The archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England in the pagan period: a review

1979 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 297-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Hills
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Settlement Patterns ◽  
Great Increase ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Roman

In recent years there has been a great increase in both excavation and research in the field of pagan Anglo-Saxon archaeology. Yet much of the literature remains so detailed and specific for a non-specialist it resembles a maze without obvious clues. A recent book, The Archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England, dealt with many aspects of later Anglo-Saxon archaeology but did not cover some of the topics which have been central to study of the pagan period in recent years. This article is an attempt at an outline of some of those topics. The subject falls into two interrelated parts. First there is the course, date and nature of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of England, involving consideration of the continental background, both late Roman and Germanic, and assessment of the significance of the earliest Germanic finds in England. The second part is concerned with the material culture of early Anglo-Saxon England, chiefly as reflected in the cemeteries of the period. Although I discuss settlement patterns in general, I do not examine individual settlements or house types in detail, because this subject has been dealt with twice recently, once by Addyman in this publication and once by Rahtz. I refer only occasionally to documentary records, since my intention is to present the archaeological evidence to non-archaeologists.

scholarly journals Beowulf and Archaeology: Megaliths Imagined and Encountered in Early Medieval Europe

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard Williams
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Manuscript Illustrations ◽  
Ancient Monuments ◽  
Social Memories

Since the mid nineteenth century AD, the poem Beowulf has long been a quarry for inspiration, analogy and insight for those exploring the archaeology of Early Medieval Britain and Scandinavia (Cramp 1957; Hills 1997; Webster 1998; Owen-Crocker 2000). The dialogue of archaeology and poem has been employed to explore a range of Early Medieval social practices and structures: the production and circulation of weapons and armour through inheritance and gift-giving, the role of vessels and feasting practices, hall-building and ceremony, the hoarding of treasure, and various dimensions of funerary practice including barrow-burial, boat-burial, and cremation. In discussing many of these practices, scholars have recently pointed to the sense of the past in the poem as a practice-orientated form of social memory. Synergies have been identified between heroic poetry and the ceremonial use of material culture, monuments, architectures, and landscapes identified in poetry and archaeological evidence as distinct but related technologies of remembrance within the hierarchical Christian Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that emerge during the mid to late seventh century AD (Williams 1998; 2006; 2011a; 2011b; Owen-Crocker 2000; Semple 2013). In this fashion, the assertions of legitimacy and identities by Early Medieval elites, including their claims to land, power and people, were performed through the ritualized reuse, appropriation and naming of ancient monuments and their deployment within rituals and oral performances, including poetry (Semple 2013; see also Price 2010). The locations and immediate environs of major later Anglo-Saxon churches and elite residences, and the maritime and land routes connecting them, provided the dramaturgical and ritualized settings and media by which social memories were transmitted and reproduced. Landmarks such as ancient monuments were actively integrated through reuse for a variety of functions from burial to assembly (Williams 2006; Reynolds and Langlands 2011; Semple 2013). In particular, Sarah Semple’s (2013) important interdisciplinary survey and analysis of Anglo-Saxon perceptions and reuse of prehistoric monuments from the fifth to the eleventh centuries AD, identifies the variegated and shifting perceptions of prehistoric monuments revealed by later Anglo-Saxon texts, manuscript illustrations, place-names and archaeological evidence (see also Semple 1998; 2004).

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maureen Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Age Group ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
The Subject ◽  
One Year

The introduction seeks to locate the youngest children in the Roman family and discusses the newly emerging theme of Roman infancy. It outlines the ways in which the book aims to fill a lacuna on the subject of infancy and earliest childhood, isolating the age group of the under one-year-olds because of the very particular historical circumstances that affected this period in the life cycle and attitudes toward it. The introduction presents a methodology for integrating archaeological evidence, material culture, and the iconography of infancy with social and cultural history, an approach for which this subject matter is especially well suited.

Land and Power from Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon England?

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Moreland
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Rural Settlements ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Roman Britain ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Burial Mounds ◽  
Political Structures ◽  
Late Roman

AbstractArchaeology, and in particular the study of ceramics, lies at the heart of the interpretive schemes that underpin Framing the Early Middle Ages. While this is to be welcomed, it is proposed that even more extensive use of archaeological evidence - especially that generated through the excavation of prehistoric burial-mounds and rural settlements, as well as the study of early medieval coins - would have produced a rather more dynamic and nuanced picture of the transformations in social and political structures that marked the passage from late Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon England.

Cristóbal Balenciaga. Explorations in Traditional Spanish Aesthetics

Costume ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-185
Author(s):  
Ana Balda Arana
Keyword(s):  
Creative Process ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Country Of Origin ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Doctoral Thesis ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Religious Iconography

This article investigates how the traditional attire and religious iconography of Cristóbal Balenciaga's (1895–1972) country of origin inspired his designs. The arguments presented here build on what has already been established on the subject, provide new data regarding the cultural context that informed the couturier's creative process (with which the Anglo-Saxon world is less familiar) and conclude by investigating the reasons and timing of his exploration of these fields. They suggest why this Spanish influence is present in his innovations in the 1950s and 1960s and go beyond clichéd interpretations of the ruffles of flamenco dress and bullfighters’ jackets. The findings derive from research for the author's doctoral thesis and her curatorial contribution to the exhibition Coal and Velvet. Balenciaga and Ortiz Echagüe. Views on the Popular Costume (Balenciaga Museum, Getaria, Spain, 7 October 2016–7 May 2017).

