The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

Early historic Britain
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tended to confirm the traditional account of urban decline and destruction, although it has
provided a more ambiguous and complex picture for the countryside (see below).
Under the influence of ideas associated both with processual and post-processual archaeology,
social analysis has become important (e.g. Arnold 1988), partly because it offers an alternative to
the agenda set by historians which is still focused largely on political history. Much research is still
devoted to tracing migrations through distributions of metalwork or placenames, or to the
development of kingdoms from pottery and coins. New ideas about the mechanisms behind
change in material culture have, however, encouraged criticism and reassessment of the traditional
equation of different types of pottery and brooches with different ethnic groups. Interest has
shifted to the detection of social complexity, whether in terms of hierarchical ranking and status,
or to the roles of different people in society according to such factors as age, gender, occupation,
family or religious affiliation (e.g. Hines 1997).
Although some archaeologists would prefer to treat at least the earlier centuries as prehistoric,
and although some historians would still prefer to disregard archaeology altogether, it is the
existence of both kinds of evidence that is the greatest strength of the period. If the temptation
to subordinate one kind of information to the other can be resisted, the combination of both
allows each to provide different kinds of insight. Historical archaeology should be a key testing
ground for both historians and archaeologists; the fact that instead it is often a poor relation is a
result of the territoriality of academic disciplines, which should be continually challenged.
KEY DATA
Landscapes
Environmental evidence (e.g. Rackham 1994) has made it possible to approach the history of the
landscape over the long term, and to put recorded events into a longer and broader perspective.
It is no longer possible to imagine the complete disappearance of the population of Roman
Britain: aerial and field survey have shown a density of occupation of lowland Britain during the
Roman period that reached, or exceeded, that known for medieval England. A population of
such size could not have completely disappeared, even in the face of prolonged war, famine and
plague. It is true that the same surveys show a far less densely occupied land in the early medieval
period, but not an empty one. The difference must partly derive from a genuine decline in
population, but it is exaggerated by the difference between Roman and later people in terms of
identifiable material culture. Romano-Britons seem to have created more rubbish than their
successors, so that it is easier to find Roman sites than later ones. In Scotland and Wales, it is
extremely difficult to identify early medieval sites at all because pottery was not made or used in
large quantities, and when it was, it was of poor quality, not durable and not easily identifiable.
That is not, however, taken as evidence for complete depopulation of those regions. Even in
Anglo-Saxon England, where many sites have been identified, the majority are burials, so that
when the practice of burying grave-goods ends around AD 700, archaeological evidence for the
Anglo-Saxons declines, at a time when we have no other reason to suppose that the population
was itself in decline.
We know that there was no regeneration of the primeval forest in which it used to be
imagined that Anglo-Saxon settlers hewed clearings for their newly founded settlements in an
otherwise empty land. There may have been abandonment of some fields, and a shift from
arable to pasture, but no dramatic overall change in land use seems at present to be be attributable
to the middle of the first millennium AD. Animal and plant species did not change at this point
either, nor, as far as can be seen, did farming techniques. Even land divisions remained in use.