ABSTRACT
In recent years Bonnie Effros, professor of history at the State University of New York at Binghamton, has published three books and numerous articles exploring both the contributions which archaeology can make to our understanding of the Merovingian period and also the strengths and weaknesses of archaeological method. Perhaps no historian is more at home with archaeological evidence than Effros, and some of her sharpest criticisms have struck at historians who have made incautious or inappropriate use of archaeological findings. In this chapter from her book Merovingian Mortuary Archaeology (2003) Effros demonstrates both her acute sensitivity to methodological issues and her keen sense of historical realities. Effros is also alert to issues of gender. In reading this selection, the reader should be particularly concerned to think about what we actually can learn from archaeology about questions of ethnicity, identity, migration, gender, status, etc.
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