Rewriting the Rural History of Early Medieval Italy: Twenty-five Years of Medieval Archaeology Reviewed

Abstract

The archaeology of rural settlements is a comparatively new branch of history. Its genealogy is easy to trace. Spurred on by the growth of economic and social history in the inter-war years, Dutch archaeologists, like A.E. van Giffin, and younger Danish archaeologists, such as Gunther Hatt and Axel Steensburg, undertook large open-area excavations of North Sea Migration period settlements. Van Giffin's excavation of the terp at Ezinge during the ‘thirties is a typical example. Using open-area excavation, a controlled form of the clearance excavation being employed on the large classical sites in Mussolini's Italy, it became feasible to examine the Migration-period architecture (as an architectural historian might) and the evolution of the settlement (as a classical topographer might do it). Neither would have been possible if a site such as Ezinge had been trenched. As far as we can tell today, van Giffin et al. did not intend to rewrite history, so much as to use archaeology to confirm prevailing ethnically-oriented theses about Migration period peoples. In some ways this was also the case when W.G. Hoskins and Maurice Beresford began to undertake small excavations of deserted medieval villages in England in 1947. Both hoped that small excavation trenches might help them to date the desertion of some of these settlements. In practice, of course, what they discovered in the course of nineteen excavations merely proved to be confusing (cf. Hurst, 1971: 83). Hoskins turned to other matters, but Beresford pursued the possibilities of archaeology at Wharram Percy, a fine example of a so-called deserted medieval village.