On Thursday and Friday 20-21 October Caroline Brett attended a conference ‘Migrations et territoires celtiques’ at the University of Rennes 2, Brittany, and presented a 20-minute communication on ‘An Invisible Migration? The Origins of Brittany’. She sought explanations for the paucity of archaeological evidence for migration from Britain to Brittany in the late fourth to sixth centuries A.D., contrasting with the abundance of archaeological material in Brittany from most periods of prehistory. The only really promising category of evidence for illuminating the migration process at present is metalwork in ‘Quoit Brooch Style’, a style associated with a Romano-British military identity in south-east Britain in about 430-470, some examples of which have recently been discovered in a cemetery near Vannes. Features of the material culture that emerged in western Britain from the late fifth century onwards, such as imported pottery, inscriptions on stone, decorative metalwork and hillfort reoccupation – the culture of the elite that is usually credited with the colonisation of Brittany – are conspicuous by their absence there. Possible explanations might include an inability on the part of British migrants to Brittany to extract resources from the local population in the same way as they could in Britain itself, and a readiness or compulsion to adapt to local Gallo-Roman and Frankish material culture.
Month: November 2016
Cambridge Festival of Ideas 2016: presenting the project to a wider audience
On Monday 17 October 2016 Caroline Brett and Paul Gazzoli gave a joint talk at the Department of ASNC, Cambridge, as part of the annual Cambridge University Festival of Ideas. Their subject, chosen to fit in with the festival’s overall theme of ‘movement’, was ‘We the Migrants, They the Invaders?’, an investigation of how some population movements of the early Middle Ages were seen by migrants and their ‘hosts’, and also in modern historiography and popular culture. Caroline discussed the migrations that coincided with the end of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries, homing in on the creation of Brittany. Paul provided a discussion of the Vikings, under the heading ‘Terrorists or Migrants?’ The talk, chaired by Professor Paul Russell, was very well attended by between 50 and 60 members of the public who enjoyed a lively question and answer session at the end. 34 feedback forms were returned at the end of which five gave us a three-star, fifteen a four-star and fourteen a five-star rating. http://www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk/events/we-migrants-they-invaders