Abstract
During the early Anglo-Saxon period (ca. a.d. 450–650), the sociopolitical landscape of England underwent a profound transformation. The state-centered political structure of Roman Britain was replaced by the end of the fifth century with “a multitude of unstable and competing polities centered on ‘royal’ residences and economically based on domestic modes of production, in which authority was directed through chains of personalized relations of domination and obligation” (Garwood 1990:90). Our understanding of how the early Anglo-Saxon rulers and their followers acquired and conveyed territorial control, the geographic extent of the early kingdoms and, indeed, the degree to which their inhabitants conceived a common identity remains elusive. Leeds’s (1945) and Vierck’s (1971, 1978a) intuitive studies of early Anglo-Saxon dress ornaments indicate that contrasts in the distribution of these artifacts parallel the pattern that would be expected if these clusterings were affected by membership in ethnic groups. More recently, Arnold (1982:125) suggests that by a.d. 600 the distribution of early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries reflects the population groups historically documented as kingdoms at a later date.
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Fisher, G. (1995). Kingdom and Community in Early Anglo-Saxon Eastern England. In: Beck, L.A. (eds) Regional Approaches to Mortuary Analysis. Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1310-4_7
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