‘Impious Easterners': Can Oxygen and Strontium Isotopes Serve as Indicators of Provenance in Early Medieval European Cemetery Populations?

Considerable debate persists concerning the origins of those involved in theadventus Saxonum: the arrival of Germanic peoples in Britain during the fifth century AD. This question was investigated using oxygen and strontium isotope ratios obtained from archaeological dental samples from individuals in the ‘Migration Period’ cemetery, Ringlemere, Kent (n= 7) and three continental European sites (n= 17). Results demonstrated that strontium alone is unable to distinguish between individuals from south-east England and north-west Europe. Although87Sr/86Sr values from Ringlemere fell within local biosphere parameters and suggest a spatially and temporally related group, δ18O values were inconsistent with origins in eastern England or on the North German plain. Results from the European sites negate past climate change as an explanation. It is possible that culturally mediated behaviour has obscured geographical relationships. Further work to characterize water sources and human δ18O values in the putative European homelands is required.

Genesis A and the Anglo-Saxon ‘migration myth’

In his study of Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England, Nicholas Howe has argued that the Anglo-Saxons regarded the ancestral migration from the Continent as ‘the founding and defining event of their culture’. He suggests that the adventus Saxonum gave the Germanic tribes in England a shared identity, and proved central to their historical, cultural and even theological self-definition. Howe investigates what he calls the Anglo-Saxon ‘migration myth’, which links the Germanic tribal migration to England with the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, both being transmarine journeys from a land of spiritual bondage to one of spiritual salvation. Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England traces the development of this concept from Bede's Historia ecclesiastica to Wulfstan's Sermo Lupi, and discusses its function in the writings of Alcuin and Boniface, as well as in Old English poetry. Howe's elegant analysis succeeds in demonstrating the pervasiveness of migration as a cultural myth, that is, a story that endures in a people's memory because it speaks powerfully to their collective imagination.