Ethnic Identity and the Archaeology of the aduentus Saxonum

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
James M. Harland
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
North Sea ◽  
Social Constructionism ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Migration Patterns ◽  
Roman World ◽  
The North ◽  
The North Sea ◽  
Alternative Understanding

For centuries, archaeologists have excavated the soils of Britain to uncover finds from the early medieval past. These finds have been used to reconstruct the alleged communities, migration patterns, and expressions of identity of coherent groups who can be regarded as ethnic 'Anglo-Saxons'. Even in the modern day, when social constructionism has been largely accepted by scholars, this paradigm still persists. <br><br>This book challenges the ethnic paradigm. As the first historiographical study of approaches to ethnic identity in modern 'Anglo-Saxon' archaeology, it reveals these approaches to be incompatible with current scholarly understandings of ethnicity. Drawing upon post-structuralist approaches to self and community, it highlights the empirical difficulties the archaeology of ethnicity in early medieval Britain faces, and proposes steps toward an alternative understanding of the role played by the communities of lowland Britain - both migrants from across the North Sea and those already present - in transforming the Roman world.

Ethnic Identity and the Archaeology of the Aduentus Saxonum

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
James M. Harland
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
North Sea ◽  
Social Constructionism ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Migration Patterns ◽  
Roman World ◽  
The North ◽  
The North Sea ◽  
Alternative Understanding

For centuries, archaeologists have excavated the soils of Britain to uncover finds from the early medieval past. These finds have been used to reconstruct the alleged communities, migration patterns, and expressions of identity of coherent groups who can be regarded as ethnic ‘Anglo-Saxons’. Even in the modern day, when social constructionism has been largely accepted by scholars, this paradigm still persists. This book challenges the ethnic paradigm. As the first historiographical study of approaches to ethnic identity in modern ‘Anglo-Saxon’ archaeology, it reveals these approaches to be incompatible with current scholarly understandings of ethnicity. Drawing upon post-structuralist approaches to self and community, it highlights the empirical difficulties the archaeology of ethnicity in early medieval Britain faces, and proposes steps toward an alternative understanding of the role played by the communities of lowland Britain – both migrants from across the North Sea and those already present – in transforming the Roman world.

Maritime and River Traders, Landing Places, and Emporia Ports in the Merovingian Period in and Around the Low Countries

2020 ◽  
pp. 763-796
Author(s):  
Dries Tys
Keyword(s):  
North Sea ◽  
Institutional Economics ◽  
New Institutional Economics ◽  
Central Position ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
The North ◽  
The North Sea

The origin, rise, and dynamics of coastal trade and landing places in the North Sea area between the sixth and eighth centuries must be understood in relation to how coastal regions and seascapes acted as arenas of contact, dialogue, and transition. Although the free coastal societies of the early medieval period were involved in regional to interregional or long-distance trade networks, their economic agency must be understood from a bottom-up perspective. That is, their reproduction strategies must be studied in their own right, independent from any teleological construction about the development of trade, markets, or towns for that matter. This means that the early medieval coastal networks of exchange were much more complex and diverse than advocated by the simple emporium network model, which connected the major archaeological sites along the North Sea coast. Instead, coastal and riverine dwellers often possessed some form of free status and large degrees of autonomy, in part due to the specific environmental conditions of the landscapes in which they dwelled. The wide estuarine region of the Low Countries, between coastal Flanders in the south and Friesland in the north, a region with vast hinterlands and a central position in northwestern Europe, makes these developments particularly clear. This chapter thus pushes back against longstanding assumptions in scholarly research, which include overemphasis of the influence of large landowners over peasant economies, and on the prioritization of easily retrievable luxuries over less visible indicators of bulk trade (such as wood, wool, and more), gift exchange, and market trade. The approach used here demonstrates that well-known emporia or larger ports of trade were embedded in the economic activities and networks of their respective hinterlands. Early medieval coastal societies and their dynamics are thus better understood from the perspective of integrated governance and economy (“new institutional economics”) in a regional setting.

scholarly journals Gems from Private Collections

The Geologist ◽  
1858 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 110-113
Author(s):  
J. S. Bowerbank
Keyword(s):  
North Sea ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The North ◽  
History Of ◽  
The North Sea ◽  
The Town ◽  
Private Collections ◽  
Organic Remains

At the extremity of a pretty bay, on the coast of Yorkshire, stands the town of Whitby, known to every geologist for the numerous treasures of organic remains which the Lias beds, there outcropping on the shore, have furnished at various times.Nor is Whitby wanting in historical associations. It was there, in Anglo-Saxon days, stood the far-famed monastery of Streones-healh, of which St. Hilda, the relative of Northumbria's powerful monarch, Edwin, was the abbess. It was there the famous council was held to decide the keeping of Easter (A.D., 664); it was on those rugged shores of the North Sea that the early stand was made by Colman on behalf of the native religion against the then increasing dominion of the Romish Church. It was there reposed the remains of Edwin, Oswy, Aelfleda, and of the Saxon Hilda herself. Associated with its monastic rule were many of the famous men of the olden times—Bosa, Aetla, Oftfor, Wilfred, and Cædmon, to whom Bede says sublime strains of poetry were so natural that he dreamed in verse, and composed in sleep that which he penned on awaking. And the history of Whitby is pleasingly associated with its geology by the legend of its saint.

