Early Medieval archaeology has stressed a cultural «gap» in north-western Italy, once a land of the Roman Empire, between the late Roman and the Early medieval period, due to the spreading of allochthonous groups, mainly of German origin, and consequently to their political and military control. The burial of dressed bodies was a basic feature of the funerary rituals of these populations; they used to lay into the grave those elements considered as inalienable possessions of the dead, as markers of his/her social status, such as weapons for men and clothes, fittings or jewels for women. The settlement scheme in the Piedmont region, as far as we know today, is different from the pattern of large, basically egalitarian groups, jointly established in quite short periods according to their needs of political and/or military occupation, which has been considered as a standard pattern of the period. Maybe the difference dipended on the settlement of limited and diversified groups, possibly extended families which progressively occupied (through legal grant conditions) not only tax lands, but also properties where the previous rights of land grant had already been forfeited. This happened in a long period of time, maybe starting from the late 4th-5th centuries, within the land reorganization process attested by both historical and linguistic sources.
Il problema della etnogenesi delle popolazioni germaniche tra V e VII secolo nelle aree alpine occidentali e le sue conseguenze sullo sviluppo del modello insediativo
DE VINGO, Paolo;
2005-01-01
Abstract
Early Medieval archaeology has stressed a cultural «gap» in north-western Italy, once a land of the Roman Empire, between the late Roman and the Early medieval period, due to the spreading of allochthonous groups, mainly of German origin, and consequently to their political and military control. The burial of dressed bodies was a basic feature of the funerary rituals of these populations; they used to lay into the grave those elements considered as inalienable possessions of the dead, as markers of his/her social status, such as weapons for men and clothes, fittings or jewels for women. The settlement scheme in the Piedmont region, as far as we know today, is different from the pattern of large, basically egalitarian groups, jointly established in quite short periods according to their needs of political and/or military occupation, which has been considered as a standard pattern of the period. Maybe the difference dipended on the settlement of limited and diversified groups, possibly extended families which progressively occupied (through legal grant conditions) not only tax lands, but also properties where the previous rights of land grant had already been forfeited. This happened in a long period of time, maybe starting from the late 4th-5th centuries, within the land reorganization process attested by both historical and linguistic sources.
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