The Changing Perception of the Five Senses

2020 ◽  
pp. 103-122
Author(s):  
Sara Benninga
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Scientific Instruments ◽  
Peter Paul Rubens ◽  
Courtly Culture ◽  
Southern Netherlands ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Five Senses ◽  
The Senses

This article examines the changing approach towards the representation of the senses in 17th-century Flemish painting. These changes are related to the cultural politics and courtly culture of the Spanish sovereigns of the Southern Netherlands, the Archdukes Albert and Isabella. The 1617–18 painting-series of the Five Senses by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens as well as the pendant paintings on the subject are analyzed in relation to the iconography of the five senses, and in regard to Flemish genre themes. In this context, the excess of objects, paintings, scientific instruments, animals, and plants in the Five Senses are read as an expansion of the iconography of the senses as well as a reference to the courtly material culture of the Archdukes. Framing the senses as part of a cultural web of artifacts, Brueghel and Rubens refer both to elite lived experience and traditional iconography. The article examines the continuity between the iconography of the senses from 1600 onwards, as developed by Georg Pencz, Frans Floris, and Maerten de Vos, and the representation of the senses in the series. In addition, the article shows how certain elements in the paintings are influenced by genre paintings of the courtly company and collector’s cabinet, by Frans Francken, Lucas van Valckenborch and Louis de Caullery. Through the synthesis of these two traditions the subject of the five senses is reinvented in a courtly context

Unsustainable Capitalism

2001 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-34
Author(s):  
Allan Macinnes
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Culture Change ◽  
Critical Period ◽  
Settlement Patterns ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Important Distinction ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Individual

This paper makes an important, interdisciplinary contribution, to the ongoing debate on the transition from clanship to capitalism. Integral to this contribution is the important distinction between capitalism as an individualist ideology and capitalist societies where individualism is a widespread but not necessarily a universal ideology. His concern is not with the bipolar opposition of landlord and people which tends to dominate debates on the land issue in the Highlands. Instead, he focuses on material culture change in relation to landscape organisation, settlement patterns and morphology in order to examine how social relationships were structured during the critical period of estate re-orientation often depicted progressively as Improvement but regressively as clearance through the removal and relocation of population. His case study on Kintyre is particularly valuable. By scrutinising spatial as well as social relationships Dalglish demonstrates that clanship was based as much on daily practices of living as on an patrimonial ideology of kinship, practices which led the House of Argyll to attempt the reinvention of concepts of occupancy in order to emphasise the importance of the individual over the family through partitioned space.

The Anglian collection of royal genealogies and regnal lists

1976 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 23-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
David N. Dumville
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Corpus Christi ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

This collection of Old English royal records is found in four manuscripts: London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian B. vi; London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. v, vol. 1; Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 183; and Rochester, Cathedral Library, A. 3. 5. The present paper aims both to provide an accurate, accessible edition of the texts in the first three of these manuscripts and to discuss the development of the collection from its origin to the stages represented by the extant versions. We owe to Kenneth Sisam most of our knowledge of the history of the Anglo-Saxon genealogies. Although his closely argued discussion remains the basis for any approach to these sources, it lacks the essential aid to comprehension, the texts themselves. It is perhaps this omission, as much as the difficulty of the subject and the undoubted accuracy of many of his conclusions, that has occasioned the neglect from which the texts have suffered in recent years.

Żelazna Nowa, stanowisko 2. Cmentarzysko kultury przeworskiej z Zapilcza na południowym Mazowszu

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Cieślak-Kopyt ◽  
Dorota Pogodzińska
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Archaeological Heritage ◽  
Non Invasive ◽  
Vistula River ◽  
Animal Bones ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Metal Detectors ◽  
Przeworsk Culture ◽  
Small Finds

The subject of the monograph, published as the 10th volume of the Saved Archaeological Heritage series, are the results of rescue excavations on a cemetery from the period of Roman influence on the Vistula River near Magnuszew in southern Mazovia (Poland), carried out several years ago at the initiative of the Museum in Radom. This necropolis, like many similar ones throughout the country, was systematically destroyed as a result of agricultural activities, and in recent years also through illegal prospection with the use of metal detectors. Archaeologists, with the cooperation of numerous volunteers, managed to protect against further destruction about 60 graves (urned and urnless) from the period between the 1st century BC and the 3rd century CE. These are an evidence of the settlement of the region by people whose material traces are referred to in the archaeological nomenclature as the Przeworsk culture (associated mainly with the Germanic tribes). The cinerary graves were equipped with ceramics, metal parts of clothing, tools, less often weapons, glass beads, imported vessels or dice. Among the forms of graves, the so-called groove object stands out: a kind of rectangular grave feature tied with survival to the beginnings of our era of Celtic traditions, arriving here from northern Małopolska. In addition to the standard catalogue with the description of graves, pottery and small finds, and very detailed illustration plates, the monograph includes an analysis of material culture and forms of burial, photographs of selected finds and very extensive specialist reports. The latter include both osteological materials (anatomo-anthropological analysis, analysis of animal bones placed in the graves), as well as other ecofacts and individual categories of furnishings (glass, faience, iron and bronze objects). The whole is complemented by clear plans with the location of graves and artifacts in the necropolises, as well as with the results of non-invasive research going far beyond the excavated area and of key importance for further in situ protection of this extremely valuable monument.

Material Culture and Making Visible: On the Portrayal of Philistine Gath in the Book of Samuel

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-27
Author(s):  
Daniel Pioske
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Early Iron Age ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
The Past ◽  
Book Of Samuel

Over the past twenty years our understanding of Philistine Gath's history (Tell es-Safl) has been transformed by what has been revealed through the site's early Iron Age remains. But what has received much less attention is the effect these ruins have on how we read references to the location within the Hebrew Bible. The intent of this study is to draw on the archaeological evidence produced from Tell es-Safl as an interpretive lens by which to consider the biblical portrayal of the site rendered in the book of Samuel, where the material traces of more amicable associations between Gath and highland populations invite us to reconsider the city's depiction in this ancient literary work.

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