 Oké, bedankt. Als je een goed kijkje hebt op het programma, denk ik dat je kunt zien dat er in Hooridum en Mija de enige naam van deze A4 met de letter FSA is. Dus ik denk dat het een geweldig honor is om hier te praten. En ik bedankt de organisaties voor de invaartij om hier te praten op deze verhaal. Sorry. Ik denk dat ik er was invaartig, omdat we een ERC-fonderd project begonnen op de post-Roman economische ontwikkeling van de Noord-Bestse continent van Europa in 1,5 miljoen keer. Dus eigenlijk ga ik spelen over bezoekers die moeten plaatsnemen en nog niet plaatsnemen. Maar we ontwikkelen deze bezoekers natuurlijk op de basis van een aantal ideeën waarin het interesse zou zijn. Het is een probleem dat over 100 jaar het eerst nu voor over 100 jaar is. Onze meeste bezoekers vragen hoe Noord-Bestse Europa economisch ontwikkelen na de verhaal van de Roman Empire en specifiek, wie de agenten van deze ontwikkeling waren. In bezoek in de vorige jaar bezoekers waren gemaakt door deze debat, door historiën ook met materiaal culturen. In hun werk er is een common denominator die is dat agenten van de ontwikkeling zijn. Aalie demand ontwikkelen de economische toekomst. Dit is misschien wel waarom maar is het wel waarom Noord-Bestse Europa een periverale gebied van de Roman Empire die nog steeds op de koor van de Carolinian Empire een paar 100 jaar later was. Noord-Bestse Europa showed a ruined countryside since the 3rd century and towns had shrunk to small fortified settlements. The final blow to demand was delivered by the departure of the emperor from Trier to Italy and the retreat of the Roman army. Northern Gaul was a backwater of the empire but it got repopulated quite fast from the late 5th century on. Hundreds of cemeteries are now known in the region like the Picardie some of them being very large. Repopulation however is not evenly distributed over Northern Gaul which we are analyzing now. Together with this repopulation important changes in burial rights take place. One can see nagging behind I guess this is the Picardie with all these cemeteries and the big ones and changes in burial rights take place. One can see many grave goods referring to food and drink the inhumation of the fully clothed person the strong accent of gender differentiation and one wonders why that was the case and this burial right developed quickly in the northern parts of the former Roman empire. One can conclude that next to the repopulation considerable new investments to place in burial rights and probably in other life cycle rituals too. Life is burial so is our hypothesis was however not a privilege of the happy few. It seems to be widely practiced in the countryside of Northern Gaul. What you see in this right is a sixth century boys grave one of many that you can show in a rural settlement cemetery near Nangbeiding in the Netherlands with a sword, a lance, a shield glass and pottery vessels and a bronze basin. Looking at all the material in graves in Northern Gaul one can for the moment conclude that huge quantities of weapons, pottery glass vessels, jubilee, belts, bronze vessels horse gear etc. have been deposited in graves mostly by the rural population and many of these objects were not of local origin Byzantine coins, cowrie shells beads, garments, belt elements came from the Mediterranean the Indian Ocean or the Baltic so the rural population obviously possessed substantial amounts of material culture of high quality produced locally, regionally or far away they must have had access to the networks in which these objects circulated one way or another and it is this one way or another you cannot formulate a more simple research question than this one we are analyzing the one way or another and I got quite a lot of money for that so stay in the European Union the most used current model to explain this is the top down prestige goods model such as presented by Heinrich Stoyer kings and aristocrats exchange gifts among themselves or they take prestige items by force kings and aristocrats control crafts people at their courts and aristocrats present gifts to their client members of the revenue which must include I guess because this is mainly of very sharp is it sharp? because this is mainly about men but I guess that these kings and aristocrats were also handing out fancy dress items for the wives of these clients etc so there is no room for women in this scheme there is neither room for the unfree in this scheme there are no unfree people objects from far away were obtained through long distance trade and the agents of this long distance trades in the upper corner here were in contact with the kings and aristocrats only the free were blocked from this long distance trade the circulation of foreign objects is thus controlled by the elite a similar model more recently has been presented by my co-dutchman Jola Nikolaj in his book the splendor of power with the exception that long distance traders traders were also in contact with the free these are the long distance traders in this model the big question is how much elite control was there actually in the period 450-650 in Norengol when all this wealth was deposited in the grace by the rural population I would say that one would need a fairly only present aristocracy to control the mass circulation of all these fancy objects from the Mediterranean near East India and the Baltic in my view this top down prestige goods model is a theoretical obstacle to a proper understanding of the economic development in Norengol yet there is yet another theoretical obstacle it's the peasant mode of production which holds that peasants are not inclined to produce