Revue Archéologique du Centre de la France (Dec 2022)
Barbares, militaires et fonctionnaires dans le centre et le centre-ouest de la Gaule durant l’Antiquité tardive. 1re partie : les données
Abstract
This article, published here in two parts, is the result of a paper published at the ATEG Tours Colloquium in 2018, and concerns the examination of all available data about the presence, in a wide Center-Ouest and Center of Gaul, on the one hand of Roman soldiers and officials on the other, of exogenous populations known as “barbarians”, traveling through this territory or settling there, from the end of the 3rd century to that of the 5th century. Mobilizable data are examined one by one, whether textual or archeological, from corpus – published online separately – designed to be as comprehensive and wide as possible. Criticism of their relevance and heuristic value to this issue is studied- in detail, leading to conclusions about these issues – which themselves have a close dialectical relationship. Taking into account the complementarities but also sometimes the existing contradictions between textual and archeological documentation, although the data used may sometimes appear relatively marginal or even somewhat irrelevant, and thus some disappointing conclusions, in several cases, we arrive at observations which seem significant, in particular, thanks to an adequate renewed cartography, as regards the spatial distribution of certain phenomena.
