People, Place, and Identity: Funerary Landscapes and the Development of the Early Medieval Kingdom of Northumbria

Summary

Early medieval Britain witnessed dramatic changes to the socio-cultural landscape due to the withdrawal of Roman authority, climatic change, and the arrival of migrants from the continent and from different regions of Britain. The analytical and scientific analysis of the burial record, from a landscape perspective, allows an investigation of key questions related to the scope and nature of this migration, the development of social identity, and how portions of Britain expanded from small polities into a series of large and powerful kingdoms ruled by dynastic lineages. Northumbria was one of the largest kingdoms of early medieval Britain and at its greatest extent incorporated modern-day lowland Scotland and northern England. The Leverhulme Trust-funded People and Place: The making of the kingdom of Northumbria 300-800 CE project is undertaking a full reassessment of all known funerary evidence from the kingdom. The project is combining scientific assessments of skeletal and artefactual evidence, archival research, and spatial analysis in a multi-scalar GIS to refine chronologies, characterize communities, and investigate the results from a landscape perspective. This paper presents the preliminary findings of the project and how these results are reshaping our understanding of the formative processes in this period.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21992