Landowning and Labour in the Rural Economy 269
to interpret the terms on which the Ostrogoths were settled on the land, we
may choose to see a massive influx in rural contexts as Ostrogothic settlers
moved onto rural estates en masse or a much smaller rural footprint with the
bulk of Ostrogoths simply receiving revenues from those estates. It is not my
intention here to weigh into that debate, for it is the subject of a subtle and
persuasive chapter elsewhere in the present volume.22 But, for our current
purposes we may observe that if the Ostrogoths did settle on the land in large
numbers, they have left little in the way of a distinctive material culture behind
them, and that material culture is rather geographically restricted. A relatively
small number of tombs have been excavated whose (mostly female) occu-
pants have accoutrements that appear to mark them as Ostrogothic.23 These
tombs cluster in central and northern Italy and along the Adriatic coast, but
are to date entirely absent from southern Italy and Sicily, and from the territory
west of Rome.24 Similarly, inscriptional evidence containing Gothic personal
names and modern place names with Gothic elements occur almost exclu-
sively north of the Po River, leaving the strong impression that Ostrogothic
presence on the Italian peninsula was primarily concentrated in the northern
and eastern parts.25 This proposition brings into high relief questions about
the purpose of the Ostrogothic settlements. It does not seem likely that only
these regions were economically impoverished, so arguments that rest upon
economic necessity are problematic.26 On the other hand, attempts to ascribe
this distinctive pattern to military factors appear to founder on the predomi-
nance of female burials among funerary contexts that have been recognized as
Ostrogothic.27 And in any event the extensive estates ascribed to Theodahad
before his accession as king in Tuscia, for example, raise doubts about an
overly neat equation of the distribution of Ostrogothic material culture and
the dispersal of the human population.28 At the current state of knowledge
these questions must remain open.
22 See Halsall, “The Ostrogothic Military” (Chapter 7) in this volume.
23 Christie, Constantine to Charlemagne, p. 451, with further references.
24 Bierbrauer, Die ostgotische Grab- und Schatzfunde remains seminal. Note also the recent
discussion of Ostrogothic cemeteries in De Vingo, “Archéologie du pouvoir”.
25 Moorhead, Theoderic, pp. 69–70, with further references. Note, however, Christie,
Constantine to Charlemagne, p. 453 with figure 96, arguing strongly in favour of settlement
predominantly in rural areas.
26 Thus, for example, Christie, Constantine to Charlemagne, p. 455.
27 See also Halsall and Swain in this volume.
28 Procopius, Gothic War 1.3.2. For Theodahad’s landholdings, Vera “Proprietà terriera”,
pp. 137–8; Vitiello, Theodahad: A Platonic King, pp. 31–7. See, for a comparable argument
about southern Italy, Noyé, “Social Relations”.