This volume offers a comparative study of the ways in which the new communities that developed in the course of the 'transformation of the Roman world' (4th-8th centuries) were pulled together. In understanding the political, social, religious and ethnic formations in the early medieval West as "communities under construction", the various contributions attempt an exemplary discussion of the various forms in which significance and cohesion could be achieved. Case studies include the terminology of ethnicity; population movements (evacuees and refugees); treasures in their material and symbolic aspects; early kingship, cities and ethnic survivals of the Visigoths; Merovingian identities and hairstyles; Christian communities and historiography in the Frankish kingdoms.