The Rural Riches Project
The Rural Riches Project addressed the question as to how (northwestern) Europe economically emerged from the collapse of the Roman state in the West. The project addressed several general accepted notions that are in dire need of revision. They are the general notions of strong decline and elite initiatives which made recovery possible. It cannot be ignored that towns declined in size, population numbers dropped, rural society did not have the ‘prosperity’ it had in the heydays of the Roman empire.
Most modern authors agree on the idea that the post-Roman economic development was the result of the initiatives and the demand of the elite. This paradigm of elite control of production and (long-distance) trade seems to be at odds with the vast amounts of objects, often precious and of exotic origin, found in the thousands of richly furnished rural cemeteries. The current images are created on the basis of the written evidence, produced by the elite, for the (literate) elite in the interest of the elite. But what about the rest of the population which hardly features in those written texts? How important are the political antagonisms and related identity politics of the elite for those who bury their dead in the villages of northern Gaul?
This project studied the rural population and its unexpected wealth on its own terms.
The central research question was: What role did the mass of the rural population play in the post-Roman economic development in northwestern Europe and what was the nature of that economy?
With this ambitious archaeological project, we aim to contribute substantially to the debate on the origins of the European economy and to a debate on the role of the mass of the population in economic processes in the past. We envisaged some important practical and intellectual problems. One major intellectual problem is conceptualizing the economy of the post-Roman period. It was not functioning as our modern economy although on the other hand it is impossible to exclude commercial, profit-oriented transactions. Much depends on the conceptualization of ‘value’. We analyze the value of objects (including coins) along four criteria: material value, object value, social value and imagined values. This leads to including many non-economic elements (in a modern sense) into the assessment of ‘economic’ practices, leading up to considering the moral character of the past economy and the exchanges. These exchanges are as much an element of the material existence of a society as they are elements in the social and cultural construction of society, beyond the simple dichotomy of interaction between what was Roman and what was Germanic, a way of thinking the ancient elite writers like to seduce us.
Another intellectual problem is the interpretation of the remains of the early medieval burials. Past interpretations are often inspired by the writings of the elite in those days seducing archaeologists to think in ethnic terms and vertical hierarchy. The products of burial rites, such as those we excavated may rather be ‘sacred fictions’, images created to convey messages on what was deemed important to the burying group and the norms and values they were confronted with, adhered to or negotiated on. This makes burial groups active agents instead of slaves of fixed ideas.
Another practical problem was the total disorganization of the needed data in northern Gaul, (the Benelux, the German Rhineland and Moselle valley and northern France). There is no comprehensive well-organized dataset. We created one and the resulting database is one of the outstanding products of the project, see:
https://earlymedievaleurope.org/(opens in new window)
