Documenting the Frankish Migrations/Invasions: Creating a Narrative at the Juncture of French Archaeology and History

In the early nineteenth century, French enthusiasm for archaeology grew out of expectations of what the emerging discipline might add to knowledge about the national and provincial past. Based on pre-Revolutionary analyses, prevailing French ideology argued that the ancient Gauls were the forebears of the Third Estate, whereas the royal dynasty and aristocracy descended directly the Franks. Under the July Monarchy, this emphasis on Celtic ancestry was reinvigorated by bourgeois liberal historians and bourgeois members of antiquarian societies, who invoked the Gauls and Gallo-Romans as the ancestors of France. But industrialization, not least the expansion of the country's rail network, uncovered long forgotten cemeteries across the country, and these changed everything. As antiquarians grew more familiar with local material, some observed that not all of the artifacts exhumed could be identified as Gallic or Roman. Nineteenth-century archaeological studies concentrated almost entirely on artifact typologies, an approach that can be attributed in part to the creation, under the aegis of the Ministry of Public Instruction, of the Comité de travaux historiques in 1834. This governmental body encouraged provincial elites to collect rather than interpret data about local history and customs so that research could be carried out centrally in Paris. Even in Paris, few archaeologists sought to create larger narratives about the migration period and the early Middle Ages. At most, artifacts were used to illustrate narratives drawn from historical texts, commonly Augustin Thierry's Récits des temps mérovingiens. As late as the early years of the Third Republic, when archaeologists began to synthesize the material at their disposal, they still relied extensively on the narratives of historians to interpret their data. This presentation will examine the interpretative dependence of nineteenth-century archaeologists on historical narratives and its legacy in modern archaeological research on the late Roman and Merovingian periods.