Landscapes of otherness? Migration, ‘ethnicity’, ‘apartheid-like structures’ and cultural difference
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 2018-08-27

Fifth- and sixth-century migration into Britain from north-west Europe is widely regarded as the most significant driver in explaining transformative changes in material culture in post-Roman Britain, and the emergence of Old English as one of the latter’s principal languages. A leading strand of historical and archaeological scholarship has as a result focused on the structure of the relationships between incomers and indigenous communities in explaining the origins of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England.

The paper begins with a re-examination of models of the migration process, the premises and arguments for ethnicity as the defining criterion that framed relationships between indigenous communities and incoming groups, and for the proposition of the formal or semi-formal separation between them that is sometimes characterized as ‘apartheid-like’. It uses archaeological, documentary, and typonymic evidence to evaluate those models through an an exploration of the impact of migration on the evolution of early medieval political structures, land-use and communities in the landscape of the East Anglian fenland, believed to have been one of the earliest regions to be settled by those post-Roman colonists.

Author: Dr Oosthuizen, Susan - University of Cambridge (Presenting author)