Peter S. Wells
Barbarians to Angels
My book is about the peoples who are often referred to as “barbarians” during the period commonly known as “the Dark Ages.” I argue that far from being the uncivilized and unaccomplished peoples whom many Late Roman writers described, the communities of the early Middle Ages achieved great heights in artistic creativity, technology, manufacturing, and commerce.
The special approach of Barbarians to Angels is to use the archaeological evidence of these peoples, rather than trying to understand them by taking at face value the assertions of Roman writers. The Romans were not part of these societies. So I use the direct evidence of material culture to understand how people of early medieval Europe fashioned their social, economic, and religious worlds.
Editor: Erind Pajo
Barbarians to Angels
Peter S. Wells Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered W. W. Norton 256 pages, 8 x 5 1/4 inches ISBN 978 0393335392
Available here →October 28, 2009
20091028-wells-peter-on-barbarians-to-angels-dark-ages-reconsidered-1
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Peter S. Wells
Peter S. Wells is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota. Besides the book featured in this Rorotoko interview, his publications include The Barbarians Speak: How the Conquered Peoples Shaped Roman Europe (Princeton University Press, 1999), Beyond Celts, Germans, and Scythians: Archaeology and Identity in Iron Age Europe (Duckworth, 2001), The Battle that Stopped Rome: Emperor Augustus, Arminius, and the Slaughter of the Legions in the Teutoburg Forest (W.W. Norton, 2003).
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The Dark Ages are dark only because the surviving descriptions were written by outsiders.
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