The Last Horizons of Roman Gaul: Communication, Community, and Power at the End of Antiquity

In the fifth and sixth centuries CE, the Roman Empire fragmented, along with its network of political, cultural, and socio-economic connections. How did that network’s collapse reshape the social and mental horizons of communities in one part of the Roman world, now eastern France? Did new political frontiers between barbarian kingdoms redirect those communities’ external connections, and if so, how? To address these questions, this dissertation focuses on the cities of two Gallo-Roman tribal groups. The Aeduans and Lingons inhabited a strategic crossroads region in what is now Burgundy and Champagne, and between ca. 460-534 passed from Roman to barbarian rule – first under the Burgundians and then under the Merovingian Franks. Close prosopographical study of the written sources and distribution-analysis of material sources – coins and ceramics – illuminate the region’s experience of the end of Empire. An unprecedented study of the distribution of Burgundian coins found in France revises the consensus model for the movement of gold coins across the post-Roman West. The dissertation’s multiple independent types of evidence reveal and mutually corroborate previously unrecognized communication patterns in late antique eastern Gaul. During the fifth and sixth centuries, Aeduan and Lingon communication horizons contracted sharply but unevenly. To the northwest, where Burgundians and Franks faced off across a sometimes-tense border, traditional socio-economic ties withered almost completely, only to resume after the Frankish conquests of the 530s. To the south, however, throughout the fifth and sixth centuries, Aeduans and Lingons more easily forged long-range connections across a different but also frequently hostile political border, with the Goths. The struggles of violent kings, then, could decisively reshape communication networks, but did not always do so. To explain the importance of politics relative to other influences – social, economic, and environmental – the dissertation turns to social gravity and network analysis theories. The study culminates in a multi-scalar model for the complex and dynamic communications of late antique Gaul. That interdisciplinary approach models new methodological possibilities for explaining pre-modern communication history.Histor