I was delighted to work with colleagues in Tübingen between October 2019 and June 2020. I have three ongoing projects: a shorter survey entitled Imperial Periphery: Northern Barbaricum in Late Antiquity, a major study entitled The End of Western Antiquity: The Transformations of the Year 600 and a second edition of my 2007 monograph Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376-568. The intersection of these is the archaeology of what is now modern Germany, the northern Netherlands, Scandinavia, northern Britain and Ireland, between c.300 and c.650. It has been especially interesting to compare and contrast changes visible in these regions with those in the former provinces of the western Roman Empire. Was there greater or lesser divergence between the two sides of the old limes after the fifth century? How did patterns of migration between them change? What role did the end of the frontier play in the history of western European migration? It is also interesting to think about how one compares contemporaneous changes or thinks about analogous topics in areas where the evidence is overwhelmingly archaeological and those where we have an increasingly rich written record.
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