Percorsi di archeologia barbarica: nuovi dati e riflessioni sui Longobardi in Italia

[Autom. eng. transl.] The contribution starts from the reflection of Michelangelo Cagiano de Azevedo about the possibility of tracing Lombard contributions and specificities in the settlement methods and architecture and about the material culture of this people and the technical knowledge underlying it. On the one hand, therefore, it investigates the entity, the social structure and the cultural stage of the communities of Germanic cultural matrix in Italy and the distribution and nature of their settlements, also in the light of recent findings, often unpublished; on the other hand, it recalls the means and languages of the artistic form such as expressions of visual perception, taste, beliefs, mentality and technical knowledge. This, in the awareness that the peculiarity of the artefact as an expression of ethnic-cultural identity is a theme that has passed through the most diverse historiographical currents from the end of the nineteenth century to today, but still with unexplored potential.