more than is necessary for their basic needs or in more economic terms their marginal investments of labor are too large to produce a meaningful extra unit such extra units are only produced when there are outside incentives such as feudal lords demanding a rent or the market thus in a peasant mode of production there can be no economic growth that only happens with a change over to a feudal mode of production which you can read in a very big green book however Eric Wolf's explanation of peasant household economics might provide an important clue to what had happened what can happen in a peasant mode of production an important element of the basic needs is the ceremonial fund they are the resources to live an acceptable social life even in small scale communities one would like to help out the neighbor when his harvest fails or give a big party when your daughter marries so what happens when there are serious changes in the needs for a ceremonial fund changing ritual repertoires by the rural population may bring about quantitatively because there are many of them important changes in the demand that are difficult to conceptualize with current models of economic thinking on the post Roman period in which rural populations do not figure prominently so is this actually what happened in the late 5th and 6th century in modern gold so what we do is to reconsider the circulation of wealth in modern gold and the role of various agents in this circulation first of all we have to create a proper database of merwinian archaeology in modern gold you have nice maps where all the annual sex and semitrails are we don't have them so to our frustration such an overview does not exist which is actually a conditional cynical unknown for any explanation of merwinian modern gold so creating this database and this is just we are mapping all the sites and it's really in progress each day there are new sites added to this map we are and it costs a lot of time and staff we are also mapping the distribution of a number of indicators for the distribution of wealth such as exotic beads and the people who are doing all this are in this room today so this is really in progress that when we finished our mapping probably the whole area is covered by dots indicating that the whole area that everyone has exotic beads from the Mediterranean and India and if this fails I'll just make the dots a little bit bigger glass vessels we are mapping all the glass vessels and you can still read catalogue entries in German like near everyone could have this when they had it I don't have put it in the grave that's my other escape we are mapping broaches we find them in the smallest of cemeteries and smallest of settlements and Aaron Paul on the corridor is mapping merwinian gold coins and he is filling in record 13523 or something like that there's gold everywhere in the landscape so if you are thinking about this we have also considering the circulation of wealth is unavoidable to reflect again on the meaning of the most lavish burials we have in northern gold we have to understand why they are there is it the aristocracy that we are tackling here we are critically assessing the archeological Pavlovian reaction that a lavish grave or the presence of gold is aristocratic this interpretation is vested in the modern conceptualization of the individual which also explains why we are frantically searching for the names of these persons we want to see historically existing persons preferably kings and queens here they are however their historicity might not be what was really important at the time of the burial I always compare such grace with the lives of saints written in the early Middle Ages if you read them and you think you know everything of the historical person you missed the linguistic turn in historiography now on the other hand they are not entirely fictional there is a social logic of the text as Gabby L. Spiegel has explained to us Grace might be like saints lies they might not exactly represent the historical person but will refer to some extent to the social conditions in which the burial took place literary theorists like the Dutchman Hans Gertens ask the following question into what position does a text a film, a rock video or a commercial try to maneuver us through specific strategies of narration specific shots images and other forms of representation one could rephrase this into what position does a grave or a burial write try to maneuver us through audience or the public present in those days through specific strategies of narration specific shots, images and other forms of representation so let's stick to the example of the largest burial in cult places that you just saw what has in my view been insufficiently considered is that these are almost exclusively women and children there are very few rich men's race in cult places this is more important this is more important than referring to them as queens and to try to identify women must have been crucial in the definition of the relation between groups and the supernatural world like it was Clovis's wife who was crucial in his conversion to Christianity whether that was true or representation when we look at a burial maybe you should not search for the truth but for the representation behind it in most cases in the logic of the text which referred to an important aspect of Meridian society that one does not encounter much in texts written by men but we archaeologists can see it as I always see there is a lot of society outside texts I would not be surprised that these am I running let's see what happens here no I would not be surprised that these life is