Early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries: Kinship, community and identity (Social Archaeology and Material Worlds)

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY) open access license. This book is available as an open access ebook under a CC-BY licence. Early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries are known for their grave goods, but this abundance obscures their interest as the creations of pluralistic, multi-generational communities. This book explores over one hundred early Anglo-Saxon and Merovingian cemeteries, using a multi-dimensional methodology to move beyond artefacts. It offers an alternative way to explore the horizontal organisation of cemeteries from a holistically focused perspective. The physical communication of digging a grave and laying out a body was used to negotiate the arrangement of a cemetery and to construct family and community stories. This approach foregrounds community, because people used and reused cemetery spaces to emphasise different characteristics of the deceased, based on their own attitudes, lifeways and live experiences. This book will appeal to scholars of Anglo-Saxon studies and will be of value to archaeologists interested in mortuary spaces, communities and social archaeology. "Early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries are known for their grave goods, but this abundance obscures their interest as the creations of pluralistic, multi-generational communities. This book explores over one hundred early Anglo-Saxon and Merovingian cemeteries, using a multi-dimensional methodology to move beyond artefacts. It offers an alternative way to explore the horizontal organisation of cemeteries from a holistically focused perspective. The physical communication of digging a grave and laying out a body was used to negotiate the arrangement of a cemetery and to construct family and community stories. This approach foregrounds community, because people used and reused cemetery spaces to emphasise different characteristics of the deceased, based on their own attitudes, lifeways and live experiences. This book will appeal to scholars of Anglo-Saxon studies and will be of value to archaeologists interested in mortuary spaces, communities and social archaeology."--Back cover List of fgures viii List of tables xii Preface xiii Note on terminology xviii Acknowledgements xx Prologue 1 1. Negotiating early Anglo-Saxon cemetery space 3 2. The syntax of cemetery space 37 3. Mortuary metre 87 4. The grammar of graves 143 5. Intonation on the individual 190 6. Early Anglo-Saxon community 239 Epilogue 273 Appendix: Dover Buckland chronology 276 References 286 Index 307 This book moves beyond the examination of grave goods to place community at the forefront of cemetery studies. It reveals that early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries were pluralistic, multi-generational places where the physical communication of digging a grave was used to construct family and community stories. -- .