Multi-disciplinary investigation of Anglo-Saxon funerary traditions. Burial evidence provides the richest record we possess for the centuries following the retreat of Roman authority. The locations and manner in which communities chose to bury their dead, within the constraints of the environmentaland social milieu, reveal much about this transformational era. This book offers a pioneering exploration of the ways in which the cultural and physical environment influenced funerary traditions during the period c. AD 450-850, in the region which came to form the leading Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex. This was a diverse landscape rich in ancient remains, in the form of imposing earthworks, enigmatic megaliths and vestiges of Roman occupation. Employing archaeological evidence, complemented by toponymic and documentary sources and elucidated through landscape analysis, the author argues that particular man-made and natural features were consciously selected as foci for funerary events and ritual practice, becoming integral to manifestations of identity and power in early medieval society. Kate Mees is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Archaeology, Durham University.

Volume 14 of the Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History series is dedicated to the archaeology of early medieval death, burial and commemoration. Incorporating studies focusing upon Anglo-Saxon England as well as research encompassing western Britain, Continental Europe and Scandinavia, this volume originated as the proceedings of a two-day conference held at the University of Exeter in February 2004. It comprises of an Introduction that outlines the key debates and new approaches in early medieval mortuary archaeology followed by eighteen innovative research papers offering new interpretations of the material culture, monuments and landscape context of early medieval mortuary practices. Papers contribute to a variety of ongoing debates including the study of ethnicity, religion, ideology and social memory from burial evidence. The volume also contains two cemetery reports of early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries from Cambridgeshire.

The Ancient Ways of Wessex tells the story of Wessex’s roads in the early medieval period, at the point at which they first emerge in the historical record. This is the age of the Anglo-Saxons and an era that witnessed the rise of a kingdom that was taken to the very brink of defeat by the Viking invasions of the ninth century. It is a period that goes on to become one within which we can trace the beginnings of the political entity we have come to know today as England. In a series of ten detailed case studies the reader is invited to consider historical and archaeological evidence, alongside topographic information and ancient place-names, in the reconstruction of the networks of routeways and communications that served the people and places of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex. Whether you were a peasant, pilgrim, drover, trader, warrior, bishop, king or queen, travel would have been fundamental to life in the early middle ages and this book explores the physical means by which the landscape was constituted to facilitate and improve the movement of people, goods and ideas from the seventh through to the eleventh centuries. What emerges is a dynamic web of interconnecting routeways serving multiple functions and one, perhaps, even busier than that in our own working countryside. A narrative of transition, one of both of continuity and change, provides a fresh and alternative window into the everyday workings of an early medieval landscape through the pathways trodden over a millennium ago.

All communities have a strong sense of identity with the area in which they live, which for England in the early medieval period manifested itself in a series of territorial entities, ranging from large kingdoms down to small districts known as pagi or regiones. This book investigates these small early folk territories, and the way that they evolved into the administrative units recorded in Domesday, across an entire kingdom - that of the East Saxons (broadly speaking, what is now Essex, Middlesex, most of Hertfordshire, and south Suffolk). A wide range of evidence is drawn upon, including archaeology, written documents, place-names and the early cartographic sources. The book looks in particular at the relationship between Saxon immigrants and the native British population, and argues that initially these ethnic groups occupied different parts of the landscape, until a dynasty which assumed an Anglo-Saxon identity achieved political ascendency (its members included the so-called "Prittlewell Prince", buried with spectacular grave-good in Prittlewell, near Southend-on- Sea in southern Essex). Other significant places discussed include London, the seat of the first East Saxon bishopric, the possible royal vills at Wicken Bonhunt near Saffron Walden and Maldon, and St Peter's Chapel at Bradwell-on-Sea, one of the most important surviving churches from the early Christian period.

"This volume draws together a series of papers that present some of the most up-to-date thinking on the history, archaeology and toponymy of Wessex and Anglo-Saxon England more broadly. In honour of one of early medieval European scholarship's most illustrious doyennes, no less than twenty-nine contributions demonstrate the indelible impression Barbara Yorke's work has made on her peers and a generation of new scholars, some of whom have benefitted directly from her tutorage. From the identities that emerged in the immediate post-Roman period, through to the development of kingdoms, the role of the church, and impacts felt beyond the eleventh century, the rich and diverse character of the studies presented here are testimony to the versatility and extensive range of the honorand's contribution to the academic field"--

New insights into inscribed and stone monuments from across Europe in the early middle ages.