Carl Harper
speaker
28 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 30 Apr
Carl Harper’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Any idea that the Roman Empire creates a really impermeable frontier that holds its own and then all of a sudden breaks down and gives way to a wave of barbarians isn't credible.
is a really exciting new frontier for those of us who work in history and archaeology.
And what this new study does is add another piece of the puzzle that helps us see that any idea that the Roman Empire creates a really impermeable frontier that holds its own until sometime after 400 and then all of a sudden breaks down and gives way to a wave of barbarians isn't credible.
Right.
And I think that this paper belongs to a wave of studies over the last few years that do indicate that there was a lot of migration.
People were moving around.
It's just that a lot of that migration predates the breakdown of the frontier.
And this does include people from Northern Europe who probably speak an ancestor of the German language.
who are coming into the Roman world.
Many of them are probably very highly Romanized.
Many of them probably are Romans and certainly probably think of themselves as Romans before the frontier itself collapses.
And so it's another reminder that the Roman Empire itself moves people around and creates mechanisms for migration long before the frontier falls.
That's what the Romans want you to believe, I think.
So that stereotype goes back a long way.
And
It's certainly true that there are important cultural and technological and social differences in the way people are living on one part of Europe or another.
But those change and those in many ways converge.
And by the later Roman period, it can sometimes be amazing how similar culturally and socially people were on what we may think of if you draw a line on a map.
say that's where the frontier was.
By the later Roman period, that's not a very reliable indicator of where civilization stopped and barbarism began.
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