The Anglo-Saxons and the Christianization of Scandinavia

1995 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 213-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lesley Abrams
Keyword(s):  
North Sea ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The North ◽  
Theoretical Support ◽  
Malar Region ◽  
Northern Border ◽  
The North Sea ◽  
Louis The Pious ◽  
Mission Field

St Anskar, a monk of Corbie and Corvey, is often referred to as the ‘Apostle of the North’. In 826 he was attached to the retinue of Harald, king of Denmark, upon the king's baptism at the court of Louis the Pious; Anskar was sent to evangelize first the Danes, who were an increasing threat to the northern border of the Empire, and then the Swedes of the Mälar region, whose rulers may have hoped for imperial favour. If the mission of Anskar and his immediate successors had significant and enduring effects beyond his death in 865, however, they have so far failed to make themselves known to historians. The see of Hamburg-Bremen, of which Anskar was the first archbishop, had indeed been given responsibility for the northern mission-field, and successive popes renewed their theoretical support for this goal; but activity, let alone success, was not conspicuous for many years thereafter. The conversion of the Scandinavian peoples had to wait, and when it came the impetus was not from Hamburg-Bremen alone. Rather, the story of the Christianization of Denmark, Norway and Sweden from the later tenth century through the eleventh is one with a significantly English cast and an English script, although the German church – and maybe others – never quite withdrew from the stage. Scandinavian historians have long been concerned with this missionary activity of Anglo-Saxon churchmen, but it has attracted undeservedly less interest and attention on this side of the North Sea.

The First Waves of Internationalization: A Comparison of Early Modern North Sea and Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Labour Migrations

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jelle van Lottum
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
North Sea ◽  
Mobility Patterns ◽  
Urban Populations ◽  
Migration Patterns ◽  
Chain Migration ◽  
The North ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
The North Sea

This chapter argues that prior to the mass migration and globalisation of the nineteenth century, an earlier era of mass migration can be identified in the North Sea region between 1600 and 1950. It offers a quantitative analysis of Northwest Europe’s first major waves of internationalisation. It provides and analyses emigration rates and mobility patterns throughout the period, and seeks to determine the causes of increased migration within the region spanning Scotland, England, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. It identifies two main waves of migration, occurring between 1550-1800 and 1850-1950 respectively. In exploring migration patterns, it defines four phases of movement: introductory, growth, saturation, and regression. Chain migration, industrialisation, the growth of urban populations, and the needs of the labour market are all considered, before concluding that the populace of the pre-industrialisation North Sea region was fairly mobile, linked to the supply of labour across the region, and statistically similar to the age of mass migration that followed later.

An archaeological theory of the sea

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Van de Noort
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
North Sea ◽  
Archaeological Theory ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Early Medieval Period ◽  
The North ◽  
The Social ◽  
The North Sea

Despite the wealth of information available on the North Sea, surprisingly few archaeologists have set out to study how people related to and connected to this sea, and other seas, in the past. In fact, we can distinguish four established traditions in archaeological research of the sea, all of which originated in the 20th century. First, many (or most) land-locked archaeologists working on any side of the North Sea have simply disregarded the sea itself, seeing it merely as the natural boundary of their study areas rather than considering its role in any significant way. At best, they are seeing the sea from the land, without genuinely engaging with it (cf. Cooney 2003: 323), although the panorama is slowly changing (e.g. cf. Bradley 1984 with Bradley 2007). Second, there are those archaeologists with an interest in long-distance exchange and exotic objects, who focused initially on the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods but have also been concerned, in more recent decades, with the early medieval period. Although these archaeologists have recognized the seas as conduits of long-distance exchange, they have rarely questioned how the practice of travel across the sea impacted on the social products of such exchange (e.g. Butler 1963, O’Connor 1980, Bradley 1984, Clarke, Cowie, and Foxon 1985, for the Neolithic and early Bronze Age; Hodges 1982, Loveluck and Tys 2006, for the early medieval period). Third, a group of archaeologists have studied the exploitation of the sea, especially for fish and salt, and the occupation and the reclamation of the edges of the sea in the Roman period and afterwards; but these studies have generally not strayed beyond the functional utilization of the sea and coast both for food and for land for food production (e.g. Clark 1961; Van den Broeke 1985; Andersen 1995, 2007; Rippon 2000; Smart 2003; Milner et al. 2004; De Kraker and Borger 2007). And fourth, maritime archaeologists’ focus has been on ships and waterside structures directly relating to shipping activities, but the development of a fuller appreciation of the significance of the sea and seafaring to past societies remains something of a distant aspiration (e.g. Ellmers 1972; McGrail 2003: 1).

A handlist of Anglo-Saxon lawsuits

1988 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 247-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Wormald
Keyword(s):  
North Sea ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The North ◽  
The North Sea ◽  
The Alps

There is no acknowledged corpus of Anglo-Saxon lawsuits. Scholars have had the benefit of Bigelow's Placita Anglo-Normannica for over a century, and this will soon be superseded by the definitive edition which has occupied Professor van Caenegem since 1952. But the nearest that Anglo-Saxonists have come to a counterpart is the set of thirty-five ‘Select Cases in Anglo-Saxon Law’ appended to the Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law, which four of Bigelow's fellow Bostonians published as a symbolic, if apparently unintended, celebration of America's origins in centennial 1876. The limitations of this admittedly useful exercise extend beyond the facts that three of its cases are not Anglo-Saxon at all, and that its editors were unable to distinguish between the Latin names for Dover and Canterbury. Since then, the selections of Harmer, Robertson and Whitelock have made many more texts generally available, but without isolating the procedural records from other ‘historical documents’. Mean-while, the English evidence was ignored in the impressive list which Hübner intended as the basis of Placita section in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica: that august institution has tracked Germanic footsteps across the Alps, the Rhine, the Pyrenees and even the Straits of Gibraltar, but it as seldom followed. the Anglo-Saxons across the North Sea.

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