-Caveat Lector-
Germanic 'barbarians' likely pleasant, archeologists argue
By WILLIAM J. KOLE
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (February 8, 1999 2:03 p.m. EST
http://www.nandotimes.com) - Can there be such a thing as nice barbarians? In
pre-medieval Holland, at least, they appear to have been the perfect
neighbors: pleasant peasants who by and large minded their own business.
Challenging the traditional depiction of Germanic tribes as vicious marauders,
Dutch archaeologists said Monday they have unearthed new evidence that people
branded as "barbarians" actually coexisted peacefully with the Romans in some
parts of northern Europe.
The State Service for Archaeological Investigations said its excavation of
Roman ruins near the village of Voerendaal in the southern Netherlands
uncovered the remains of crude wooden dwellings used by Germanic farmers who
worked for Roman landowners.
Significantly, there are no traces of a violent conquest by the tribes, and
none have been found in other excavations nearby or in neighboring Belgium,
the archaeologists said.
While Germanic tribes unquestionably earned their barbaric reputation in the
Balkans and the eastern stretches of the Roman empire, lead researcher Rene
Proos said there's no sign that they rampaged their way through the Low
Countries.
"If it happened, we should have found weaponry, arrowheads, traces of fire and
pieces of mutilated bodies. We haven't," he said. "The stories of violence and
bloodshed must be taken with a big grain of salt."
A spokeswoman for the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural
History in Washington said experts on the period had not seen the Dutch
finding and declined to comment.
The Dutch scholars say the tribes who mingled with the Romans in the southern
province of Limburg late in the third century A.D. likely came from just above
the Rhine, which served as the Roman empire's northernmost border.
Evidence of their presence abounds, Proos said. Archaeologists have found
remains of their simple homes and the unusual workshops they built partly
underground.
Unlike their Roman neighbors, their pottery was more primitive and they grew
mostly rye, an oddity to the wheat-raising Romans.
Over a period of 100 years, other simple homes that housed Germanic
agricultural workers sprang up near a Roman villa, suggesting that so-called
barbarians adjusted well to the highly organized and complex Roman society, it
said.
Persistent images of these groups as raping, pillaging invaders can be mostly
traced to classical writings from distant Rome, which were based on hearsay
and used to describe all Germanic peoples, Proos said.
"They wrote down terrible stories," he said. "But what we've found doesn't
really support this."
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