Given that mindset – the assumption that ‘superior races’ must dominate, conquer and either enslave or replace ‘inferior races’ – it is not shocking that these scholars tended to assume, any time they could detect a hint of population movement, that what was happening was extermination and replacement.
That said over time we’ve developed better historical tools to allow us to question those assumptions. For the earliest 19th century scholars, all they had were the raw textual evidence. And that’s tricky because ancient writers routinely describe places and peoples as being utterly, completely and entirely destroyed – verdicts carelessly accepted by readers both 19th century and contemporary – when the actual destruction was very clearly less total. Students of Roman history will have in their heads, for instance, that in 146 BC Carthage and Corinth were utterly, completely and entirely destroyed and that Numantia was similarly annihilated in 133.
Except they weren’t. Corinth is, after all, still around for St. Paul to write letters to the Corinthians in the first century AD and it is still a distinctively Greek settlement, not some Roman colony. Carthage is recolonized by the Romans in 44 BC, but the people from Carthage continue to represent themselves as Phoenician or Levantine, suggesting quite a lot of the population remained Punic. Most notable here, of course, is the emperor Septimius Severus, who was from that reestablished Carthage, who is represented in our sources (and seemingly represented himself) as of mixed Italian-Punic heritage, with branches of his family living in Syria as locals. Evidently the Carthaginians weren’t all destroyed after all.
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In short, many students and scholars are swift to accept declarations by our sources that a given people was ‘wiped out’ or annihilated or replaced when it is clear that what we are reading is intense hyperbole meant to stress that these people were badly brutalized (but not wiped out).
Alas, the first real tool we got to assess population movement reinforced rather than discouraged the 19th century ‘all replacement, all the time’ view: linguistics. After all, if your sources say there was a population migration and the local language changes, well chances are you really do have a lot of people moving. But assuming replacement here is extremely tricky because the thing about languages is that people learn them. One need only briefly look at a list of languages under threat today to see how people will migrate towards more useful or popular languages – abandoning local ones – even in the absence of official repression and indeed sometimes in the presence of active state efforts to sustain local languages. But it was easy for a lot of older scholars who already had a migration-and-replacement mental model to point, as we began to puzzle out the relations between languages, to languages moving and expanding and assume that the reason one language replaced another in a region is that the former language’s speakers moved in, killed everyone else and set up shop. The fact that locally dominant languages tended to become universal over a few generations could be taken as (false) confirmation of a replacement narrative.
What begins to lead scholars to question many (though not all!) of these ‘replacements’ was not ‘wokeness’ but rather archaeology, which offered a way of tracking the presence of cultural signifiers other than language. One example of this, noted by Simon James in The Atlantic Celts (1999) is population movement into Britain during the Iron Age. Older scholars, noting that Britain was full of Celtic-Language speakers (even more so before the Anglo-Saxons showed up, of course), had imagined (in addition to Bronze Age or very early Iron Age migrations) an effective invasion of the isles by continental Celtic-Language speakers (read: Gauls with La Tène material culture). But the archaeology revealed that burial customs do not shift to resemble continental burial customs – had there been a great wave of invaders, they would have brought their distinctive elite warrior burials and grave goods with them and they didn’t. Instead, the evidence we have is for significant human mobility and trade over the channel between two culturally similar yet distinct groups which remain distinct through the mid-to-late Iron Age (and beyond).
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Now I should note here at the end that I have pushed here against the assumption that migrations and movements always meant extermination and replacement. Indeed, it is far more often that we see – often quite violently, to be clear (but not always so) – populations blend to a substantial degree. At the same time obviously sometimes peoples really did push or wipe out pre-existing populations. The aforementioned Early European Farmers – the first wave of farming peoples entering Europe, coming from Anatolia, do seem to have largely displaced almost all of the pre-existing European hunter-gatherer population. Of course living in the United States, the arrival of European settlers resulted in a catastrophic decline of the Native American population, primarily from disease and also from warfare and displacement.
The point here is not a pollyannish assertion that historical population contacts were always peaceful (or the equally silly proposition that they were always peaceful except for European imperialism). The point is instead that these contacts were complex: incoming migrations did not always or even usually mass-replace existing populations. They very frequently blended, sometimes relatively more peacefully, sometimes very violently. Meanwhile there was also a lot of human mobility that didn’t involve mass migration or warfare at all, resulting in the nice neat ethnic lines imagined by earlier scholars rapidly turning into a blur with strongly blended edges all around.
From the article:
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