The material culture and agricultural traditions in the early medieval eastern Merovingian areas: a new study proposal

Based on a study of some types of early medieval iron farm tools produced in the eastern Merovingian areas, it can be asserted that such implements were not the products of Mediterranean craftsmen but rather were of allochthonous origin, and specifically central European. Since, some of these tools, such as special kinds of iron ploughs, were completely unknown in Italy prior to the Langobard conquest, such an event must be recognised not only of having brought about important socio-political and territorial transformations but also as having had an even more profound impact on the material culture. To this regard, it is important to consider the Regnum Langobardorum, along with the outlying and bordering zones – and Bavaria and Alamannia in particular – with which the kingdom developed an intense cultural and commercial network that included the entire eastern Merovingian sector and of which the Italian peninsula certainly acted as the central junction. Hence, the eastern Merovingian areas cannot be considered simply as an outlying zone of the Frankish world but, on the contrary, must be considered, from an economic and cultural standpoint, a relatively well-defined and uniform geographic space that, between the end of the 6th and 7th centuries, played a central role in the transmission of technological know-how and farm tools from central-northern Europe to the Mediterranean regions.