv Table of Contents ............................................................................................................. v List of Figures ................................................................................................................ viii List of Tables ..................................................................................................................... x Chapter 1: Introduction ...................................................................................................1 Statement of Problem ...........................................................................................3 Hypothesis and Alternative Hypothesis ...........................................................5 The Problem of Definitions ..................................................................................9 You know a Roman when you see one ................................................15 Proposed Analysis ..............................................................................................17 Chapter 2: Theories of Cultural Evolution .................................................................20 Roots of Evolutionary Archaeology .................................................................20 Essentialism .............................................................................................23 Finalism ....................................................................................................25 Cultural Evolution ..............................................................................................27 Evolutionary Processualism ..............................................................................30 Background ..............................................................................................30 Basic Principles and Assumptions ........................................................37 Evolutionary Ecology .........................................................................................46 Background ..............................................................................................46 Basic Principles and Assumptions ........................................................48 Selectionist Archaeology ....................................................................................53 Background ..............................................................................................53 Basic Principles and Assumptions ........................................................58 Inclusive Phenotype Perspective ..............................................60 Cultural Virus Perspective .........................................................66 Comments on the ‚Normative‛ critique .........................................................74 Chapter 3: Seriation and Mathematical Models of Cultural Change .....................77 History and Theory of Seriation .......................................................................78 Occurrence Seriation, History ...............................................................80 Occurrence Seriation, Theory ................................................................85 v Frequency Seriation, History .................................................................86 Frequency Seriation, Theory .................................................................91 The Popularity Curve .................................................................92 Conditions of Application .........................................................95 Seriation and Darwinian Evolution ................................................................102 Chapter 4: Roman and German Interaction: Historical Evidence .......................108 Early Accounts: First Century BC – First Century AD ...............................108 Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum ......................................................................111 Tacitus’ Germania ...................................................................................114 Late Accounts: Second Century AD – Sixth Century AD ..........................116 Ammianus Marcellinus’ Res Gestae ....................................................121 Chapter 5: Roman and German Interaction: Archaeological Evidence ..............133 Technology Transfer .........................................................................................135 Weil ......................................................................................................138 Bötzingen ................................................................................................146 Settlement Patterns ...........................................................................................152 Settlement Patterns