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- AMSTERDAM (AP) -- Can there be such a thing as nice barbarians? In pre-medieval
Holland, at least, they appear to have been the perfect neighbours: pleasant
peasants who pretty much minded their own business.
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- Challenging the traditional depiction
of Germanic tribes as vicious marauders, Dutch archeologists said Monday
they have unearthed evidence that people branded as "barbarians"
actually coexisted peacefully with the Romans in some parts of northern
Europe.
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- The State Service for Archeological Investigations
said its excavation of Roman ruins near the village of Voerendaal in the
southern Netherlands uncovered the remains of crude wooden dwellings used
by Germanic farmers who worked for Roman landowners.
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- Significantly, there are no traces of
a violent conquest by the tribes, and none have been found in other excavations
nearby or in neighbouring Belgium, the archeologists said.
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- Although Germanic tribes unquestionably
earned their barbaric reputation in the Balkans and the eastern stretches
of the Roman empire, there's no sign they rampaged their way through the
Low Countries, said lead researcher Rene Proos.
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- "If it happened, we should have
found weaponry, arrowheads, traces of fire and pieces of mutilated bodies.
We haven't. The stories of violence and bloodshed must be taken with a
big grain of salt."
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- A spokeswoman for the Smithsonian Institution's
National Museum of Natural History in Washington said experts on the period
had not seen the Dutch finding and declined to comment.
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- The Dutch scholars say the tribes who
mingled with the Romans in the southern province of Limburg late in the
third century likely came from just above the Rhine, which served as the
Roman empire's northernmost border.
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- Evidence of their presence abounds, Proos
said. Archeologists have found remains of their simple homes and the unusual
workshops they built partly underground.
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- Unlike their Roman neighbours, their
pottery was more primitive and they grew mostly rye, an oddity to the wheat-raising
Romans.
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- Over a period of 100 years, other simple
homes that housed Germanic agricultural workers sprang up near a Roman
villa, suggesting that "barbarians" adjusted well to the highly
organized and complex Roman society, it said.
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- Persistent images of these groups as
raping, pillaging invaders can be mostly traced to classical writings from
distant Rome, which were based on hearsay and used to describe all Germanic
peoples, Proos said.
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- "They wrote down terrible stories,"
he said. "But what we've found doesn't really support this."
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