Report on the rescue excavations of an Anglo-Saxon cemetery discovered during 1974/5. Full catalogue of some 150 graves - mostly of the sixth century AD - and of the jewellery, weapons and other objects found with them. Fully illustrated catalogue of the finds and a discussion of them and their significance. Numerous specialist reports.
Reports on excavations by Northamtonshire Archaeology (now MOLA) in the south-east Midlands region; Nineteen sites were investigated, dating primarily to the Iron Age, Roman and Anglo-Saxon periods
Report on the rescue excavations of an Anglo-Saxon cemetery discovered during 1974/5. Full catalogue of some 150 graves - mostly of the sixth century AD - and of the jewellery, weapons and other objects found with them. Fully illustrated catalogue of the finds and a discussion of them and their significance. Numerous specialist reports.
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY) open access license. This book is available as an open access ebook under a CC-BY licence. Early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries are known for their grave goods, but this abundance obscures their interest as the creations of pluralistic, multi-generational communities. This book explores over one hundred early Anglo-Saxon and Merovingian cemeteries, using a multi-dimensional methodology to move beyond artefacts. It offers an alternative way to explore the horizontal organisation of cemeteries from a holistically focused perspective. The physical communication of digging a grave and laying out a body was used to negotiate the arrangement of a cemetery and to construct family and community stories. This approach foregrounds community, because people used and reused cemetery spaces to emphasise different characteristics of the deceased, based on their own attitudes, lifeways and live experiences. This book will appeal to scholars of Anglo-Saxon studies and will be of value to archaeologists interested in mortuary spaces, communities and social archaeology.
Presents the Anglo-Saxon period of English history from the fifth century up to the late eleventh century, covering such events as the spread of Christianity, the invasions of the Vikings, the composition of Beowulf, and the Battle of Hastings.
A detailed study of the ways in which Anglo-Saxon society dealt with social outcasts. It begins with the period following Roman rule and ends in the century following the Norman Conquest. The author argues that outcast burials in this period showed a clear pattern of development.
Cruciform brooches were large and decorative items of jewellery, frequently used to pin together women's garments in pre-Christian northwest Europe. Characterised by the strange bestial visages that project from the feet of these dress and cloak fasteners, cruciform brooches were especially common in eastern England during the 5th and 6th centuries AD. This book provides a multifaceted, holistic and contextual analysis of more than 2,000 Anglo-Saxon cruciform brooches. It offers a critical examination of identity in Early Medieval society, suggesting that the idea of being Anglian in post-Roman Britain was not a primordial, tribal identity transplanted from northern Germany, but was at least partly forged through the repeated, prevalent use of dress and material culture.
This is the first book to focus entirely on children and material culture. The contributors ask: * what is the relationship between children and the material world? * how does the material culture of children vary across time and space? * how can we access the actions and identities of children in the material record? The collection spans the Palaeolithic to the late twentieth century, and uses data from across Europe, Scandinavia, the Americas and Asia. The international contributors are from a wide range of disciplines including archaeology, cultural and biological anthropology, psychology and museum studies. All skilfully integrate theory and data to illustrate fully the significance and potential of studying children.
Although lowland Britain in 300 CE had been as Roman as any province in the empire, in the generations on either side of 400, urban life, the money economy, and the functioning state collapsed. Many of the most quotidian and fundamental elements of Roman-style material culture ceased to be manufactured. Skills related to iron and copper smelting, wooden board and plank making, stone quarrying, commercial butchery, horticulture, and tanning largely disappeared, as did the knowledge standing behind the production of wheel-thrown, kiln-fired pottery and building in stone. No other period in Britain's prehistory or history witnessed the loss of so many classes of once-common skills and objects. While the reasons for this breakdown remain unclear, it is indisputable the collapse was foundational in the making of a new world we characterize as early medieval. The standard explanation for the emergence of the new-style material culture found in lowland Britain by the last quarter of the fifth century is that foreign objects were brought in by "Anglo-Saxon" settlers. Marshalling a wealth of archaeological evidence, Robin Fleming argues instead that not only Continental immigrants, but also the people whose ancestors had long lived in Britain built this new material world together from the ashes of the old, forging an identity that their descendants would eventually come to think of as English. As with most identities, she cautions, this was one rooted in neither birth nor blood, but historically constructed, and advanced and maintained over the generations by the shared material culture and practices that developed during and after Rome's withdrawal from Britain.