grace in cult places which in the early days of Meridian archaeology were considered a contradiction in terminies are related to a change in the conceptualisation of wealth and the development of the idea of treasure in heaven so brilliantly explained by Peter Brown interpreting these grace as those of kings, queens and princes and accepting that they are thus explained is too simple he misses the essence of those barriers if you map such grace in modern gold I haven't got the right map now with some examples here the area where Levis burial is common you will find out that there are relatively few actually there are not many in each generation up till now we have to consider the fact that they are quite incidental they are not a normal phenomenon that they might and that they might not point to only present aristocracy finally we are considering the role of central places such as Roman towns and the new viki of the Meris valley and we would like to understand production in modern gold topics that I am not discussing today now I was invited on a conference on the Staffordshire Horde so I would have reason to talk the Staffordshire Horde so now back to the Staffordshire Horde with the risk of commenting on it without too much intimate knowledge but I am confident that you will tell me that to interpret it I would say that we should first and foremost consider that gold was probably much wider available in society than is often suggested in the book The Encounter Kings, Bishops and Aristocrats again but I would suggest to compute a range of other agents such as traders, peasants, goldsmiths abbots of small minsters etc I don't know in England but I would suggest that they all had a fairly direct access to gold and silver luxuries and coins if we try to make an idea of the circulation of gold objects I think I got the scheme like that if we try to make an idea of the circulation of gold objects we can start at the moment where they were produced on the top of the screen to do so an influence of gold is necessary whatever the form it might have then the produced objects start to circulate which might be a quite complicated affair at some point those objects get out of circulation because they were deposited in a grave were lost or deposited in dry and wet conditions just explained or as a ritual gift or they might enter a heart or they are directly recycled the important term that should be in the slide is transformation objects transform in their life cycle not only in a physical sense which is suggested when things are added to the health but also in relation to their social value and their imaginary value which is the value which is related to the system of values and the system of how people think that the world is operating moreover we are we discuss maybe that we are dealing with composite artifacts that is when a warrior is wearing a sword with a belt there is a sword and a hilt with a hilt that you can change there is a scabbard and there is a belt each of these objects when they are in the normal circulation are handed over from father to son you can separate these things you can give one son a scabbard some give the bull trick so these composite artifacts play a very complicated role in the intergenerational exchange of such objects and that must have taken place because in a statutory order are objects that are almost 100 years old we have of course to ask about horse it just has been done brilliantly why they were created, when, by whom and for what purposes one type of board is popping up in the English landscape by then they might have a reliquary a lot of difficult words for me to pronounce a chalice, a patine and maybe even more gold than silver so if you map horts in England contemporary with the Staffordshire Hort the minsters that existed by 675 should be put on the map as well some of the horts were simply connected for the gold to be reduced in the production of new objects there is nothing special about such horts they have a quite profane character but what these objects need is again a transformation robbing the objects from their previous social and imaginary values and reducing it exclusively to the third value, its material value and this might have been done by the act of destruction and fragmentation and I am actually suggesting to you that you interpret in the Staffordshire Hort you should forget about all these symbolic social and other connections that the objects have in the other contexts using the other context to interpret the hort might be something that has some methodological difficulties occasionally such a hort does not get into the melting pot maybe this temperature hort is such a hort buried as far as we know now as far as I see in a fairly insignificant place but correctly that if I am wrong just before entering the melting pot it might already be ideologically removed from the world of kings, bishops and aristocrats maybe to be turned into coins or to the peasant tree remember not all gold is circulating in their hands only using the interpretive framework of intact gold objects in their normal circulation as you put them by this one the deposition in a grave or in a wet or dry ritual deposition or in a church hort to understand a collection of fragmented and broken objects this lead us to some extent whatever is the case one thing is certain the Staffordshire Hort makes 7th century England much richer than it was and it makes England richer today as well it will certainly enrich the debate on the early medieval societies on both sides of the channel in Taingord we have to go back there is a tunnel which has no knowledge of brexit debates